334 | Do you have self-care built into your schedule?
Do you take time for yourself? No really think about that question. Are you intentional with your self-care? I find that leaders are so focused on goals, growth, and others that often they make excuses about not taking time for themselves. This is about the three ways you can set up self-care when you lead others.
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The Transcript
Do you take time for yourself?
What I mean by that is do you have self-care built into your schedule? As a leader, I’m finding it more and more important for you to be very intentional about how you actually take care of yourself so that you can actually take care of others.
Hi, my name’s Gene Hammett. I work and study with hyper-growth companies so that I can understand the chaos of hyper-growth and share that with my clients. When I asked a client one day about her self-care habits, I could see the tear kind of coming up forming in her eye. Now she didn’t full out cry that day, but I could tell that I touched a nerve because she didn’t have any self-care plan. And I asked her a simple question.
What is it you would do in an ideal world that would give you that time for yourself? And she had kids, she had a busy schedule and her company was doubling every six months. The answer was, “I’d go for a run.” Now your answer might be completely different, you may hate running maybe it’s yoga, maybe it’s meditate, maybe it’s something completely different but the key is to be very intentional about your self-care. And as a leader, you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your team to actually take care of yourself.
I wanna talk about three specific areas that you need to focus on and have some boundaries around it to really improve the way you lead and really improve your overall energy in the way you meet challenges everyday.
The first area is morning. Morning is a powerful time for most people. If you’re a morning person then you know that that’s your zone of genius, you either working out in the morning or you’re doing devotional time or you’re meditating or you’re eating a healthy breakfast or you’re doing all of that. The key is to have a very intentional morning.
I interviewed Hal Elrod on my show, I’ll put the link in here, it’s leadersinthetrenches.com/144 and he wrote a book that’s still continuously selling very well called the Miracle Morning. If you wanna go deeper, you can listen to the interview atleadersinthetrenches.com/144 or you can actually go buy the book, I mean I think it’s a great book. But you need to have a very clear intention to what gives you energy in the morning and protect that.
The second area I want you to think about is your evening. Now for me, I’ve always worked past dinnertime, I always worked past this and I noticed recently, maybe a couple years ago that it just wants working for me. It wasn’t working for my family for sure because I wasn’t present for them when I needed to be but I want you to think about what is your evening plan as a leader, when do you stop work on a regular basis? Now you’re gonna have times when you may have to put in some extra hours, you’ve got some projects that are going, whatever it may take, but in general, what is ideal for you? Do you stop work at [6:00] and then eat dinner with the family? And then do something else? For me, I decide not to do anything else and if I can at all help it, I’m done at [6:00]. And that’s just the way I wanna work.
Now the third area is your weekends. I think you need to have boundaries around the weekends so that you can recharge for Monday. One of my big mission statements is I love Mondays and I want everyone to love Mondays. You’ve gotta recharge yourself on the weekends so that you can meet every Monday with more energy and more focus and clarity than ever before.
So what do you do on the weekends to put work down? I do work a little bit on weekends. I take one or two projects, I’m writing a lot now for Ink Magazine, I write on Sundays. So what is your plan? In my opinion, if you have boundaries around what you’re doing, you would be a much better leader and you would set a great example for your employees and you guys could actually talk about that in meetings about self-care.
I had a client recently who said, “We’ve actually hired “someone for the wellness of our culture,” and they’re having regular conversations, they have yoga, they have all kinds of things around how they are treating their wellness as an overall culture. I think that’s fantastic and their company is growing astronomically. So what are you doing? What are you doing in the morning, what are you doing in the evenings, what do you do on the weekends to really recharge yourself? I’m not gonna get into vacations but I actually love vacations and the more you can unplug, the better, but that’s for another topic someday.
My name’s Gene Hammett, I work with hyper-growth companies and I study the hyper-growth leaders so that I can give back insight to the evolving needs of leadership for these hyper-growth companies. If I can help you in any way, make sure you let me know. Stay tuned for more episodes of hyper-growth tips and keep listening to the podcast, read my articles, share this, all that stuff. I say this with a smile ’cause I really believe I’m here to help you be a better leader. All right, take care, lead with courage and I’ll talk to you next time.
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