hi Shannon Waller here and welcome to this episode of inside strategic coach today Dan and I are going to talk about a really interesting concept relative to entrepreneurs and that is Rejuvenation so Dan I know that a lot of entrepreneurs have a really difficult time taking time away from their business but you've always said how critical and vital it is to their success so can you just say why Rejuvenation is so important for people people get worn out this takes the form of that when people get worn out by constantly working three immediate things happen is that they start getting bored with the work that they're doing and the reason is because they're not seeing any Variety in their life and so one of the things you want to do is that you want to work intensely when you're actually working but then you want to break from the work and it's a bit like what would happen if someone worked out at the gym for five or six hours every day what you would find is that your system would start deteriorating you would start breaking down muscle would break down and your performance instead of going forward would actually go backwards and I think the same thing happens with your creative muscles your mental muscles your management muscles as an entrepreneur I think the other aspect is that's sort of the negative side the positive side Shannon is that for the most part in the 21st century entrepreneurs don't live in what I call a time and effort economy in other words that by choosing to be an entrepreneur you're choosing to have only one standard for judging your performance and it's not the amount of hours you put in it's not about the amount of effort you put in it's actually just the results that you get and the results if you're tired take a long time and the results if you're really fresh and you're you've got a lot of energy take a very very short time so it makes total sense to put your focus on results and then try to see how little time and how little effort that it actually takes to get those results and so you have to get away so my prescription for Rejuvenation is that you have certain days that are work days which we call Focus days in strategic h and you have certain days which are preparation days which we call Buffer days but then you have an increasing number up to a very satisfying level of free days and on the free days you don't do work-related activity you don't do work-related communication and you don't do work-related thinking you're thinking and doing all sorts of things which are completely different from your work life and that getting away that that contrast and activity actually rejuvenates you just in the same way going back to the gy analogy that if you worked out and then you took a rest from that particular muscle group and then you did something else you find that your muscles would grow as a result of that and you'd have lots of physical energy well free days are sort of the break that you get which allows your mind to be very clear very focused very energized when you come back to work so this is kind of fascinating because I know lot of entrepreneurs over the years and they struggle with taking that time away but we also know though that for people who really do take the free days they actually experience enormous jumps in both productivity profitability increased Revenue it looks like it shouldn't happen but it does tell us more about that Dynamic well I just got off the phone this morning with really top entrepreneur in the 10 times program and out of the last 90 days he had worked 25 days and he had 65 days off had done four separate trips for different reasons throughout the US in Europe at the same time his company was making an absolute exponential breakthrough in terms of technology which he had set up before he left and then only needed to be back for days at a time to check up on the progress and this breakthrough is just extraordinary and it relies entirely on very little of his time vastly expanded teamwork and vastly expanded use of Technology he would not have come up with that idea if he was going to work the 90 days or he was going to work 85 days and the project would not have moved forward if he had not had that great amount of time off so you know I have living proof going back 43 years of this concept that the most effective entrepreneurs actually don't work all the time two things about it is that they are much more productive in the short run much more creative in the short run but they're incredibly more successful in the long run so that's really interesting because I know every entrepreneur wants to be more creative and wants to have a big and long future ahead of them but if they don't take time away from their business this won't happen is that what you're saying no no they'll burn out and the problem is that people who burn themselves out burn other people out so there's not much enjoyment I mean people can say well my work is my pleasure but I have to tell you the people around you don't experience it that way okay your family doesn't experience it that way your friendships don't experience it that way so people who are obsessed about something can convince themselves of anything and they can make up a very good story about what they're doing but in fact they're not very effective and what I find is that people who work all the time and don't take breaks spend an enormous amount of their time putting out fires and dealing with crisis and having to repair things having to start over and the reason for the crises the fires and the setbacks comes about because they're actually fatigued they're very very fatigued their judgment goes they are not seeing things in the form of the big picture and the most important thing is that they're not really appreciating the full value of their teams they're not appreciating the full value of the opportunities that they have available to them basically they become almost like hourly laborers who are always putting in 10 or 12h hour days not getting any weekends off not getting any holidays off or anything else they just will not grant them that and the truth of the matter is that they just got into a bad set of habits when they were young for one reason or another they've said to themselves I only feel good about myself when I'm working and I don't feel good in any other part of their life well they just haven't what I would say developed themselves in other parts of their life so this becomes an excuse so it's very very interesting I mean I suffered from it my great savior was Babs my partner at coach and my lifetime partner I met her in 198 to and I would say in the previous eight years certainly since I had been out in the marketplace by myself I can't tell you an actual real free day that I actually took I was tired all the time I was dealing with a great deal of self-created complexity because I wasn't allowing myself to get away and her encouragement and constant pushing this whole thing about taking free days really transformed my life so what happens from a business sense when an entrepreneur decides yes they're going to take some time away from their business they're going to disconnect I know a lot of people are afraid that the walls are going to fall down and the sun will no longer rise in the east but what happens when people do are encouraged and supported to take that time away what happens with the team what happens with the company and the processes when people aren't there all the time well I can't give a straight answer on this because you may have done a very bad job of actually preparing your team for you being away so in fact the early results can be possibly upsetting to yourself and other people and they can in a certain way be negative okay but that's the short run which you have to think about is the lawn run here let's say somebody's 45 or 50 and they've just been at it forever they can't remember when they weren't working hard and they can't remember when they weren't working all the time so first of all they've built an organization around them that treats that as normal so other people's abilities to take ownership for the company when they're away none of those abilities have actually been developed so what I always say well I'm not looking for you to take a month off I'm looking for you actually to take 24 hours off and pick a workday I always say go for a w Wednesday cuz that gives you two days before the Wednesday and two days after the Wednesday during a normal work week and what you do is that you say okay I'm going to start taking days off when I'm not going to be in contact with the office and we're going to start with this Wednesday you put it on the calendar I'm just going to meet with you on the Monday and Tuesday and talk to you about what you're going to do on that Wednesday and get out on paper things that people would be worried about that you are away for a day they've never experienced you actually being away for a day during the week and you say so let's talk that through and what you have to say is that this is an experiment for you and this is an experiment for them and that when you get back on the Thursday you're going to talk through what the experience was what worked what didn't work and by repeating this process first of all you might do another one day a couple weeks later you might get to the point where you take two days off gradually both sides of the equation here Shannon will get used to it and what the team will notice one is whether they're up to this or whether they're not up to it some of them will experience it as very uncomfortable pressure or they'll just waste the time when you're away they'll take advantage of it and not do anything while you're away but that's going to get sorted out out because you have to again say well this is the way things are now a year from now how would I want things to be 5 years from now how would I want things to be and gradually you begin to say well there's going to be short-term courage required there's probably going to be short-term upset there's going to be short-term suffering but the question is what other solution is there than for you to reverse yourself and if you can do that and you can get your team used to you not being there what you'll notice is that the best people will step into the spotlight and you will notice that you can go one day you can go two days you can go a week you can go two weeks if there's proper planning beforehand and there's proper debriefing afterwards in that way you can say to yourself I was thinking about working straight through the way I'm working until I'm 65 and then I'm not going to work anymore anymore you might say to yourself I can get a lot of that enjoyment that I think I'll get out of retirement or vacations I can start taking that right now and the moment you get into it you'll notice that when you have that day off you come back on the next day and you're more refreshed you have more perspective you're much simpler in your thinking and you become more strategic not just tactical but you become much more strategic so I would say that I'm talking about my experience with thousands of entrepreneurs here but I think that's the general kind of path and plan that I would suggest for people to do it and you'll notice a huge jump on the personal side in terms of personal relationships your family friends other things related to that and you will notice that you move away from grading yourself on the number of hours you work the amount of effort you put in and more and more you'll just say well if I get these Five results done over the next 90 days that's a fantastic quarter and the whole thing is I bet I can get them done inside the company with not much effort and time on my part I really like this perspective Dan because it's viewing yourself not as just an automaton who just is like a robot putting the hours in but as a resource that needs to be maximized and you want to maximize the results and minimize the time and effort and your team is that too so I would presume at some point they get free days as well so this is really interesting it's a very different shift or mindset than how if anyone was raised in a hierarchical organization or something more bureaucratic where you are rewarded based on time and effort and not on results so you're saying no entrepreneurs need to have a different way of looking at their free time than the standard managerial set of people well let me ask you a question you have admitted to me that you have workaholic tendencies yep how have you come to grips with this well it's really interesting because I started with coach in 1991 which was quite a while ago now I remember starting and I would come in early and Babs would invite me to go for lunch I'm like no no no I'm working she said no you're going for lunch now with us I'm like oh okay and I would work late I really wasn't all that productive to be perfectly honest I put the time in and I was in a learning phase so that was fine but because you and Babs were so clear on the value of stopping taking a break even during the day I started to focus much more on results and productivity than just putting in the time and effort because that wasn't actually going to do it and if you're working at a really high level you need to give that burst and then stop and do something different now I'm at the point many years later where I don't even think about taking work home on the weekends I never think about taking work with me on my Vacations or my holidays and I'm so well trained so I was on my phone and and someone said oh are you working I'm like are you kidding me I'm talking to my daughter it just would not occur to me to do that and my husband and I are both actually really good at holding each other accountable to that and kids are brilliant at keeping you accountable if you have any bad habits just tell your kid you're in a free day and that you aren't doing any work things and the moment you step into that territory they're like what are you doing you're like oh sorry in a moment I want to talk about the long-term impacts of taking time off but before we get to that point I actually want to define the term rejuvenation mhm cuz you have a great explanation for this and to me it actually adds a lot of credibility and weight to why it's important to to take time away from your business yeah well I grew up when they were still teaching Latin in the schools I don't know whether that's done anymore I don't even know if English is still taught in the schools but certainly Latin and the word Rejuvenation comes from the Latin it means to make yourself young again or to make something young again so when you rejuvenate someone you're bringing youngness back into the way that you're operating you're young again in your thinking you're young again in your emotions you're young again in your energy you're young again in your creativity and most of all you're young again in your motivation so that's why you're doing it most people think of a career as being a real burst and upward progress and then you sort of level out and you sort of plateau and then just gradually you get less and less efficient but actually it's a whole series of jumps what a really proper career is you burst you take a jump then you back off you get rested you get relaxed you come back you consolidate your gains and then you take another jump and you're the key person at doing this because everybody else's ability to take jumps is entirely based on your performance your behavior so Babs and I you know take $150 5 free days a year out of a 365 day year which works out to about 22 weeks we do them in different lengths of time and we do them for different reasons and in different places but just to prove the case I've experimented a couple of times when I had a lot to do on my plate and it was coming up for free day time and I said you know it would probably be better if we didn't take the free days and I just St and got this done now I didn't really have any energy for doing that but it was sort of the sense that well when am I going to get it done if I don't take the time that's scheduled for free days it's just so much that I have to do and what I noticed is that there's a mind trick that happens Shannon and a lot about what we do in strategic coach is just you've been tricking your mind in a bad way and what we do is we get you to trick your mind in a good way so what I did first for myself and then I recommended for other people and that is that I would get a sheet of paper out and I says okay now write down a list of everything that has to be done that you would use your free day time to get done and then I would write it out then I put it someplace that I could look at it the moment I came back I would take the free days and there was something about writing everything out on a sheet of paper actually puts your mind a little bit at rest so I come back and I take the sheet of paper and I'd look at it and immediately I started Crossing out about half the items because they really weren't that important they looked crucial before I went on because I was tired and fatigued but afterwards I say why would I be spending my time with that stuff so I'm down to about half the list and then about two or three of them let's say there were 20 10 of them disappeared and about maybe three or four of them actually got done while I was away by someone else because it had to be done and I'm down to six and I say myself well I could delegate these four or five right away and get somebody else involved to working with it and it's kind of left with one so the impact of my one week away or my two weeks away was that I reduced my list from 20 points down to one point and that was just lack of perspective and this is the biggest thing that happens to people when they don't rejuvenate is their perspective becomes that everything is crucial there's not enough time to do any of it you're going to have to work harder and longer to get there and you get very very stressed and you cut yourself off from teamwork you cut yourself off from the support of people in your personal life and it it's a very bad scene and people have to medicate themselves to overcome this they have very adverse health effects as a result of this relationships get strained it's kind of driven by images in the General Media what I call the General narrative that people who work really hard and really work long are very admirable but they aren't admirable to themselves they aren't admirable to the people that they directly impact on and they are certainly not admirable to the people that they're truly committed for in their personal life so it's a bad mind trick that gets you to do this and the other thing is that you think that other people are really impressed with the fact that you work hard and Lawn but actually they're not there's no admiration that actually this is a madeup thing in your in your life and it doesn't have anything to do with how people would actually like you to be which is to be energetic and inspirational and creative and highly productive so there's a real impact of fatigue then that people underestimate by the sounds of it so describe Dan like what happens after you come back after you're a week or two away and you're clearly feeling rejuvenated and you've got that one point left in your list how long can someone go or what does that pattern look like before they need to take free days again the way that Babs and I have organize their life and you have to realize that we've been at the 155 days a year for 25 years so every year you get smarter about how to fully enjoy the free time and you also get really really smarter about setting the people in the company up properly when you're going away so there's this learning cycle that you do once a year by any indicator that you want to use I'm incredibly more productive now than I was 25 years ago so I'm 72 and I'm incredibly more productive than I was when I was 47 and I have to tell you there aren't many any 72 year olds in the world who can say that they are at a much higher level of creativity and productivity at their age now than they were 25 years previously and there aren't many 47 year olds who say I'm going to keep getting better and better and better and the reason is they've designed their life so that they can't be but I've designed my life so that I can't be and quite frankly just to push it a little bit further when I'm 95 I'm going to be incred to be more productive than I am at 72 because number one I never get bored with what I'm doing I never get fatigued by what I'm doing and the other thing is that I just keep getting smarter especially in relationship to teamwork of using other people's abilities to do everything except two or three things that I think I'm uniquely good at so this sort of indicates that again we're not living in a a time and effort economy anymore this is not a factory economy we are not Factory workers we're not on the line doing peace meal we're actually being paid for results and those results can actually be very quick it can be an hour can produce a result that can make a difference for a year so you and Babs will take a week or two and then you'll work for what Dan three weeks usually Max usually three we won't go more than three weeks of work with then taking at least a week off and sometimes we're taking 17 days off and it all depends when we go to the United Kingdom we usually take almost three full weeks off so it depends I mean everybody's got their own pattern it depends on what age you are it depends on what your family situation is so I can't make really definable well you have to arrange your weeks that way everybody's going to arrange arange their weeks the way that suits them but the key here is that you constantly increase your Rejuvenation so that you can constantly increase your productivity and then you also increase the amount of preparation time you have both for taking the best possible free days and taking the best possible Focus days so for someone who has figured out their pattern and just so everyone's clear you don't work three weeks straight there's still a free day a week at least yeah I always take Saturday off I find Sunday is a really good writing day for me so I get a lot of writing one of my contributions to the company is that there's new copy being developed and new new ideas but Saturday is a free day regardless it's always a free day yeah great so Dan if someone kind of what you were intimating if someone is constantly rejuvenated and always increasing their productivity and their contribution would they ever stop no no no they won't this is going back to your whole thing is that if your future the way you're looking at it is always bigger than the past that you've already lived there's no reason and I think that the Science World and the technology world is going to increasingly provide fitness and health and energy support for people who just want to continue working but they truly have to love the work they're doing it has to be entirely results-based work and the trend as they go along is they get increasingly more done in less and less time with less and less effort the impact of their work keeps getting more important in terms of its impact in terms of its productivity in terms of its profitability and if that was the formula that you could work out there would be no natural Endo to your working I love it so thank you Dan this conversation about rejuvenation I think is really important because I think what entrepreneurs contribute is massive but for people getting tired and fatigued then that contribution gets diminished so you've provided some really clear evidence for why Rejuvenation is key and actually how to do that too so really appreciate it thank you and our next podcast is actually going to be about how you can have that bigger future so stay tuned thank you Shannon