🎙️ S2 E7: Why Rest Feels Like Cheating (And What That Says About Us)

Rest can feel like cheating, even when you’re running on empty, and that uncomfortable truth says a lot about how we’ve been trained to measure worth. We’re coming off a bank holiday weekend and we thought a couple of nights away near Sherwood Forest would mean proper downtime. Instead, we caught ourselves doing what so many self-employed people do: packing the laptop “just in case”, checking scheduled posts, grabbing b-roll, and turning a break into a softer version of work.

We share what finally helped us drop into something more restorative, what we call Star Child energy: wandering the woods, using the Merlin app to notice bird song, watching tiny wildlife in the undergrowth, and letting ourselves feel wonder again. We also talk about that modern habit of seeing everything through a phone lens, and why being present is sometimes the most rebellious productivity choice you can make.

Then real life lands. A call about mum going into hospital snaps the nervous system straight back into alert mode, and it raises a bigger business question: does your business have your back when emergencies happen? We dig into rest guilt, ADHD brains, hustle and grind conditioning, and why “stopping” is often harder than starting. We also explore practical ways to ring-fence empty days, build genuine recovery time, and even create outdoor workshops that get people out of the office and back into creativity.

If this hits home, subscribe, share it with a fellow business owner, and leave a review. What would you change this week to protect real rest?

Transcript

Why Rest Feels Like Cheating

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today is Autumnly Off Topic where we talk both brand and everything else we're not supposed to say about RET Diving.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Hey there and welcome to another episode of Automately Off Topic. Today we want to talk about why rest feels like cheating and what that says about us.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Oh, there's a subject to tackle today, Tad. I feel so tired. That's precisely the right time to tackle it, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 0:31

I know.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

It came up, didn't it, because of the the last few days and things that have happened.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

So what if you're in the UK, this is the first Tuesday after a bank holiday weekend. Yeah. Those of you who get to enjoy it. We did our best to try and switch off, although it was a bit tough at times because number one, we've talked about it before, but Ashley was coming right up to the last week of National Pet Month, where you do all the social media, a load of the PR and the interviews. The last day is actually today. Last day's actually today we're recording this. We'd got a little bit of time away booked, just a couple of nights, literally, right on the edge of Sherwood Forest. Oh, it was lovely. In the village of Edwinstow, where we get a chance to go, it's nice. It's it's essentially Robin Hood Village. It's where all the legends of Robin Hood live and where they purportedly got married here and made Marion. And also we chose that because we were planning to go and visit Mum on Sunday, and it would mean we'd be able to get there earlier and it would be halfway, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. A shorter trip.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

But it's a nice he was my hero, Robin Hood.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Total hero. But the point is, it's the switching off part. So by the time we actually got there, we'd done the running round in the morning, we'd done the making sure you'd got post scheduled for the pet month. Yeah, we'd got making sure we'd got everything packed, we'd got taking the dogs to the cities, we've got making sure that we fed the cat, we'd got checking again, it's everything scheduled. Let's take the laptops with us so we can keep checking and keep adding content, not just for your national pet month work, but to check in with your book clients and me with my coaching clients and with the group coaching programs I run, all of that. By the time we actually landed at our little tiny holiday home. And it was tiny. It was small but perfectly formed. It's wonderful. If you're ever in Edwinstow, shout out for Willow's Cottage, it's fabulous. You walk into the bedroom and go upstairs for the living room. And if you like animal print, you'll be in your element. Anyway, by the time we got there, we must have landed about what, half past two? Yeah, about that, I think. Friday. Friday. On Friday. We sat there, unpacked. We were planning to go and walk the woodlands and maybe go out for dinner. And we both just sat and looked at each other and went, Do you have the energy to go out? And we both kind of shook our heads and said, Shall we just stay in? We'd taken some food with us, shall we just stay in and cook the pasture and just veg?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

And we just got a lovely, one of those lovely recliners. We have those at home, but this one was an even lovelier one than we've got. I had recliner MV because it was there it was, and we just pressed the button, sat back with my computer before we wore it out. Yeah, yeah, before and the pets wore it out as well.

A Break That Starts With Laptops

SPEAKER_02 3:07

There's a you know, but but the point is, why is it so hard to switch off?

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

So we get there, we're supposed to be going and doing chilling things, and we end up spending the whole of the first afternoon in the evening just sitting on a little sofa. And there was some chatting with the host via text message about where and the remote was and finding it where do you think it would be?

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Down the back of the sofa. That sounded a bit like CNXG.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

But we find it so hard to switch off, don't we? And I think for us with our ADHD brains with a little bit of autism in there as well, it's even harder, isn't it? We've we've been, particularly when we run our own businesses, I think we've been so conditioned to equate busyness with worth that switching off can feel like almost a moral failing, even when we're exhausted.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Well, I had a classic example of that. So bearing in mind we went on the Friday night, as Taz has said, I'd set up all my scheduling for National Pet Month, but there was a problem with one of the posts that we had to go and sort out. I took my laptop with me just in case because I was worried about if anything went wrong. So I had to go in to do that. Then I thought, oh, I might as well do that as well now. And I just had that moment, even though I'm away from home, for about an hour, hour and a half where I was in work mode again because I felt guilty about leaving it for that long.

unknown 4:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

That's ridiculous, isn't it? Because it's you know, we were on schedule, everything was happening when it should.

SPEAKER_02 4:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

And one little tiny blip and I went into a oh no, I must sort that out now. When actually what I needed to do was just stop and chill out a bit.

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Yeah, yeah. And what made it worse then is by the time we got to Saturday, we went and walked around the woodlands and it was lovely. I mean, we took our phones. Yeah, we did, yeah, because we wanted to get some footage, b-roll footage. Here we go, we're not switching off again. We did switch off. We managed to kick into Star Child mode. For any of you who've listened to the episodes about archetypes and some of the medicine and shamanic work we do on our 30-month programme, the big one, and the three-year programme, spiritual empowerment programs. Star Child Energy is when we kind of get to access that childlike creative state, the kind of state where you can, you know, see shapes in the clouds and get excited about bird song and things like that. We were wandering around with the Merlin app switched on and looking at the birds that we could listen to. We were we spent about 20 minutes sitting next to this piece of undergrowth where there are all these little wild m world mice, and we were trying to capture them on video.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Yeah, I think they were getting really wild because but they made such a noise, didn't they? It was so loud, and how can we not have noticed that really properly today?

SPEAKER_02 5:44

Do you remember that? Is it is it a rabbit, is it a hare, or is it a little mund jack? And by the time I realised it, that level of noise was from a tiny little mouse.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

No, it's amazing, they're so fast as well. And then there was that bit where I found the hollowed-out tree stump. Yeah. And then I went into full kind of this is what it must have been like for Robin and his merry men when they were trying to hide from the Sheriff of Nottingham. And I had that kind of role-playing thing going out. I was saying, Do you think I could fit under there? And I thought, no. And then I said the classic, didn't I? About well, they obviously they were much smaller then, so that I'm sure they could. But look at that.

SPEAKER_02 6:15

It took us the whole first afternoon before we actually felt relaxed enough to even walk out. Yeah. And then we walked out, we we spent a few hours wandering around the woods, the forest, and going to the visitor centre, and then we walked the village trail and did some of the sightseeing on the way back. But again, let's just stop and shoot some b-roll footage for our videos. Which we did, and it's great. You know, we uploaded a couple of reels while we were there. But why on earth, instead of completely downing tools, even when we're feeling exhausted, do we keep going into work work mode? Is it all the hustle and grind culture that's been conditioned for so long? I remember in the early days of our business, we talking to one of our business contacts and saying that no, when we go on holiday and we need a break to recharge properly, I think we should stick our out of office on and only be available for emergencies. Yeah. And he said, no, no, I'm not making enough of that now. I need to be on all the time, I need to be on call. But for me, if we are on call all the time, we never recharge enough to be able to deliver our best for our clients anyway. True, so true, isn't it? Well, where has this come from? Why is it that to switch off for a couple of days over a bank holiday, we had snatches of switching off, which was wonderful, but then quickly snapped back into oh well we could record this and what about this? And do we need to film that? Take a picture of that, that tree over there with the strange shape in it.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

We can make a social post out of that. Well, there's I there was one point where we're sitting, and one of the first places we went to, of course, was to see the major oak. The biggest, it's over a thousand years old, I believe. Yeah. In Nottingham Forest. It's in the most Sherwood Forest, it's the most beautiful Nottingham Forest. I'm on to football again does in Sherwood Forest, and it's it's stunning. It's now propped up because it's got bits of it nearly falling down, falling over. But if you've ever been, it's something to really see and take in because of the sheer size of it and the history and the thought of all the stories, all the things that that tree has witnessed, if you like. But what I noticed was there weren't that many people around at the time, were they? For a bank holiday, it was really quiet. Well, we got there later in the day, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

We had a bit of a line and allowed ourselves to be lazy for it.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

But what I was gonna say was that we did some work before we left. Yeah, well, when we stood when we stood there or sat there looking at it, a number of people came up and they were so busy trying to get themselves in the shop with the tree in it, yeah, that they weren't actually looking at it. And we fell into that trap too a little bit, didn't we? In the end, we just went, let's just sit and look at it and talk about it. Because we got so used to seeing everything through a lens of of mobile phones, haven't we?

SPEAKER_02 8:55

That we better capture this so we've got a memory we can share it with other people instead of it. Instead of being in the memory. There's that wonderful clip, isn't there, in the is it Ben Stiller who's in the the Secret Life of Walter Mittie movie. Might be. And I remember watching that, and there's the guy, the wildlife photographer, who's been tracking, I think it's a snow leopard. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's this wonderful snippet of the movie where they finally find the snow leopard and the protagonist goes to look through through the camera. And the wildlife photographer actually says, No, stop looking through the lens, just watch it.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Yeah.

Sherwood Forest And Noticing Again

SPEAKER_02 9:28

This is a moment that we need to take in and enjoy. Don't look at it just through the camera. Yeah. And yet we do that so so often.

unknown 9:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Don't we? We really do. And when we did, and we were joked about the little mice earlier, but when we had just sat and listened to them, the sound levels were extraordinary, and people just whizzing past because of course humans make even louder noises. There's all these people coming, and the mouse the mouse mouses? Mouses, the mice, the mouses, miesies, the mouses, the meesies about the in the pieces, I hope not. But the mice were just going about their daily job or whatever, weren't they? And still making a racket. But we what the point I'm making with that is we don't stop to listen, we don't notice things like that because we're too busy just carrying on with our busy lives. And what if the mice weren't actually that loud?

SPEAKER_02 10:17

But we were tuning in and louder to us, yeah, because we were tuning in in and getting rid of some of the clutter of of our daily lives. For our brains. Yeah. And there's another childhood TV programme relevant piece. What do I mean? Reference. Reference. I hate those Mises to pieces.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Oh yeah, that was I said that earlier on, didn't I?

SPEAKER_02 10:38

Yeah. But what's it from?

SPEAKER_01 10:41

It's is it Tom and Jerry? No. No. Mises to pieces. It's go on, go on. The cat's Jinxie, isn't it? Or Jinx? Jinxy?

SPEAKER_02 10:50

What's it from?

SPEAKER_01 10:52

There's a question for everybody. My tummy was trying to answer then.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

I know we referenced it in the woodlands because I was saying I love these Mises to pieces. Is it Sylvester? Sylvester. Ace those Mises to pieces. I'm sure it is. I'm sure the cat was called Jinx or Jinxie in it. Anyway, we'll look it up later. Is it the Arista Cats? No, it's not the Arista Cats.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Oh, it's gonna drive me mad now. Anybody that can help us answer that, please, please write in, send us a message.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

But anyway, so we wander around, we go and get a Chinese because we can't be bothered to cook that night. We sit down, starting to chill, thinking about a nice relaxing lie in and and just relaxing for the evening. And then we get the call to say, my mum's just been taken into the hospital. And my mum's been been really quite poorly lately. You know, we we recorded an episode not too long about where we were on the way to the hospital.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Yeah.

The Call That Shattered The Calm

SPEAKER_02 11:42

So only a few weeks back, she was blue lighted in and out eight times sorry, three times in eight days. Yeah. And we just had a feeling that things weren't right. So then on Saturday night, we hear she's being taken in again. And then the the kind of peace that we've started to create is of course shattered. And then we're in this awkward what do we do? Do we dash over to the hospital or there's nothing we can do? And we don't know if she's just gonna go in and out or if they're gonna keep her there overnight, and what's gonna happen? And as it as it happened, she was she was back home by the next morning. But this is the sort of stuff that nobody talks about when we're running businesses. A lot of people who get caught in that entrepreneurial hustle and grind mentality. That hustle and grind mentality is one thing when you're just trying to sound like the next Gary V in social media, but nobody factors in what happens when real life comes and bites you on the backside. So we had to take a few days out the last time when we were in and out of hospital, where we're having to go and look after and see what we could do and how we could help and what was going on. It really was quite serious. But if we think back to one of our previous episodes about does your business have you back? Yeah. If you're gonna work for yourself, you do need to build a business that has you back. Because those emergencies, those family emergencies, being in crisis mode or bereven bereavement or ill health for yourself, people don't tend to factor those in. We just assume it's all gonna be perfect. Yeah, we don't think about those, do we? I suppose you don't really want to go to that point, do you at all? But we don't consider them. But if we don't build a business where we have the capacity to apply the emergency brakes when we need to, and either clients who know us and who are understanding enough and wonderful enough to allow us to to postpone and come back and rearrange and juggle the diary, or sign some kind of facility where the business can keep going in our absence, what are we gonna do? What then? Yeah. If if we struggle to just say, let's have a couple of days out without the family drama of making sure mum's okay, if we're not factoring those things in, and that's not to manifest those things, nobody wants them, but we need to be able to deal with normal life, and normal life always includes situations that we haven't accounted for, yeah, without a doubt, and also the recharge element, and again I maintain we need that recharge element. I mean, when when we got out in the woodlands, yes, we recorded some b roll and stuff, but there was also that element of just again marvelling at the bird sound, listening to the sound in the undergrowth. What could that have been? What could that have been?

SPEAKER_01 14:37

The amount of dead trees that have got hollowed insides, and the fungi on the side of them as well. We learnt a lot about that, didn't we? Which we were talking about because we went into the visitor centre and they've got a whole thing on there and the different types to look out for on your walks and the different birds and the bird song, and using the Merlin app, which was fabulous, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 14:54

So identifying the bird song and using using our phones for cameras to take pictures of fascinating stuff, turning it into a macro lens to go do close-ups on some of those bits of fungus. The detail in that, yeah. But it's that kind of inspiration where we start to wonder and tip into our imagination that allows us to come up with the brilliant business ideas, and also, of course, it then leads to great conversations, like the couple that we met with their young son, who was a huge Robin Hood fan. They'd come all the way over from London to take us on to Robin Hood village.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

Yeah, and we were talking about that, and we're talking they were trying to identify what was on the side of the trees, and we were telling them about that because we'd learnt about it in the visitor centre. So we had that lovely discussion with them and saw them a bit later, didn't we? And recommended some places for them to go because we've been to places like the juries of what's it called, the ju the in Nottingham. Oh, the Galleries of Justice. The galleries of justice, yeah. And places like that that he'd enjoy, and also going to see more about Robin Hood. So we get so all those conversations that came out of that just in passing, and people with their dogs, and we got chatting because we met the dogs, and then met the person with the dog, and things like that, simple things, it just makes you feel good.

The Myth Of Earning Your Rest

SPEAKER_02 16:01

And it's so important, and yet so often we hear coaches and trainers, and people do the same kind of work that you and I do, Ash, talking about how to get people started with a project. In reality, for a lot of us, it's not the starting that's the issue, it's the stopping. And we can't stop what we're doing enough to create the time to start new and additional projects, and we end up being caught again in this mentality of we have to be working in order to be worth it. Yeah. And we end up working in our businesses more than on our businesses. Yeah, we get stuck in the churn wheel, don't we? Yeah, it's it's so it's so so important that you know there's to find that that space between resting and recharging earning. Yeah. And we think we have to earn the rest. But of course, with that, there are no benchmarks, are there? And if there are no benchmarks, how do we know when to stop?

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Do you not also think though? Because certainly for our generation, maybe not so much for the later generations, but we're what generation? What are we? Gen X. Yeah, we're Gen X, aren't we?

SPEAKER_02 17:18

The best ones, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Of course. Um, because we've got the X factor, of course. Of course. Simon agrees. But because of that, we were brought up to think you work towards your retirement, don't you? And now retirement, you know, it seems to be getting later and later in life, but actually, there's almost like that, it's almost like you work towards that deserving of rest at the age of what would have been when we were younger, 65, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:38

Same thing I've talked about before, though. We're all grinding ourselves into the ground in the hope that we'll be able to stop at some point with a little bit of a penchant pot. Ha ha ha. Yeah. At an age where, if we're lucky, we'll have a couple of couple of years to to go and do a cruise before we start dribbling and piddling down our legs and end up in a retirement home. Oh, well, that's happy, happy. Thank you for that, Taz. But don't we have it the wrong way around? Yes. We're not taking the time to enjoy life while we're young enough to enjoy it, and everything's being funnelled into this idyllic, you know, on golden pond era that we're lucky if we get to.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

But we're creating a pot to be able to give to our kids if we have kids. Or to keep us okay when again we're gonna need caring for. But that means we miss out on so much when we're younger. I mean, we're we're both in our 50s, and I still feel quite young.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

I still feel quite young. So, in other words, that hint that I don't understand.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Those six years make a lot of difference.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

True.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

Well, I'm near far near a six before it gets to April.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Far nearer sixty than you. So you're at the beginning of the fifties, whereas I'm at the end of the fifties. Yeah. So yeah, I'm, you know, not far off pensionable age. But pensionable, again, ha ha.

SPEAKER_02 18:55

But again, how often, without me prompting you and giving you a kick to do it, yeah, do you give yourself permission to stop the grind and to go into that place of creativity and inspiration and playfulness?

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Whimsy. Yeah, whimsy, that allows us to actually do more. And we know if anybody goes back to one of my TED talks, the science of being seen. You're gonna go there because that word you used in your TED talk was. Whimsy. There was a study that shows that actually adult whimsy can impact everything from us living longer to being healthier and looking younger as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Because it all ties into the levels of telomerase. So go look that up, but why are we not allowing us to do it? Why aren't we why aren't we actively building in that time that will allow us to be better at life and business? You know, when what's it gonna take for us to realise that rest isn't laziness, it's mo it's it it's maintenance.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Yeah, yeah. You get so much from that, don't you? Just as a prime example, we had what, I don't know, three hours in the forest walking around and stuff, maybe three, four hours at the visit centre as well. But by the time it and what's really fascinating is when we did take some pictures in the day, our eyes are so much shining brighter. You can see the difference. We've got we're filled with that, yeah, that star child energy energy, that wonder, that excitement that I've been out and you know, out in nature and and we forget how to do that.

SPEAKER_02 20:26

Going back into full colour instead of shades of grey. Yeah. Or the babies that we are transforming every day without realising, because again, stress and anxiety means we're being a proper grown-up.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Yeah. Because that's obviously what you need, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 20:39

When you get older, stress so that we can have heart attacks, which also you know designate being a proper grown-up.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

If we haven't worn ourselves into the ground, we haven't done it properly. Yeah. We need to change things. There's that old adage, isn't it? You know, that you can't can't pour from an empty cup. Yeah. Or you can't pour from an empty kettle, whichever way you look at it. Yeah, definitely a kettle with made a cup of tea. You can't pour from an empty kettle, and yet most of us are still stood there rattling the empty kettle over a cup and pretending there's something left.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

We've we've gotta we've gotta change things up. We've we've got to recognise that you know the burnout, too many of us are going into burnout.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Rest guilt. Oh, I'm good at that one. I think that's also my ADHD brain, potentially, though, where if there's a zillion things going on in my head, and it's like actually sitting down, and I'm I'm almost over focusing on the I need to relax. And because there's so much going on in my head, I can't then I can't relax because then I'm thinking about well, what does relaxation look like? What does it mean? What does it mean for me? What should I not be doing? And then I'll go into a thousand things instead of what I shouldn't be doing, but things I should be doing, i.e., I don't know, putting the washing machine on, or if we're somewhere else, or tidying this or doing that, or doing that, or letting the dog out, or whatever it may be, there's always something to. Do rather than just sitting and chilling out.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

And when we sit and chill out, that actually gives us more of an energy to do the things that need doing and maybe gives us some creative ideas about how to sort it out in a different way, in a in a better way. But this goes back to what I said right at the start, isn't it? That we've all been so thoroughly trained, conditioned to equate busyness with worth that switching off feels like some kind of moral failing. Yeah. Something worse than laziness. Yeah. And again, those of us with ADHD have probably had words like lazy thrown at us for years and years and years. No wonder we don't want to stop. It feels like we're getting away with something. I mean, in a in a fairly recent episode of the podcast, you were talking about one of the days when was when it was early in our in our careers when we were both working together in Tiger, before I branched off into coaching and training full-time, when we'd been out somewhere with a client, and it would have been about half four or something by the time we'd finished. And instead of bolting home to try and squeeze in an extra half hour of work, we said let's stop and do the weekly shopping.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

And you still remember feeling guilty about that. Yeah, just from that. Yeah, definitely. It's ridiculous, isn't it? It's a ridiculous way to be. Yeah. You're just so conditioned to be. With between the hours of this and this, you should be working. You should be at your desk and working. And actually, what does that working look like? No.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

No. It's like we we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, isn't it? Yeah, a little bit. And actually, those old beliefs, those old levels of conditioning about what it means to be a grown-up in the working world, they're exactly the kind of ideas that we need to dismantle. We need to deconstruct them. And when we start to dismantle those, I reckon that could be the what some of the most productive work we've ever done. Yeah. If we dismantle everything we've learned about the hustle and the grind, we might just find that we're more productive than ever. Oh, you little rebel.

ADHD Rest Guilt And Old Rules

SPEAKER_01 24:00

That's what I love about so many things. No, it's so important. Exactly. Why does it have to be done that way? Why do we have to behave in that way? Why, I don't know. It's like we go right back to, you know, years ago. I've said to you, but when we first met, I had this thing about I couldn't be, this is going to sound ridiculous, but it kind of there's a tenuous link here. Remember, we are awesomely off topic a little bit, maybe a lot of the time, and me particularly. But when I was younger, I remember saying to you, right, once we get to, you know, once we get to 40, I've got to have my I can't have I can't have long hair. I mean, bearing in mind now I've got short hair, but that's another story for another day. But it was nothing to do with that. I actually think he looks so much better shorter, but it was this thing that I cannot possibly have long hair after 40. And I certainly couldn't dye it.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

That was really I remember saying I was gonna go do my hair completely silver white when I got 40 to 40 and go all my underpriestly. Not a bad look at all. But here I am, you know, 52 with bright pink hair. Yeah. I'm not old enough to have white hair, yeah. Get out of it. Oh, I think it really looks like more maintenance than the pink.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Yeah, but it's that so that just because it was like that was the way, and you certainly didn't dye your hair. I can remember that when I sprayed my hair for a joke. My mum and dad, when I was about 15, 16, I did it bright blue and sprayed it. I didn't tell anyone, my sister was in on the joke with me, but I didn't tell my mum and dad and just turned up at their house. My dad went into an absolute frenzy and went, I thought you were such a sensible child. I'm really dis I'm really disappointed in you. So it's that sort of thing, but um the point I'm making with that is that in the same way that why can we not work in a way that suits us? Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Rather than being conditioned to sit behind a desk and work between the hours of this and this, but when you work for yourself, why would you leap into that great unknown and take away the perceived safety net of being employment to go self-employed? Yeah, if you then want to adhere to exactly the same rules and conditions that you booked against when you were working for somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

So many people go self-employed for the freedom and then provide themselves even less freedom but than before. At least when you work in an office, you close the door at 5, 5:30, whatever it is, walk away, and there's this idea that that's somebody else's problem. Douglas Adams would have said it's an SEP. Yeah. And the weekends, again, you've closed the door on work. Yeah. When you're on your own business, oh, well, I could just. I could just. And can you just?

unknown 26:26

Yeah.

Building Breaks Into The Business

SPEAKER_01 26:27

We've both done that. We've both done that so many times. We've sat here frequently, haven't we, on a Friday night or something and gone, should we watch a movie or should we go out for a drink? Or whatever it may be, and then we'll go, no, I've just got to do this and just finish that, and then at come half past seven, eight o'clock, we're still working, we're still doing stuff, and then that's one evening of your weekend gone. And now the difference it makes. I'm not, you know, huge going out to the pub, for instance, because we don't drink, but you know, going out somewhere different, having a wander for a couple of hours, going out somewhere to get yourself out of the house, so you're not stuck into staying in that work mode, and you suddenly realize you're into Saturday morning and you're still not taking a proper break.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

We're so switched into this message now that we're actually in the planning stages of coming up with a few workshops that were specifically gonna hold for outdoors for people. Yeah. Oh, definitely, that's gonna be fabulous. Yeah, even something that's really, really star childy. We've got one workshop we're planning where we're gonna take people to a beach specifically to go and look for hagstones. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those stones you find with a naturally occurring hole through them. There's all kinds of stories and mythology and lore around those.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Loads of lovely journaling prompts there for people.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

But that's the point. Get people out of the office and out of work mode just for a few hours to do something that is completely different, but the freedom and the inspiration and the creativity from that will top up their playfulness, their whimsy, their imagination enough to go back into work for you now, get those old telly telem the what do you telomeres telomeres, get those telomeres.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. And that and actually, if there's anybody listening, if you're in the UK and you fancy doing that, let us know because we'd love to do that. Or if you fancy hopping on a plane and coming over, yeah, exactly. Come and do that because I'm just for a what an hour on that beach that time, the difference for us and the all the ideas that came out of that.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

And again, talked about different law laws and nothing like hugging a tree and methodology and energy and funny shaving and standing barefoot on the ground, all of those things beautiful, just foot tread on a pine cone. No, it makes such a difference. We've got to get ourselves out of believing that we're constantly in crisis mode with our businesses when in fact we're not. We're just in that conditioned idea that we need to be stressed and anxious and really, really on it, and really, really busy and on the edge of burnout all the time to be a proper grown-up and a proper entrepreneur. What a load of bolts.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

We're not doing that. Star child for the win.

SPEAKER_02 29:02

Yeah, we need to be building businesses that that are built to survive as being human with very, very human traits. Yeah. So we know that if we've pushed through so many times when we should have taken a break.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Oh goodness me. Well, that I said to you, I think we spoke on it on previous podcasts. Just before Christmas, I was there with that, and it was just suddenly a sudden realisation. I'm not surprised you're like that, I'm not surprised you got poorly. And I've been quite poorly the last few weeks with an eye condition that's really impacted work a bit, right at the time when I didn't need it, but I know, you know, I'm pretty sure that's because I kept pushing on. Finally, now I took a step back and spoke to my GP and got some help with it, and surprise, surprise, guess what? I've relaxed more, I've got better, I'm feeling better, feeling rested. We took the weekend break for a couple of days, and it was just fabulous, and it's just reminded me of that.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

How did it feel for you when from just starting to relax we got the call to say your mum was ill? Because that's going from starting to relax a little bit into a forced level of alertness.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Yeah. Well, because we'd had such a lovely day because we'd been out in the in the forest. Yeah. Beautiful weather, everything was perfect, really. Lovely time together, and then coming back into that, it was like you know, nervous again, anxious a little bit, wondering what was going to happen, whether we're just gonna have to whiz off and get packed up and go again when we're just starting to settle in. And I take a while to settle into a place. I'm not one of those people that can just go in and feel like I'm at home. I need to go in, ideally, have my tea bag so I can make a cup of tea, I can I can put my stuff in the right places. Yeah, settle into the yeah, the right kind of teabag, definitely. Everybody's gonna say, What would that be? Well, you'll have to ask me in person or to ask me for another episode to watch. That's your favourite tea. Because I love I love my tea. But I will do that, and it takes me a while to settle in. And I'd done that there, because at first I was, you know, it's a new place, and even though it was charming and lovely and tiny little place, I love the fact that we were living upstairs and sleeping downstairs. That in itself was something a bit different. It was just really nice, really, you know, compact bijou and perfect for what we needed, straight onto the high street, which was lovely, and all the lovely shops and the restaurants. But it takes me a while to get into the space of calming down a bit and settling in. So then to have that kind of I don't want to say threatened because that sounds terribly dramatic, but thinking that we're gonna have to leave it in a hurry.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

But did it for you also like like an overly taught piece of elastic? Yeah, snap you straight back into Oh my god, I shouldn't be taking down time.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Yes, and then I went to the point where I thought, well, we should maybe we shouldn't have gone away. And I I knew this one of my sayings, I knew this would happen, which is you know, I'm gonna swear now, it's bollocks because I didn't know it was gonna happen. Yeah, but I tell myself that sometimes, which is ridiculous. Because what how does that serve us when we say something like that? Serve us or are the people impacted by that?

SPEAKER_02 31:54

What does it do for our nervous systems that we've done this year that we did in times past and swore we'd never do it again? You know, we booked time out with our dog sitter to take a couple of holidays this year, yeah, and then guess what? Forgot all about it, didn't mark them in the diary, didn't book them, and to be fair, with the way travel is at the moment internationally, we we alluded to that earlier. We've now not taken the time. We've not taken the time, we've not put it in our diary, so we would have normally been planning for a a holiday somewhere this month, yeah. And instead we've had two nights away. Yeah. Two nights, not even two full days. How crazy is that? And also, when you realised that one of those scheduled posts that you'd arranged hadn't gone on, how did you feel then? Really panicky. And yet all we needed to do was let people down. Yeah, I know. And yet all we needed to do was take out the laptop, find the post, hit post now.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

I think we had to train your format on video. Yeah, we did, and then we had a bit of problems, didn't we, in one of the blogs or something? I can't remember now.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

But they were on within minutes. Yeah, oh yeah. I know they were supposed to be on. Yeah, yeah. But that moment of snapping back, you just get to that point where you're starting to feel fluid and chilled, and then the tiniest thing. I described this to somebody earlier. I've been feeling quite teary these past couple of months, a couple of weeks. I've got a lot of old stuff coming up at the minute to process and to deal with. And I was saying to someone earlier, I can be feeling quite relaxed, and then something probably as minuscule as a speck of dust can snap me straight back into oh, worries me, I'm not doing enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not I'm not working hard enough, I'm not taking it seriously enough, I'm not outreaching enough, I'm not socially enough, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Whoa! Wheezy tiger. So it just shows sometimes when we keep pushing through and we don't give ourselves the breaks, we can snap back into that feeling on the edge of burnout really quickly.

SPEAKER_01 33:57

Yeah, definitely.

Ring-Fence Time Off And Reset

SPEAKER_02 33:58

And we need to stop doing that.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah, just that stop. Anybody listening, does has that happened to you? Do you are you recognising some of this happening in your lives as well? How did you get through it? What was it like for you? And what do you do to ensure that that's not happening regularly for you so that you can have a proper break and really, really, you know, enjoy the experience, fully relax into it instead of being on tender hooks. Which again creates better stuff for your businesses in the same way we talk about our inspiration days.

SPEAKER_02 34:28

Yeah. It's so so important. So we should probably wrap it there. I think we've said loads. We need to go and pick up our dogs now. We do.

SPEAKER_01 34:37

We've got to get a nice and quiet for now. The cats enjoy it because the cat's at home feeling like I run the place and then three mad dogs. Yeah, exactly. And then here they come, I'm preparing. He's ready for them though, he always is.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

So essentially the the break is ending, real life resumes. Mummy's now back home. Yeah, that's the good side of things. That's it. That's good, although she's still poorly, so we're still kind of on call and worrying about her.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

But it's it's almost like rest has a natural shape. It's it it doesn't have to be stolen, we don't have to justify it, we don't need to earn it. We need to just start taking the breaks where they're allowed, and either we need to create the shape for them by creating those those breaks in our schedules and diarising them.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:24

Or with things like bank holiday, or sometimes where you just have a natural break in your schedule. If you look at your diary and you've got a day that's empty, what if, dare I say, what if you then ring fence that and keep it empty?

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Wow, what would happen then? That's exciting.

SPEAKER_02 35:38

And what if you didn't work that day? What if you don't do instead? What if you just got out into nature and took a book or a journal and just wrote or read or just or go and sit in a coffee shop, go and do something.

SPEAKER_01 35:53

People watch, people watching's cool.

SPEAKER_02 35:55

Yeah. Absolutely. And instead of thinking I've got to check my phone every five minutes, glance at it quickly before you leave the leave in the morning and and then don't track it until maybe lunchtime.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

You're rebellious again to us. I know.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

We've got to we've got to start taking control of things. We've got to start taking the breaks where we can. We've got to stop feeling guilty for allowing our brains the creativity, the space to to breathe that they all need. And we've got to stop behaving in the way that we have been conditioned to believe that busy professional grown-ups behave.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

We have definitely.

SPEAKER_02 36:40

We'd love to hear from you. What are you going to do to take some downtime and to stick to it? And what are the changes you need to make in your business to make sure that your business does have you back and that you can step out for a while when needed. And what if we started creating those times to step away a little bit before crisis point hits? Anyway, until next time, we will see you next Tuesday. You've been listening to Automately of Topic. If you've enjoyed it, hit a like and subscribe. And if you want more, please comment on the off topic on social media.