Transcript: FitBizU Episode 250: Three Lessons Learned From Three Weeks Away

Listen to the Full Episode HERE!

[Transcript starts at 1:02]

What is up y’all? Welcome to another episode of FitBizU. I’m your host, Jill Coleman. Welcome back. It is 2023 and excited to get into regular episodes. We were on hiatus for a couple of months, but we’re back and I’m excited for this year. If you have not listened to, the last episode was all about, uh, sort of a debrief from 2022, taking you behind the scenes behind the curtain at Jill Fit, and giving you some of the insights and the ways that we.

And some of the things that we have done differently this past year and some of the things we’re excited about for next year. But today I actually want to give you a little bit of a personal episode. I actually took three weeks of vacation in December. Now, one of the things that I promised myself last year was I was gonna take two weeks off in July, and I was gonna take the entire month of December.

Now, I wasn’t able to take the entire month of December off because we did enroll for our Strategy and Scale Mastermind. But I wanted to share with you some really interesting lessons from my three week vacation. I actually went to Australia and New Zealand with my partner, and we literally left November 30th and we got back December 23rd.

And it was a really, really fun trip. However there were some challenges that I wasn’t exactly ready for and I wanna share with you a little bit about that. Now, this is a little bit obnoxious. I’m gonna say this, but as an entrepreneur, it’s like really hard to take a vacation and you know, it’s not because we’re workaholics really, it’s just more -especially if you have like a lifestyle business where make your own schedule and things like that.

Like for the most part, number one, you really love what you do. You know, like you really love your clients, you really love what you do, or else you literally wouldn’t be doing it. You don’t have to have a business. You own a business because you want to, you do what you do in your business because you like it.

So you know, sort of a forced time off feels a little bit tough. And also, you know, this is the biggest challenge for me and I, it’s funny because I remember I actually did something like this in 2015, and I have even told this story before. So in 2015, December of 2015, I took that month off as well, and I said, I’m not gonna do any client calls in December.

And I didn’t go anywhere. I remember December, 2015, I was actually living in Santa Monica in LA and I just stayed in town and I remember being like, number one, I felt really bored, and number two, I felt really disengaged. and I almost like borderline felt depressed. Like I don’t tend towards depression, but I definitely like, that was probably the closest I’d ever felt to depression.

And I remember I’ve actually told that story before to where like, you know, I won’t ever do that. However, this past fall, we did four launches in four months. And the launches were big launches. They were successful launches, and they took a lot out of me. And so by the time we were getting ready to go to Australia, I mean, I could not get on that plane fast enough.

I was like so, so excited. And I had earned it! Right? I didn’t feel bad about it. I felt like I did my due diligence on my clients. I felt like people had great results. I was definitely, you know, my team was taking care of stuff at home. You know, and people were like, oh yeah, like your work so hard, you have to take a vacation.

Right? So it was like, it was felt justified. But what was really interesting was, Like after the first, I don’t know, like week or so, I started to get really antsy and I wanna share with you some of these lessons. And this is the first lesson, which is the same thing that I experienced seven years ago and I forgot.

But there is a balance between like disengaging and novelty, right? You’re being on vacation, we’re traveling different places, we’re in new locations, we’re meeting new people, whatever that novelty is great, and you’re disengaged from work, but also there’s no routine. and when you’re engaged in your work, you’re like plugged in to the pulse of the business, you’re plugged into the pulse of your clients, right?

You’re having client conversations all the time. You’re in your DM’s you’re on calls, you’re talking to people, and engagement in your work puts you on the pulse of your work, right? It boosts your confidence because you’re having conversations. It boosts yourself of your self competency. Like you feel like, okay, I’m good at my job.

And what happened was being sort of “out of the loop” with some of my clients, almost put me in like a scarce energy where I was kind of starting to feel like, “god, do I even know what I’m talking about?” Like it was a very strange thing. It’s funny cuz I know it was that because the second I got back and started like having conversation with my clients, I was like, oh yeah, like this is great.

I feel like I feel plugged in, I feel engaged. It does not feel draining at all. In fact, I feel lifted up by it. So I do think that there’s a balance for us. The vacation was three weeks. I think that was a little too long. I think next time I’m, I’m gonna do like 10 to 14 days. I think for me, that’s gonna be a perfect amount of time to refill my cup, which is my second lesson I’ll share here in a second.

But to refill my cup, but to not get to that point where I start to get antsy. Like, what are my clients doing? Where’s everyone at? You know, like, , I need to feel like I’m in my business. I need to feel like I’m the pulse of the business. What’s happening in the business with my team, with, you know, I hadn’t talked to my team for a couple weeks.

Like what’s going with the team? What’s going with the clients? What’s going with the people? And so that was definitely the first thing.

The second important lesson was that you have to walk your walk, right? So if I talk about building a lifestyle business where you’re not working around the clock, you know, my goal for this past year, 2022 is to work about 30 hours a week.

And I think I got pretty close to that. For next year, it’s actually 25 hours a week. I’m gonna try and work a little bit less next, next year. So if I talk to my clients about how you need to take downtime, you need to refill your cup and do things for you, you need to take self-care, right?

I work with a lot of busy moms. A lot of people have other jobs, and you have to walk your walk. Because not only is it not fair to like do one thing and preach something else, right, then you’re out of integrity. But more importantly, it’s not fair to my clients if I don’t take the downtime not only to be an example of like health and you know, like, balance and holistic living, but if I’m not recharged when I come back to my coaching spaces, I’m an asshole.

Like literally I’m a fucking asshole . And, you know, if you’ve ever coached with me, you know that I’m definitely, I’m very empathetic. I’m very patient. You guys might be surprised to hear that if you never coached with me, but I’m very patient with my clients, especially my beginners.

And one of the things that I really pride myself on, especially our FBA calls. Sometimes they’ll go two, two and a half, sometimes three hours. And I have tons of space for that, tons of time for that. But I know if I’m starting to get like drained, like really like mentally and emotionally drained, which this last fall, it certainly was, I know that sometimes it’s a little bit harder for me to check some of that stuff, right?

I might get a little short. I might feel a little impatient. I might get a little annoyed. Whatever it is that’s not fucking okay for my clients. It’s not okay, right? And so if I’m showing up to my spaces not recharged, it’s doing them a disservice. Like I’m a fucking asshole. That’s how I see it. And so I need to take time not only for me, but for them.

That’s extremely important. And I think if you’re a mom, maybe you can extend this to like your kids, your family, your partner, whatever. But it’s really important to me. This is my second lesson, is you have to walk your walk and you know, this past fall was a lot of output at JillFit, and it was, like I said, four launches in four months.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that to be honest, but we know that we’re in like a growth phase at JillFit right now. These last two years have been like a major scaling and a major growth phase, and I was ready for it again. Right. I hadn’t, I hadn’t been in one of those growth phases for years, and so I was like, “oh yeah, I forgot a lot of output, right?”

I forgot how much output it is. One of the things that I love that Brenden Burchard says is one of the hardest things about creating more success is some success. So when I was a personal trainer working 70 to 80 hours a week in the gym, I mean, that got to a point of like misery, right? That got to a point where like, I have got to fucking figure this out.

Like I can’t keep doing this. I’m like working split shifts. I have 12 clients a day. I’m personal training. I’m teaching 12 classes a week. I’m waking up at 4:15, I’m getting home at night at 9:00. I wanna build this business. I could not continue burning the candle at both ends.

So I had a lot of motivation to figure it out. Then like Brendan said, you get some success. You’re like, I’m not in misery anymore! I’m not in that constant like miserable place anymore. I’m kind of good, kind of in a holding pattern and what I see is a lot of people stay there. And I definitely stayed there for a long time, and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s definitely comfort.

And it’s definitely more certain and it’s definitely more complacent. So in order for me to get the activation energy right, to like actually wanna do something else and be in a growth phase, again, I knew it was gonna be some output and I knew that there was gonna be some buffering that needed to happen. And so every year we’re learning and we’re getting better at these things and I’m learning about myself and getting better at these things.

So you need to walk your walk and you need to refill your cup.

Remember what you said you wanted, and trust the process. And what I mean by that is like I said to myself, “Jill, this is a growth phase. You know, that you wanna scale this year. You know you’re taking on team, you know you’re doing this stuff.”

So you have to remember when it’s tough. When you’re in those moments where things are tough. And it’s a lot, like I told you, like November 30th, when I got on that plane to Australia, I was literally like white knuckling it. I was like, I just need to sleep for like two weeks. And I need to just like, just to have nothing on my calendar, I need to like read fiction and like lie on the beach, right?

That’s how I felt. And of course that didn’t last for three weeks. It only lasted about a week. But, that feeling. I had to remember that I asked for this. Right, Jill? This is part of the process. So you have to have the awareness and recognize and then trust that yes, you always have a say, right?

I could definitely blame and complain and be like, “what the fuck?” And “this is too much and I can’t do this,” and whatever. Or I could just be like, wow, I am way more drained than I thought I was going to be. Right? It’s like when you sit down at a buffet and you put so much stuff on your plate and we say that our eyes are bigger than our stomach.

It’s kind of the same thing, right? We put our launch calendar together. I’m like, I’m excited, and then like when you get into the weeds, you’re like, wow, this is really taking a lot out of me. And so then you have to recognize that this is part of the growth process and adjust moving. Can’t change 2022.

2022 was our best year ever, but it definitely was a lot of output. 2021 and 2022 were tons of output because we’re doing a lot of different things, a lot of new things.

And remember, anytime you’re doing something new, it’s going to be cumbersome because you’re just not good at it yet, or it’s gonna feel clunky.

So next year and every single launch that we do have gotten smoother and smoother and smoother, we kind of have like a, like a, you know, we kind of joke at JillFit. Like when we go live and cart is open, we all like sort of hold our breath cuz we’re like, we hope everything works. And then it’s like, okay, anyone, we are talking to Sara, did anyone email in?

Do you have any DM’s? Anything breaking? And like sometimes that happens, but for the most part, doesn’t anymore. But it certainly used to. And so again, we’re getting better. We’re getting better. So trust the process and trust that it’s what you wanted, and then go, okay, now I recalibrate based on the new information, right?

Based on this intel and this new information that I’ve gathered as a result of doing the thing I said I wanted. I wanted to scale. Wow. It was a lot of output. Cool. How do we adjust moving forward? How do we continue to to work at this capacity, but do it in a way that saves our sort of mental, emotional bandwidth?

And lastly, and this is really important, and I think you guys probably gleaned this, but you need a lot of time and space to do creative work. So, you know, as business owners, we’re not just robots. When I was a personal trainer, I was essentially a robot. Like to me, it’s not that I wasn’t in a fun program, my clients and I love my clients, but I pretty much was, “boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” 12 clients a day, 12 fitness classes a week. Like that was my schedule. I had this one calendar that I made because there wasn’t even a calendar I could buy in a store that would give me enough time slots for what I needed. Like other ones who were like just had hourly. I made my own, uh, Excel spreadsheet that was broken down into 15 minute chunks.

I had written out like, how much, okay, I’m gonna eat my chicken and broccoli. That’s gonna be 15 minutes. I’m gonna drive from my house to work. That’s 15 minutes. Like, this shit was like… every single time slot on every single day was Xed out, and I liked it at the time, right, because it’s checking shit off a list.

It’s a to-do list. It feels productive. The problem was I was really busy, but I wasn’t productive. And I wasn’t doing any creative work. If you’ve ever been someone who works in the gym or, or your trainer or coach or, or see people across the desk and you see a lot of people and a lot of patients… like, that’s a different way of working than creating social media posts and writing emails, and writing sales pages and coming up with ideas.

Idea generation. Totally different skillset. Totally different way of working. So sometimes it’s funny because my partner Keith, like he’ll get home. He works 24 hour shift. He’s a paramedic- firefighter here in LA and he’ll be like, how’s your day? And I’m like, good. I was like, I worked for like, I don’t know, I wrote a bunch of stuff and he is like, cool, but like to him, that’s not a lot of work really.

Cuz it’s like a couple hours of like writing, but I’m like, you don’t understand. It’s like so, and I don’t say it’s draining, it’s just so cerebral, right? It takes so much mental energy and so when you have that way of working, you need a lot of time and space and it’s really balancing the inputs with the outputs.

So I just shared with you that the last four months, we did four launches in four months. That’s a lot of output, right? It’s a lot of emails I have to write. It’s a lot of sales pages I had to perfect. It’s a lot of messaging I had to think about. It’s a lot of social media posts I had to create and publish, right?

It’s a lot of conversations I had to have. All that stuff that’s output, output, output, output. Now, you can’t just continue to put out without getting inputs. So when I go on vacation, it really is about not only filling up my sort of mental, emotional cup, but my creative cup.

So I’m reading different books. I’m reading fiction. I’m reading personal development books. I’m reading books for fun, right? I’m listening to different podcasts. I’m having different conversations. The day is going slower. I have more time to think about things. I’m not rushing off to a client, and you have to think about this.

I call it time padding, right? So when I was a personal trainer, I had all my clients right in a row, literally 7:15, 7:45, 8:15, 8:45, 9:15, 9:45. I have a seven clients in a row every 30 minutes in the morning, and then I come back and do it again at night. And that is like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right?

Time padding means, gosh, if I have to write a social media post, or if you guys are doing like reels or YouTube videos. It takes a lot more time. If you think somebody’s gonna take 30 minutes, make sure you allot 90 minutes for it, not only because of the time it takes, not just writing the post it’s thinking and editing and adding and changing and thinking some more and referencing, right?

It’s all of these things, so you need time pads. It can’t just be like, boom, social media posts in 20 minutes. Sometimes, those days are great, but for the most part, you need to give yourself the time and space and don’t let anyone tell you that that’s not also working.

Just a different way of working. And sometimes if you live with someone who is in a corporate job or has a traditional job goes to, you know, to a desk job, potentially, they might not understand. They’re like, “wait, you just wrote stuff all day and that was work, right? Or you had three Zoom calls that were an hour. How is that a full day?”

But you might be completely drained, right? And so it’s not that you’re lazy or it’s not that you’re not doing a lot. It’s literally just that because of the level of the cerebral output that you have to do when it’s creative time is a totally different way of working and way more fucking draining than just checking shit off a list of tasks.

So don’t forget that that was a big thing for me. And I came back, I was so creative. I have a million fucking ideas for the podcast. I have a million ideas for different emails I wanna do. I wrote a ton of emails while I was there. I literally just feel so filled up from a creative perspective.

And that was one of the biggest, biggest takeaways and something I desperately need, especially after all the output over the last few months. So those were some of my lessons. and it was interesting to see some of ’em that I was like, I kind of knew ahead of time. And then other ones that like kind of slapped me in the face and I was like, “okay. Yep. Doin’ this again.”

It’s all just information. It’s all just data to be like, cool, do I wanna do this again? And the answer is probably no. Now, I probably will sort of do a light December, uh, continue to do a light December, but I’ll probably, if I do vacation, it’ll probably be two weeks, three weeks was a little bit too long.

So just good lesson to learn. And also don’t let someone tell you that you’re a workaholic. If you love what you’re doing, then it doesn’t drain you all the time, right? There’s moments where you feel completely excited, you feel it completely, uh, jacked up. If you’ve ever done like a webinar, done a coaching call or ran a masterclass, it’s like you get off and you’re like on a high.

So don’t let anyone tell you that you’re workaholic cuz you love to work, right? Because you love to work and you would rather be working and you’d rather be working because you miss it, not because you have to then that’s great. And that’s your experience, and that’s totally valid. Good. All right, you guys, last thing I wanna remind you is that we are getting ready to enroll for the next round of FBA.

FBA, stands for Fitness Business Accelerator, is my beginner to business course. But yeah, a business course for health and fitness professionals who want to start and grow their online business. We are going to be enrolling this coming spring. However, we are doing something very special we’ve never, ever done for everyone who’s interested in who wants to enroll early.

So make sure you are on the wait list. Go to Jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist. It’s Jillfitfree.com/fba-waitlist to get on the wait list. It’s 100%, uh, just not, you know, obligated. If you’re on there, it’s just for informational purposes. You’ll get all the details before anyone else and a exclusive discount as well to join us for the next round.

So that’s it for you guys. Hope you learn something today and hopefully have a rest great rest of your week and we’ll see you in the next episode. Bye guys.

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Join the FBA Waitlist HERE!