Maybe you're a planner like Lisa, whose calendar resembles a game of ‘time Tetris’, more spontaneous like Brea, who’s a little more free-flowing, or somewhere in between. No matter how you do it, taking time to prioritize your well-being is essential. In this episode, you’ll hear us discuss the importance of setting boundaries and making intentional choices about how you spend your time. We share our personal experiences and strategies, from booking vacations and massages to creating those precious moments of spontaneity that can truly rejuvenate your spirit.
Maybe you're a planner like Lisa, whose calendar resembles a game of ‘time Tetris’, more spontaneous like Brea, who’s a little more free-flowing, or somewhere in between. No matter how you do it, taking time to prioritize your well-being is essential. In this episode, you’ll hear us discuss the importance of setting boundaries and making intentional choices about how you spend your time. We share our personal experiences and strategies, from booking vacations and massages to creating those precious moments of spontaneity that can truly rejuvenate your spirit.
We even touch on our VIP day offerings, where you can take a deep dive into your goals and aspirations with us as your guides. So, if you’ve been feeling the weight of life’s demands, this episode is your reminder to take a step back, breathe, and invest in yourself.
So, grab your planner (or just your favorite cozy blanket) and get ready to discover how to make time for YOU!
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Work With Us!
BREA Roper Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness
If you need a Strengths Hype Girl, for yourself or your team, connect with Brea at brearoper.com. She’s ready to deliver an inspirational keynote, empowering training, or transformational workshop. If you’re looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts, reach out today!
LISA Cummings
Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo
To work with Lisa, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.
Takeaways
- Define What "Time for Yourself" Means to YouTaking time for yourself can look different for everyone. For some, it might mean a luxurious vacation with no responsibilities. For others, it could be as simple as blocking out a few moments in your day for reflection or relaxation. We discuss how it's essential to identify what self-care means to you personally, so you can prioritize it in your life.
- The Power of “Planning to Be Spontaneous”Brea emphasizes the importance of leaving open blocks of time to allow for unexpected moments of joy and creativity. This balance can help you recharge and stay present, making it easier to embrace life's surprises.
- Invest in YourselfWe can't pour from an empty cup. Taking time for yourself is not just a luxury; it's a necessity. We discuss practical strategies for blocking out time for self-care, whether it's scheduling PTO, planning massages, or setting aside time for reflection. Remember, investing in yourself is one of the best decisions you can make for your well-being and productivity.
Take Action
● Block Out Time for Yourself: Schedule your personal time in advance, whether it's for vacations, self-care activities like massages, or simply time to relax. Make sure to earmark these activities in your calendar to prevent overbooking.
● Plan for Spontaneity: Create blocks of time in your schedule that are left open for spontaneous activities. This could be as simple as a few hours with no plans, allowing you to engage in whatever feels right in the moment.
● Reflect and Review: Set aside time for a year-end reflection or quarterly reviews. Use this time to assess your goals, accomplishments, and areas for improvement, ensuring that you are intentional about how you want to spend your time moving forward.
● Establish Boundaries: Learn to set and maintain boundaries around your time. This includes saying no to commitments that do not serve your well-being and protecting the time you have allocated for yourself.
● Consider a VIP Day: If you're looking for guidance in taking time for yourself, consider booking a VIP day. This can provide you with structured time to reflect, strategize, and plan for your personal and professional goals.
○ Book with Brea: https://brearoper.com/vip
○ Book with Lisa: https://leadthroughstrengths.com/vip
If you're feeling overwhelmed or just need a reminder to prioritize yourself, this episode is for you!
🎧 Listen in and let us know your thoughts! What does taking time for yourself look like in your life? Share in the comments below! ✨
Additional Resources
● The Planner Pad – Brea’s favorite planning system. ✅ If you’re looking for a simple and effective way to time block your day, so you can streamline your focus and maximize your free time, check this out!
#Podcast #Productivity #Leadership #PersonalDevelopment #Planning #TimeBlock #SelfCare #TimeForYourself #WorkLifeBalance #WorkLifeBlend
Let’s Connect!
● LISA: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook
● BREA: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram
AI-Generated Transcript
Lisa:
Hey, I'm Lisa.
Brea:
I'm Brea.
Lisa:
And today's episode is about taking time out for yourself.
Brea:
So this is a timely topic because you have just taken time for yourself, a luxurious amount of time in a really yummy place. And I am feeling the need to take time for myself. So we're coming, you know, from opposite ends of the spectrum. And I think that hopefully that makes for a juicy conversation.
Lisa:
I feel like we should define it Brea style. You know, you're always like, let's back up. What is it like? What does this mean? What's it about to take time off? What does it mean to you?
Brea:
Yeah, taking time out for yourself can mean, an all-expenses-paid resort wherever your heart fancies for an extended amount of time with no responsibilities, turn off your cell phone, like to one extreme. I feel like it also, most of the time for most of us, looks like smaller moments, you know, throughout the day and throughout the week and throughout the month and throughout the year. And that's what I'd love to talk about as well as, you know, the big things, but just the little things. How can we, how can we take time for ourselves?
Lisa:
Yes. I love it. And for me, it's the same along with I don't have a lot of talents that are in the moment and spontaneous. And if I don't plan these things, they do not happen. So I'm very much a planner. So for me, taking time out for yourself is about relaxing. It's about time to marinate, reflect. luxurious amounts of time. I don't feel that feeling very often. It's usually like I have booked myself from the moment I wake up until 8pm in time blocks and I am like boom boom and you know how I am. You do Brea and probably many listeners know now that if I have a five minute sliver of time I have something else I throw in there. It's very packed when I'm in a workday. Okay. You might be better at this than I am. Like if I scored myself on a scale of one to 10 on how I am at taking time out for myself, I would give myself a six. I feel like you're better at this. How do you score yourself?
Brea:
Well, maybe we need to go back to the definitions. Yeah, I mean, 10, 12, 20, I feel like I am overly kind to myself in time. And that works for me, but I know that I could do more. I could accomplish more. I just choose not to because I don't like that feeling of being stressed. It's stressful for me to have a lot of time pressures. For other people, that's the thrill. That's the thriving. That's the best life. It's just not for me. I've learned that over the years and it's been a really hard lesson for me to learn or just something for me to accept about myself because I grew up, maybe like a lot of us, just feeling like we have to be productive all the time. And I just don't enjoy it. So I do take time for myself, but I call it planning to be spontaneous, you know, like putting time in my schedule to just kind of ebb and flow and, you know, live into the adaptability parts of me. So.
Lisa:
Well, that phrase you just used, planning to be spontaneous, well, it resonates with me a lot. I would love to talk strategies, what you block out. I know I have four really clear things that I block out. Yeah, tell us. Okay, okay. Number one, block out PTO for the year. So if you're an employee, like when I was an employee, I blocked my PTO. I might be wrong and I might change vacation days, but I will earmark them essentially because I can always shift things in the calendar. Like if I need to move things by two weeks, it's fine because there's a chunk of time allocated to it. So, I block that for the year. Just do it. Yeah.
Brea:
Buy the tickets. You gotta go.
Lisa:
Yes. And even if I don't buy the tickets, just have the four days, seven days, however many days that's going to be, they're earmarked so that I don't book over it. Booking PTO for the year is big. Another one is I book massages or self-care things, like whatever that thing is for you. Massage is my favorite self-care thing to go do. I block those out even if I don't have them booked I block either Mondays and Fridays because I attempt to not work on Mondays and Fridays and I will Put those in and then if it doesn't happen for some reason fine but I'll I'll block those because otherwise I'll just book right on top of them and We'll never get them done And then third thing is I time block my workouts and even my walks. Like if I just have a leisurely stroll where you hear me audio chatting with you with my gravel crunching in the background, those and my workouts are inside of those time blocks. When I have my calendar rolling from usually about eight to eight, I have every minute pre-planned what is going to happen in that minute. Doesn't always work out. But yeah, that that works for me. And I would say for someone else, they might need an accountability partner to make it happen. But I think the time blocking time for yourself to honor your body, and the one that I'm working on right now is blocking out more time for the time that food requires, like the actual eating whole food and what it requires for cooking and cleanup is something that I haven't allocated very well in my time blocks and I'm seeing it's one of my failure points. So coming into the next year when I'm reviewing how I've done, I see that's an area where I'm not doing as great. And then the fourth and final one for me is I plan a year-end reflection at least one day at the end of every year. Sometimes I do these quarterly, but I just really like them as a year-end. I usually do a year-end training day where I just give myself the opportunity to learn about whatever. And then there's one day that's like strategy, look back, reviewing all the metrics and like basically it's what do I keep of this? How did I do? And what do I change? And then what do I want this next year to be? How do I want to show up? What are the goals? It's just that whole day of reflection and thoughtful strategic stuff so that every day isn't defaulting to what is currently urgent. It's kind of like the urgent importance scale, making sure there's time blocked out for what is important and then fill in around it. So it sounds like I have all kinds of leisure time, but also people who know me would also say I've been talking about getting more white space and marination space and open brain space for years. So it's something, this is why I give myself a six. I'm pretty good at blocking the time out. And then I'm also pretty good at overbooking myself in the time blocks I have left over. Yeah, that's real. So that's my recap. Yeah, what's your recap?
Brea:
Well, that sounds exhausting. I'm like, I need a nap just listening to that.
Lisa:
This is like a great example of strength because I'm like, this sounds so cool. When I look at those time blocks, I get so excited because there are big chunks just blocked off that can't be scheduled. I get excited.
Brea:
So funny. So planning to be spontaneous in my world is not that. Planning to be spontaneous is putting, it's putting two hours or three hours or 30 minutes or whatever onto the calendar with nothing planned. So you're planning to be spontaneous, right? So maybe, so for me, if I do have a really full day that's just packed, I have to have those blocks of like nothing time because because I've learned over the years that things come up, you know? If my schedule's blocked too tightly, then I can't receive those. And it means so much to me. It gives me a lot of joy and it brings me a lot of energy and really fuels me to be able to say, yes, let's talk. You know, I have some time this afternoon. Or maybe I just need a nap or maybe I just need to rest, you know, or maybe I just want to go outside and like, you know, kick off my shoes and put my feet in the grass and let the sun on my face and just have that time for myself, you know. So, yeah, it is interesting how our talents are so different, you know, like taking time for yourself can mean a million different things depending on where you find your fuel.
Lisa:
I think yours might be a wiser, more mature version of what I'm saying, because I'm listening to you going, I need to do this, this sounds so good. Because if I got the call like, oh, sick dog, throw out the whole afternoon, I would be like, Okay, and I would do it and then there would be an aftermath. There would be no blocks of spontaneity in there that could be grabbed. So I like that as a day. Do you do that every day?
Brea:
Well, yes and no. I don't plan my schedule as tightly as you do just to start off with. I don't have my full day blocked minute for minute, so there's already just breathing room. Again, this is something that I've learned for myself over the past Specifically, past like seven years, eight years, as I've been a solopreneur doing a lot of this type of work, I used to do like eight to 10 hour-long Zoom meetings, coaching calls back-to-back all day. And that was awful. I've learned that maybe I should put a little bit of buffer space in between or not do so many in a day. It felt really efficient at the time. It was like, I'm just going to knock them out all, bring similar tasks together. I'm going to do all my Zoom computer video stuff so that Cause that's always hard, you know, is like trying to figure out, okay, I got to get home to be on the video, you know, versus taking a phone call versus meeting in person. So I thought it would be efficient, but then it just ends up draining you, you know, so draining a lot of times.
Lisa:
Cause there are coaches like Adrian Massey, as an example, fellow strengths coach, she loves doing seven, eight calls, boom, boom, boom, boom, back to back to back. coaching on video. I can't imagine that. I think I would be sucked of energy and I need that buffer in between. But she loves that and it's energizing.
Brea:
So, yes. Gosh, Adrienne, I'd love to hear more about what energizes you about that. If you're listening, throw it into the comments or tell us more. But I think for me, it is energizing because that's eight different people or 10 different people that I get to talk to that day and that's so fun. What I learned doesn't work for me about that is follow-up, right? Any emails that I have to send after the conversation or whatever, the follow-up is, I had also blocked that time on a different day. I'm going to have my admin day and I'm going to do all the follow-up from yesterday. That is so draining for me. So instead, I just have done a little bit of time before the call to just kind of prep, a little bit of time after the call to send whatever follow-up, and then it's done. It's off the list, it's out of my head, and I can move on to the next thing and be really present with whatever I'm working on.
Lisa:
Next Yes, I think you're excellent. This might be a future episode just being present. I Take it like you're naturally good at this or I have in the past making it like you're naturally good at just being present and I I think you also do it very strategically on purpose because you like being in that state and you take time out for yourself to ensure that you can. So I really like your idea of handspontaneity and I would say like people who know me really well they would crack up if you heard me say planned. Yeah. They would be like planned. Yes. Spontaneous. No. No. But I do desire that. Like that's a thing that I think, oh, that's possible because that can be planned for. I just haven't done it. I haven't learned to do it right yet. So I'm learning from you. Yeah. In this episode. But maybe I'm good at the big picture thinking out for the year, but I'm not good at executing in the day to day. Yeah.
Brea:
Well, Gosh, I mean, I've done this since high school where, like you, I plan out my big rocks. I'm also a very big planner. I know it sounds like I'm just very spontaneous and adaptable, but adaptability is not a talent of mine. I just have had to learn over the years because I've moved so many times and my life has has required a lot of adaptability. So I've learned how to adapt and it is easier for me than it used to be, but it's not a place that I thrive. It's not something that I'm like seeking out. You know what I mean? I love to plan, but truly planning to be spontaneous is more than just adding buffer. I remember when I was in high school and college and I just didn't have the responsibilities that I have today, planning to be spontaneous, what that was was blocking off an entire afternoon. And when it got to that time, I was like, okay, what am I gonna do? And it was true spontaneity. It was, what do I feel like in the moment? who's around me, what am I feeling inspired to do? Let's truly be spontaneous. And sometimes that was just going on a little adventure. Maybe we went to go get ice cream or maybe we went on a walk or maybe we just said, you know what, let's go for a drive. We've got two hours, let's go see what we can find. It was truly spontaneous and there is a thrill about that. spot in 80 that I think creating that time for myself was just, yeah, just, it was good. It was good.
Lisa:
And something you want more of or something that is just different in adult life?
Brea:
I still do it. I don't lock it or plan it in the same way, but I mean, When I'm feeling stuck, when I'm feeling low energy, when I'm feeling like whatever, I'm present with myself enough to know I got to get out of this. I got to switch. I got to do something else. I got to be spontaneous. I'll just get in the car and I'll go for a drive or I'll go to the park or whatever. But again, I can do that because I've learned not to pack my schedule. Again, it's really been more of an unlearning. I used to live the Lisa lifestyle where everything was just go, go, go, really, really full. And part of that is exciting. You get a lot of dopamine. There's a lot of adrenaline. Part of that was and still is in my adult life. It can be exciting, but it's not sustainable for me. I've learned that. And so I've learned to unlearn some of those beliefs or those patterns of, I have to be this kind of person because this is how we're supposed to be. We're supposed to be super uber productive all the time. I've had to unlearn that a little bit and this is just what it looks like for me now.
Lisa:
Yes. Well, hats off for unlearning and for using that whole concept of taking time out for yourself as a way to have spontaneous moments, get spontaneity, be spontaneous. I mean, all of those things, there's been a lot of spontaneous in your theme. And I listen I listen to your examples thinking that sounds really nice. That sounds like something I should work on. So this is great given the theme for me being all about planning in advance so that the day-to-day can actually happen. So these moments can happen, but they're still planned. There still isn't spontaneity. So the planned part, I'm solid in, I feel great about, I have a great system for, but I can see through this conversation even more clearly, maybe this is why I've been seeking that white space, buffer time, even though you said it's more than that, I don't even have that yet. So if I had the buffer space, the white space in the moment every day. I think that's the missing piece for me personally.
Brea:
Interesting. I want to holler at you offline because there's a tool called the planner pad. Okay. It's the best planner that, and I've tried a lot of them. Like I said, I mean, I used to be much, much more of a planner than I am now, but it's a simple system that makes it easy to take advantage of those five minute slivers of time or to block out a luxurious two or three hours for a futuristic Friday afternoon, where you just go and lean into, for me, futuristic, but pick your strength and just say, Hey, I'm going to go and sit on a patio somewhere and just create this white space to let my futuristic flag fly and just dream. Anyways, so I can show it to you if you want. I can link it in the show notes if people are interested, but the planner pad is a great tool to help facilitate this. But one thing that I think you're really good about is boundaries. Lisa, you're so good at boundaries. And that is something that I do learn from you and will continue to learn from you is how to set those boundaries and hold those boundaries. Because that's why I laughed when you asked me to rank my on a scale of 1 to 10, how good are you at taking time for yourself? Because I can have so much white space that there isn't enough structure to make sure that I am answering emails like I should be or email is always my Achilles heel. So yeah, I think if we could just meet in the middle, you know, then we would both be great.
Lisa:
I am so structured and you are so unstructured. Right.
Brea:
Yeah. What do I feel like doing today? Oh, it's four o'clock in the morning. Sure. My brain's awake. Okay, great. You know, like, that's usually how I get things done is when I'm, I'm feeling it, you know, whereas I am like, it is 4am.
Lisa:
That is designated blocked as sleep time. Sleep time is the only thing that might be available right now. Back to school. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. OK, well, this is great. We took people on quite the tour of options. And hello. Hi. Yeah. And this is just our example. We know you lead through your own strengths as a listener and your own preferences. And you have your own desires about what you do next when you're thinking about taking time out for yourself. What does that look like? Does that mean you haven't taken a vacation in two years and it's simply to block those five to seven days? Is it overall getting a little more relaxation, marination? Is it body work? Is it the nourishing, the body, you know, the massage, the food, the things that you're putting in so that you have the ability to perform highly? Or is it something like me that I need to focus on planned spontaneity? That is a great goal for me. to be able to do a little bit more inside of the day, like Brea was talking. So, Bria, I know we both have VIP days available for people if they want to do some deep reflection to figure out and tackle something difficult in their business. And I think the stuff we just talked about today would be a great source for a VIP day. Like, hey, I need to do some strategy and reflection. I want to decide what my next 12 months will be, but I want a third party person to step me through it facilitation style. Why don't we tell them about each of our VIP day offerings so they could get an idea in the context of taking time out for yourself, but then also maybe other things they could be for them. Why don't you tell them about your VIP day?
Brea:
Yeah, VIP days are so, oh gosh, it's just, I mean, it literally is taking time for yourself. It's blocking an entire day. For me, I don't really care what it is that you're trying to accomplish. You can come to a VIP day for professional reasons. Maybe this is your quarterly planning or your annual reflection, your beginning of the year, it doesn't matter. Or it could be personal, like let's just explore your talents, right? What talents are being fed? What are not? What did you use to enjoy? You know, you used to be into, I don't know, musical theater, you used to dance, you used to paint, you used to read, you used to take time for yourself, but you don't anymore. Why is that? You know, it could be coaching, it could be anything, but it's a day for you to step away and explore or put together a plan to accomplish your goals, however you want to use it. But I block off the day for you. I'm available for you throughout the day as you need it.
Lisa:
Beautiful. And where do they find more? Do you have a website spot for them to look?
Brea:
Yeah. So as always, BreaRoper.com. You can schedule a call if you just want to learn more. But if you're like, wow, that sounds amazing. I'm ready to book right now
