PJC EP 10 Self-Care: The Secret Of Successful Consultants

Hello, I'm Samantha Hartley. Welcome to the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about a little known success secret, which is self-care revolutionary.

Do you remember several years back when millennials were first of the age that they could start to make their own decisions in their lives? A lot of them decided instead of going to college or instead of going to work right away that they would travel. So we had all these millennials who were traveling the world and backpacking, working, or doing freelance work from Thailand and at the time, I remember the boomers went crazy like, what do you mean you're supposed to work, work, work, work, work until you're old and then you can be traveling and that was the mindset that the millennials were reacting against, was I don't want to spend my whole life working and then end up old and traveling when I'm old. I want to travel when I'm young and can really enjoy myself.

And at that time, my husband and I from our Gen X point of view, we were like, awesome, we love that idea and in fact, both of us had done a lot of travel in those youth years between college and work. So, the mindset that the millennials bring into our world with themselves is the opportunity to choose living for now instead of living for later, pursuing joy first, and then working later and I think that is a very important belief for us to look at as entrepreneurs because you probably know and can quote me 100 memes about how we are supposed to hustle and grind right now and enjoy our success later and that most people won't put in the 60, 80, 100 hours a week that you're supposed to in order to have the business that will fuel your life.

And that's definitely the point of view in corporate for a lot of us who came from corporate or any young consultants who were with the big consultancies, working 60, 80 100 hours a week isn't anything unusual. So why would we bring that to our businesses? If you want to be profitable and joyful, then I don't think that's a way to work. The hustle and grind culture has always been interesting, I like hustle. I think hustle is getting on the move and getting things done but I'm not a fan of grind, and I'll tell you why because I don't believe it's sustainable. If you're going to work those kinds of hours in order to build something, there's a huge risk that before you achieve the thing you want to achieve, you burn out, you collapse, you get sick, something happens that you're not going to make it to that finish line. The other thing that I think is really brilliant and interesting is that it doesn't have to be that way, it doesn't. In the middle of my entrepreneurial journey, during the times when I was earning the least amount and wanted to be earning much more, I would chronically overwork. So I completely identify with this point of view. We need to work, work, work. So I would work all the hours constantly and if my husband would say to me, hey Harven there's an interesting thing I'd like for us to go and do, I would say it's not a good use of my time. I don't have time for that I'm working and it got so bad that I could never turn off my work, work, work, even though it didn't seem to occur to me that it wasn't ever making me more money, I just felt like, well, eventually it will or something's going to come through here. The funny thing is earning more money doesn't have anything to do with how much you work. It's about how you work, what you work on, and what your focus is, and what your beliefs are. So this magnitude, this huge number of hours was not getting me where I wanted to be but guess what? It was a habit, it was a habit that was so hard for me to break that I basically had to take the words of my coach; my coach suggested that I leave the office, this was my office in the home, leave the office at a certain time each day, at the time I think it was really hard for me to leave any time before 10 p.m but he said, when you leave, I want you to close the computer and put a blanket over it like it's a parrot cage, so symbolizing the end of work. So hustle, grind, overwork are ineffective if they're bad for you and they don't necessarily lead to more money or more success in your business and I'm very glad I experienced that personally so that when I work with my clients or when I'm speaking with you about this, I can say with convincing persuasion, I've never worked less, fewer hours in my life and my business is much more successful than it's ever been and I'm at choice with it, and I think because I've noticed this with my clients over the years, that self-care is the key. We want to believe in a hypermasculine culture that what is going to happen, what's going to cause success, lead to success is this push, push, push more, more and more but what really is going to cause your success is going to be less, more mindful, more at peace.

So that's what I want to talk to you about, how do we help you to create routines, rituals, and habits that make you your best self. When you're your best self, what are you? Creative, smart, energetic, ready. You have all your tools and faculties that you can bring to problem-solving, growing your business, helping your clients, getting more clients. That's when you're your best self. So over the past year and half, I started to see when my clients would get into an overwork habit and then when we started to focus on self-care, how things would change in their business. It's not easy. A lot of us are addicted, overwork can be an addiction, we can get that same heat of adrenaline from doing our work and it can be very hard to leave it and I think what helps is identifying what's going to be the best self-care for you and to me, the path into that is to make sure that what you're doing is aligned with your values. So overwork, the way that I was doing it was aligned with my values at the time, or at least the way I was living them. Years ago, I had done a Tony Robbins exercise where you list out your ten values and even though the bottom of my list has shifted around a little bit, I remember peace used to be like near the bottom, I was like, oh, peaceful and now it's much closer to the top, my top three have never changed.

So love, health, and security have always been my top three values. Love because if you don't have love in your life, I mean, like, why be on earth? And by the way, I say that definitively because it's a definitive value for me, it doesn't mean you have to agree with that. It's just incredibly definitive for me, health, because if I don't have my health, then what do I have? And then the third was security, so what was happening for me when I was stuck in overwork was that they were flipped upside down and the security was ruling my life and I was living out of alignment with my values and doing that well, it is disturbing, it messes with you because your heart and mind know that you have other beliefs but when you're acting differently, it shows you what you really do believe. So that's conflicting beliefs and conflicting beliefs are a painful place to be.

So what happened for me was that I began over the years slowly to shift from 3 2 1 to 1 2 3. I began to use self-care to help me demonstrate to myself and the universe that I was committed to living these values and I tell you this because I want you to take a look at your values and notice where you're living and working in alignment with them and where you're causing yourself pain because you're out of alignment with them. A lot of us want to make a huge contribution in the world and make an impact, pursue our calling, create all of those kinds of things. So those influence your values. Figure out what they are and then let's take a look at ways that you can put those into practice in your business. So a resource that I recommend is a Brene Brown, she has a values worksheet. It's a kind of a checklist that you can go through and find yours, you can just Google Brene Brown Values PDF and find that and I found that super informative. It's always fresh to kind of revisit and see if my values are still my values, and what are my values in my personal life. What are my values at work? Just fun to see where the overlap is and how those all align.

So just as an example for you, the way I'm living out those values, if love is the highest value for me that encapsulates spiritual practice like my faith and my relationship with my husband and then also the love of friends in my life. It's kind of a big bucket that includes all of those things and they might be broken out for you, you might have spirit or faith in its own bucket but what I do with that one is make sure that love is first in my life, and that means prioritizing all those activities that are related to it. I would also put in my love bucket my time with myself, that's how I experience God's love, it's how I'm often with a dog in nature during that time alone. That's a very recharging thing for me and it fills me up so that I can give more love.

Health is an interesting one because I was so out of health or I guess streaky with committing to my own health over the years. When you have an opportunity to spend seven hours a week working out or seven hours a week revenue-generating, sometimes we can get, you know, our crazy thinking and choose the wrong one and so for years, I chose not taking care of myself because I thought figuring out how to run the business was more important, even though, again, I’d committed to that as one of my values. So when I'm sane and clear-minded, it isn't more important for me to be earning money than it is for me to be taking care of my health. That's what I think is so important about self-care, is it keeps you in your right mind and then security. Listen, work gets done, we all find a way to work. The client's work gets finished, there's always hours and time for doing the work. What always concerns me is when my clients begin to prioritize that, prioritize the work over taking care of themselves.

So I'm going to give you some examples of self-care practices. I think it's important for everyone to have a spiritual practice, it can be a non-denominational one like meditation, but a spiritual practice to me, the way I define that is connecting to universal love, God, the whole oneness. Feeling yourself, being a part of something larger than you. I think it's very grounding and also it helps you to stay in touch with what you're here to do and whether you're in the right place at the right time. So that's a spiritual practice, I find for many of my clients is pivotal and it's easy for them to do it occasionally but the real key is to make sure that that's part of your life every single day.

Rest. Arianna Huffington, thank goodness, made sleeping a priority after years of us hearing about all these entrepreneurs who only sleep four hours a night, which is not healthy for most of us. So rest is a primary kind of self-care that I think is important for us to do and it just doesn't just mean sleep. So sleep is very, incredibly important, and needs to be a priority and also rest, which is, to me, taking care of yourself, rejuvenating yourself outside of work, but not sleep. So that can be things like taking a walk, just sitting around, you know, piddling around in the garden, daydreaming, doing activities which are restful but don't necessarily mean sleep and if you're so tired that the only rest that you need right now is 20 naps a week that's also fine but there will come a time when you're up on sleep, but you still need that kind of mental rest.

And the third thing, I think it's that you should always include in your self-care routines is creativity, some kind of a creative activity outside of work because so much of our creativity is funneled into work. So can you outside of work, write, paint, create, cook, garden, do creative things, ideate with friends. Do creative things that stimulate that part of you, rejuvenate, refresh, and creation, a lot of times what happens is an inspiration, which means we bring things through from spirit into our work and so can you create those things? And by doing so, fuel that part of you, which is taxed in your work. So those are three general areas that I think it's really important to include. Another example is my client, Cheryl, who had an incredibly successful business over the few years that she's worked with me, has grown like crazy and the opportunity is for that business to suck her into it and take all of her time. So she made a little acronym for herself, so MMM is her self care practice and that stands for meditation, movement, and make time and make time meant she had had a tendency to over-schedule herself and then there wasn't time in her schedule for her to do the work for the clients or work on her own business, it was in meetings and things like that and so making time meant there was a time in her schedule for her to work on her own business and also to come up with new ideas and things like that for the business.

So I think she's a great example of like, here's what I need to have in my life and these are the habits, rituals, and routines that are going to put in place so that I can take care of myself and just for some thoughts, starters for you, a few more ideas for self-care and I do want you to choose a few of these, I’d definitely do the values exercise and then choose a few of these to see what makes you feel like a better version of yourself, so housekeeper, if I find out people are cleaning their own house still, I feel like unless you adore that activity, you have to get other people to clean your house because that is time that you could spend in spiritual practice, resting, or creating, you could spend that in your love time with your friends or your partner or your family. So a housekeeper is one of the big ones. A lot of people love their fancy coffee. I'm no longer a coffee drinker, but that's if that's you, then it's your healthy splurge. It's your thing that you do for you. Don't let anybody tell you take that away from you. If that makes you happy, there are little pleasures that make a big difference.

Chocolate every day. I have plenty of people I know who as long as there's chocolate every single day, then their life is good, again I'm not a chocolate person, people time, love my people time and I think ensuring that your business does not consume so much of your life that you don't have people time, I think that's really important, flowers, I'm a fresh flowers person, love to have that around me, I do feel like it makes me my best self when there's beauty around me. Hugs. If you're physical touch, if that's your love language, then make sure you get hugs every single day or as often as you need to get them.

Travel, maybe not right now it's a little bit difficult, but if travel is something that's key in your life, then how can you weave more of that into your life? Don't wait until later, do that right now and if you put that on your calendar first before you schedule anything else out, then you make sure that’ll happen. Classes, constantly learning, personally I love classes and I love to take classes on crazy things, we've just done one from the great courses on the history of South America. I didn't know anything about that, it was super fascinating and it makes me excited and gives me ideas. Being in nature. Hiring coaches. There are so many coaches that you can have, a relationship coach, parenting life coach, health coach, investing in you, being a better you, there's nothing more important than that. Tub time. I know there are those who need to be in the water. There's the tub time people and the beach people, make your life one that supports those self-care things.

I think the most important thing I want you to take away from today is when you are not at your best, everyone loses and when you are at your best, we all win. So, taking care of you is not a selfish act, it's actually something you do for the good of all. Taking care of you serves the highest good of all concerned. So if you need permission, if you need ideas, if you need affirmation, take care of yourself, enable, support yourself to be your best self and when you do, I think you will see that your work and your life are both more profitable and joyful.

So with that, I'm Samantha Hartley and I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consultancy.