There we go. Okay. Hello. Welcome to the coaching mixer. Today, um, we are not mixing today. We're drinking local beers, so that should be fun. Um, and yeah, welcome. I'm Elena. I'm Aaron. What you What are you drinking? So, um, I just went to my local little liquor store and I found one that it literally says Jersey life on it. So, I was like, that seems very local. Jersey style logger. I don't know what a Jersey style logger is, but I will find out. Oh my god. Please take a sip and tell me. Let me see if I'm going to tell you what it is before I'm gonna I'm gonna make sure it's okay.
Yeah, this is okay. What are you drinking? I am drinking um it is from a local brewery called Block Three. It is their Blocktoberfest ale of some kind. Okay. So, it's like I don't know. Beer is a tough one for me. Yeah. With a I don't know. I feel like I can have a a sort of like bad gin. Not bad, but like a cheap gin and a cheap tonic and a lime and it's not that far off from like the best gin and the best tonic with beer. I feel like it can go very wrong. Yeah. Are there types of beers that you just like stay away from or is it more like No, I really like stouts and there's one that this brewery makes called the like some of their sour. But uh yeah, I will I will drink beer at a brewery, but I almost never buy it and I never drink it. And if I'm at if I'm at a place with options, beer is the is never the one I choose. Oh, wow. Yeah. What about you? Are you are you a beer lover? I wouldn't say I'm a beer lover, but I do like beer. Like if if I'm having if I want to have like a sort of neutral alcoholic beverage with my dinner, like I might go for a beer just cuz like I don't love things that are too sweet generally. M um and I I like wine, but it gives me m some of them like give me migraines, so I have to be careful if like So, and I never I don't really know. I haven't investigated enough on to which which types give me migraines. So, so yeah, like I I can go for a beer on occasion. Yeah. But I'm not like an afficionado. Yeah. At all. I think great beer is great, but I just don't know. I think that's it. It's like I just don't know enough. I need like someone to go with me. Like if I went to this brewery, I would do their flight every time because they always have like some new thing. And this is like Yeah. It's light. It's nice. Yeah. Nice. And it's best. Yay. It's funny. You said yours is like block three is the name of that. Mine is three threes. So, we have like a three Whoa. theme this episode. Numerology people. What does it mean? What does it mean? Help us. Okay, this is growing on me. As I'm like having a couple more sips, I'm like, okay, this is actually really nice. I find that with beer in general, the first sip I'm kind of like, eh. But if it's a good one, it it grows better. Maybe partly because I'm drinking. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, sometimes. That's sometimes you get a few sips. I think that's the other thing is I never feel like I I don't know that I could drink enough beer to get drunk. I bet I could, but I like I I beer is like something where I'm I mean I mean I only poured half of a pint into this glass because that feels like enough. Yeah, I definitely do reach a limit where I'm like my stomach is like no more. No, no, thank you. So fun. Yeah. Maybe maybe listeners have good like beer recommendations that we should Yeah. I tend to The only thing I don't love is like super bitter, so I like don't go for IPAs usually. Okay. But anything else I'm open to. I had a I had a beer experience um when I was in Wales last summer. Was it last summer? Yeah, I think it was like last June. Um my kids and husband and I were on this retreat in this really remote place and one of the retreat days we walked along the coastal path where like it was really long walk I think we might have lied to my kids. I was like yeah fine it's nice just a little hike little stroll. We had done lots of hiking so I was sure they were going to be fine. And halfway through the hike, we walked down these stairs and we went swimming in the Celtic Sea. By swimming, I mean I stood in the Celtic Sea because it's really Yeah, I was going to say that's impressive. But it was like a cold plunge kind of leveled with cold. And then we kept walking and at the end of the hike was this little teeny town with an old ass pub, like an authentic real like pub where you go up and you order your beer and you get your little sign and you have to go like bring things to your It was so cute. And then they had a bus for us to all go back so we didn't have to drunk walk back to the That sounds amazing. I actually have a lovely uh Welsh pub story though I don't remember where it was exactly but in college I was backpacking through Europe with friends and we'd like just started and we were we we were in like a small town waiting for the ferry um and the ferry we we missed it for the night so we were going to just like figure something like maybe sleep outside. We didn't really know. We were like really roughing it. Um, and we went into the pub for some dinner. And we got to talking to the owners and they were like, "Oh, we have extra rooms. Like, just come stay for free." It was such a beautiful act of generosity that like started our trip so love in such a lovely way. Oh my gosh. I was not actually planning this segue, but we're talking about travel today. Yeah, I wasn't planning either, actually. But that's very thematically appropriate. We really didn't talk about this before we started. But yay. Yes, whales. Fun. Highly recommend. Yes. Gener generous people. At least like 20 years ago. I'm sure they still are. Yes. Um, yeah. So, we wanted to talk about travel like as a business owner, as a coach. I think maybe both from the perspective of how we plan for travel in our business since a lot of people have trouble like making time for themselves to take space away from their business and then also like mentally or emotionally how we take that time away. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean it sounds so funny. It's like oh I'm sorry. Are you going on vacation and you're thinking about work? Like oh poor thing. Yeah. It actually is a real issue. Like just because you're not at your desk doesn't mean you're not necessarily consumed with your business thoughts about your business. And I think travel especially can highlight sometimes the ways that business owners tend to really identify so much of who they are with their business. And I think if you know if you're not conscious about it, it's really easy for any people you are traveling with, partners, family, loved ones, um, to feel that and it can create problems in your relationships. Yeah. I think especially as well as like um entrepreneurs if you work for yourself. I know the first year that I transitioned from being a full-time employee of someone else to working for myself. By the end of the year, I was just feeling really depleted and burnt out and I was like, what's going on? I haven't actually been working like that intensely. Um in fact, far less intensely than when I was working full-time. But then I looked back and I realized like all of the there's like a culture in America. I would say it's not nearly enough of of traveling or taking time off, but there is a culture of like holidays and like you get your vacation days that you have to either use up or roll over. And when you work for yourself, like you don't have any of that built in, which means you have a lot of freedom to create the culture that you want to, but you have to create it. Otherwise, there's no it's not going to exist. Like, you're just going to be working all the time. Yeah. And I think I mean, for people, especially who are newer in their business, I think if you're in a service-based business like coaches are, it can really set a bad precedent with clients. if you are available 24/7, if you never take time off, um I think it can be like a really weird thing to suddenly try to go from never taking the holiday Monday off or taking time off at the end of the year to suddenly saying to your clients, "Oh yeah, all that time that I was available for you and flexible and you know, I could hop on a call on the weekend if you needed me. Now I'm no longer doing that." It can feel like you've taken something away from your business and your clients that probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. Yeah, definitely easier to like start out intentionally creating the culture you want, which is not to say you can't transition. Like, of course, I've done it. Um, but if you are creating your work culture, like it's good to start thinking about these things. Yeah. As early as you can. As early as you can. And like imagine you couldn't change it for a year. That's kind of like the game I play with myself. And like if I had to lock in all of the time I was going to take off a year ahead, like a lot of my physician clients, you know, they know where they're going to be this date next year, if they're going to be in the hospital or not. And I thought like if I had to do that as well, how would I make sure that my time was my downtime was baked in and my vacations were baked in and like my like my kids are off in the summer like how would we handle that? So even if it's not something you are rigidly committed to I think it's helpful to try to plan in advance because to your point if you don't it doesn't happen right. Yeah. There are no external forces that are going to make you take a break when you work for yourself. So at the end of that year when you were feeling like depleted, how did you address that? What did you do? Did you go on vacation? Tell us. H um I think I did go on vacation. Maybe it was a station because we um recently moved and so we were a little tight on funds, but I think it was Yeah, it was like the the shortterm reaction was, "Oh, this is why I'm feeling tired." So, I made plans for the next month to take some time off. Um, and then the longer term was I became much more conscientious about when there are actually like holidays in the US because th those are things like especially some of the holidays we have are kind of weird and I'm like I don't really care. Um, so I think I now I'm like a little bit more conscientious about trying to take those just cuz I like a Monday here or there or a Friday here or there. It seems like very little, but it actually it has an impact and it brings like variety into your work life and it's just it's kind of nice to have an occasional long weekend. So, yeah, I think I did plan a low-key vacation or station, I can't remember. And then I was just a little bit more conscious that like, oh yeah, I do need to take time every so often to be away from my business. Yeah. And I think the being away time is like a different it's a different animal than just like some days off at home, right? I mean, you can you said station. I think people can have very conscious stations. Um but there's something about knowing my laptop is like just over there in the next room. When I go on vacation, I often don't take it. Yeah. Which was a process. How did that happen? Because I know even when you said that I'm not like this is actually an area where I don't think I struggle as much as a lot of people do and like when I'm off I'm off. Um but even when you said that I I could feel the like oh scary. I know. I know it's it's like scandalous because what if the website goes down and what if and what if um I haven't done this a lot, but when I'm going away for a couple days for any reason, I do try not to take it. Um like unless I need it for like movies on Netflix or something, I don't know, like whatever. Yeah, whatever I could be doing. Um, the evolution of that was hard though because when I when my kids were little, and this might have been when I just had one kid, we used to spend a month in Hawaii every winter. Wow. Um, this was like very magical kind of manifestation where I remember I was living in Boston at the time. I was pregnant. I um was so sick. It was like the worst experience. It was a year where they had like a hundred inches of snow. Wow. And I hated like I was just like this is the worst. And I just remember suffering and feeling so bad and I'm like growing this child and feeling totally useless and then saying to Steve like next winter I will not be here in February. I will be in Hawaii. I love it. And I don't know what you are going to do with working or whatever. I hope you can come there with me, but I'm gonna be there like a baby or something because this is just I'm just not doing this again. And we totally made that happen. And then we did that. We did that every year for probably four or five years. We missed a year here and there. one because we bought our house and then after um one year we came back and then the world shut down for ah yes three days later which was a crazy experience. Um, but the last time we went, which was would have been a year or two ago, I remember it taking me like a good week of going to the beach, not having my computer with me. Um, just like kind of it felt like a detox. I don't know what detoxing feels like, but I imagine I was just like I just needed my brain to focus on something else. And I was like, "Today, my brain is going to focus on the waves and watching the children jumping in the waves and watching the whales in the distance and like it was a really conscious thing. But then after that first week was over, I felt like myself. I felt like myself without the badge of like I'm the business owner and I'm a coach and I'm this author." Like whatever things I like to tell myself that define me. I was like, "Oo, I'm just a human enjoying the sunshine and the sand and being with my family." And I it was like it was kind of a spiritual experience. And since then, I have not I don't think I've had too much too much of an issue being off. Wow. Can we talk about a little bit about why that's so important as like a human but also as a coach? Like I think a lot I I don't know I can I can start diagon
um I think as um as coaches like a lot of the work that or as a coach a lot of the work that I do with my clients is like identity work. Like who are you? What's important to you? What do you care about? How do you want to see yourself? And do you want to tie like your value or your self-worth to your accomplishments? Like what do you want that to be tied to? Um and of course like I have a I have my own politic around that. But I think I think if if as coaches like we're losing ourselves in our business or tying all of our self-worth and um identities to what we achieve as business owners, we're kind of we're not like really walking the walk in the way like that I would like to as a coach. And we're we're also like losing out on some I don't know. I believe like the work that we do with ourselves Yeah. opens us up to the work that we can do with our clients. So, I don't know. What are your thoughts? No, I totally I'm I'm with you on that. And I think that where I have struggled with that classically is there are seasons of my life where I'm like really on fire with an idea or I'm like, yeah, it's always horrible if I take a vacation while I'm writing a book because I'm just like, oo, I'm so inspired. Oh, the ideas are flowing. There were so many vacations where I would get up early in the morning and be typing away and writing and it feels really good and I never stop. I'm not going to tell the muse no, right? I have in the past, but like I I will like embrace those moments of inspiration and creativity. Um, but I think the double-edged sword is that when that when it's always an open door policy with those types of things, it's almost like saying, I need these special circumstances to feel inspired and aligned and to create. And then I where like where I struggle with it is I'm doing that on the back of something that's supposed to be like quality time with my kids or down time where I'm like literally taking myself out of my environment and the inspiration is great but I'm like doing what I do and I don't know if everybody does this but what I do is I'm like how could I write about this? How could I help someone with this? How could I turn my experience into something useful for other people? which is great as a business owner, but it sometimes can like diminish just the human presence of an experience. I have to I know I have to be careful with that because it's very easy for me to like make it all a grist for the mill. How do you navigate that? Because as as you identified like it's not necessarily the solution is not necessarily to just say no to the news so to speak though sometimes it might be to be like boundaried around when you're inspired but like how do you navigate that? Um, there was a mindset shift I had a few years ago where I started to test the idea with myself that we're all inherently creative and I can actually decide when creativity comes and that if I just sat down and I just start working, something important will come through. And so I just stopped thinking that it was like one special moment because I mean at one point I was getting up at like 2:00 in the morning like, "Oh, I have to write down this brilliant idea." I'm like, "Would did I really have to do that?" Like maybe. But I I just had to kind of test the boundary and try on kind of a thought that didn't feel correct. But after a while of only letting myself kind of work when I decided to, it actually I I I do feel it's true. Now um if I put like writing my next book time on my calendar, nine times out of 10 I will sit down and write something. Yeah. And I mean, maybe this is just a kind of a a moment or a phase in my life, but I also have kids who can like walk, talk, read, engage, and do stuff. Like when they were toddlers, my brain was looking for something else to do because I'm like, well, I change diapers and I sing the same five songs and like we just wait for nap time. like it was not necessarily intellectually stimulating as cute as they were. Now I'm like I my kids are like can keep me busy. We have things to talk about. We can go do things. They can go on a long hike through the through the coastal path of Wales. Um and maybe there will come a time when they're teenagers and they won't want to hang out with me as much. So, I'm like telling myself that while everyone is present, really present, I'm going to make sure I show up for that. Yeah. You said something so beautiful about um this like thought that you tried on. And essentially what I gleaned from that is like it's almost like shifting away from viewing ideas as a limited resource that we have to like grasp on to when they come and cling too tightly lest they fly away and you never have an idea again. Yeah. I found in myself a little less I've honestly I'm like a bit less boundaried with myself on vacation just cuz I don't have kids and like I have a lot of flexibility and freedom. Like I'm not, you know, creating a new program when I'm on vacation, but if I have an idea for a post, I might write it down. Yeah. Um, but I've noticed a big shift in myself when I like stop clinging so tightly to every idea that I have. They generally flow much more easily. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you also talked about our integrity as coaches, like, you know, if we can't unplug and we're coaching people on trying to be more present in their life, we're trying to have better relationships and like we have not we're not gra to to to hearken back to a previous episode. We're not at least grappling with that. This is what you said. If we're not at least doing the work to grapple with our own stuff, a lot of the work that we're doing with someone can just like fall short. It's not really going to have that energetic impact. Um, even I mean even when it comes to like how I like to travel. Mhm. That has had a ripple effect on my clients which I really love in it may be really expensive for them but like I try only when I'm traveling especially for work I try only to fly business class or higher. Um, I don't always do that with my kids, but I did give them an experience when we went to Spain this year of having like a business class experience. Wow. At least on the way there. I was like, we got to reset the expectations with economy on the way home. But it was one of those things where I'm like, I want you to feel what it feels like to have a successful business. And like you guys do a lot to support that. You know, some I'm not always there to pick you up every day. I'm not always, you know, available every moment of the day that you need me. But it's so that I can create experiences like this one for us to have together. And a lot of my clients have stopped. You know, they're making millions. Some of them are making millions and millions of dollars. and they're like, "I was flying in a car." Cuz I just thought it was a waste of money to be comfortable while flying across the ocean. I'm like, "That doesn't sound like valuing your yourself unless you don't care." But like, I had chronic pain for a number of years. So, I definitely will do whatever I can to be physically comfortable when it makes sense. Yeah. So, I I think like the way you do it can also set kind of a an an energy line for yourself about like I'm going to turn even the traveling part of this experience into something really nice, right? Special, right? which I think is like whatever, however, wherever this leads you in terms of like how to view vacations. It's like uh thinking about your relationship to yourself. Yeah. As you're exploring like and that said like how do I want to relate to myself as I'm thinking about taking vacations? What do I want that quality of relationship to be? And like maybe that will lead you to fly business class. Maybe that will lead you to like give yourself the freedom to take a month off to travel through Asia. Like wherever it leads. Yeah. And in making it like I think I I mean maybe this is as I'm getting older too. Even the nicest places you're not going to be as comfortable as you are at home. So like whatever I can do personally for myself to be comfortable within reason I will try to do because I don't sleep well when I'm in a hotel. I don't sleep on planes like there there's a lot of little quirks that come up for me when I travel and I hate when I go away somewhere and come home so exhausted. Yeah. because I didn't like consider that, oh, I should have just brought the extra suitcase with my special orthotic pillow that I really need instead of relied on this like rental unit to have a pillow I can use. Yeah, that actually makes me um think a little bit about um Oh, I had a thought and then it just went away. What is this beer doing to me? We can have a beer. have a beer break. Oh, okay. So, this is something that I am actually it's very top of mind for me and I do not have it figured out. So, I would love your wisdom in this. But, um I actually So, part of why we are doing this travel episode is that I'm going to China for a couple of weeks with my husband and his family. They're from um his parents are from Shanghai. So, like I'm super excited. And it's a type of trip that um I think it's going to be pretty it's going to take a lot. Like I don't speak any Mandarin. I've learned like three words. I've tried. It's tough for me. The tonal languages are really tough to So like I think it's going to be a lot. And then also navigating like family stuff. I love them. And also like it's just I think it's going to be family. Yeah. A lot. Yeah. Um, part of how I'm thinking about like where this fits into my business is like the preparation it takes before like I I'm find I think for me like traveling does not necessarily equal vacation in the sense of like you come and you're rejuvenated. So like how do you take care of yourself, take care of your business when you are facing travel that is like probably going to feel in some ways like a sort of work or at least not going to result in the like coming back all refreshed. Yeah. You're not going you're not flying to a spa for a month, right? And like the time is like exactly 12 hours ahead, I think. So like I'm going to be on the exact opposite schedule like jet lag. I have been feeling a little bit of momentum in my business. And I noticed that as I was coming up to this trip, I'm like, "Oh no, I'm gonna lose all that momentum and I'm going to come back and I'm going to like have to reintegrate into my business and I'm going to be really tired." And those are thoughts that are running through. I understand they're not good. Yes. Helpful. No, that I mean, how do you I Okay, so I actually think those are not unhelpful thoughts. I think those are thoughts where, you know, maybe they're not true. Maybe momentum has nothing to do with business growth. Um, but it's like part of you asking for support around this to make the experience a little easier. So, I mean, from a business perspective, I don't know that there's a formulaic answer, but what I try to do is have some like posts ready to go. you know, like this episode's gonna come out when you are away. So, yeah, everyone go to Elena's um Instagram, tell her that you love her, find out how trip is going, you know, like all of those things are you can kind of pre-plan, but I'm I'm I'm more curious about like what are your boundaries around working while you're away? Are you going to be totally unplugged? I'm going to be totally unplugged. I also don't even know if I'll be able to like what I'll be able to access while I'm there cuz I'll have a I don't think I'm going to get a VPN. So like I might not be able to access Gmail. I'm just planning on being totally totally unplugged.
