Episode 036 – Rest: The Entrepreneur’s Underrated Superpower

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Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

I’m a firm believer that entrepreneurs are going to change the world. I also believe that entrepreneurship is the only vehicle for creating true financial freedom, time freedom, location freedom, and emotional and psychological sovereignty. No other job, vocation, or life path gives you the same opportunity to package up what has been working through your life experiences and render it into something that you can give the world. 

The challenge is that it’s a lot of work – it’s certainly not the easiest or “safest” path to take. Especially today, when hustle and grind culture is so widely accepted, even celebrated. A lot of entrepreneurs end up burning out in the pursuit of more “success”.  So today, I want to address that.  Specifically,  how do we strike a balance between taking action and creating in a way that inspires us and taking the necessary downtime to recharge, as to allow innovation and new ideas to emerge?

The Do-ers Versus The Dabblers

A lot of entrepreneurs wear all the hats in their businesses – sales, marketing, fulfillment, admin, hiring – resulting in a significant amount of action and activity.  If you’re anything like me, that also means that even when you’re not working, you’re still thinking about work.  When that happens, we don’t give our nervous systems time to downregulate and recharge – nor are we able to be fully present during our non-working hours and activities.  We might not be fully aware of it, but this causes significant wear and tear on our neurophysiology and prevents us from operating at the highest level. 

On the flip side of that, some entrepreneurs spend a lot of time procrastinating.  They might be “busy”, but they’re not actually getting much done – they’re dabbling.  They spend more time thinking about the actions they want to take than actually being productive and focused.  Typically, this results in spending a lot of time in anxiety, overwhelm, self-sabotage, and self-doubt.

Regardless of which group you might find yourself in right now (I’ve been in both camps), the challenge is that we don’t give ourselves the appropriate amount of rest to allow for innovation, new ideas, and creativity to emerge.  Because even though entrepreneurship is an opportunity for us to render our skills, knowledge, expertise, and life experience into a set of structures that we call “business”, it also requires that our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions are aligned with whatever it is we’re trying to create.

Ultimately, the entrepreneurial guidance system is an emotional one.  So it’s important to pay attention to how we feel, because our nervous system helps us to deduce what type of season we’re in at any given moment – one of action…or one of rest.

Deciding To Take Space

Most entrepreneurs are aware that rest is important.  After all, we go into business for ourselves because of the time freedom it affords us to do what we want, when we want – including taking time off to rest.  The problem is we either “forget” what rest looks like because it’s been so long since we’ve done it or we convince ourselves that we have so many commitments and obligations that rest simply isn’t an option. 

The paradox is that if we can pay attention to our internal seasons and actually put some planning into the downtime we take, the way our businesses operate will evolve.  It’s part of Parkinson’s Law, which I’ve talked about before.  More efficiency will emerge and other people, ideas, and resources will be activated simply by deciding that we’re going to take some time for ourselves.  A recalibration will occur to accommodate the space we want to take…but only if we decide to take that space.

Freeing Yourself From The Gravitational Pull of Your Business

By turning an idea into a business entity, we’re taking something non-physical and turning it into physical matter with a gravitational pull.  Oftentimes what happens is that we create a business out of the identity we had in the past – the sum of our emotional and psychological habits that make up our consciousness.  It’s built out of our previous belief systems and, now that it’s become physical, creates this sort of gravitational pull that continues to pull us back into both the empowered and the limiting beliefs we previously held.  This can make it feel like we’re orbiting around our business, as though we’re a satellite stuck in the pull of the thing (business) we created.

Because of this, we have to disassociate ourselves psychologically and the way we think about the business, disassociate ourselves emotionally in terms of how we feel about the business, and disassociate ourselves physically in terms of our proximity to the business.  Why?  So that we can check back in with ourselves in terms of who we’ve become since we started this business.  We need an opportunity to recalibrate our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions with who we are now and who we’ve evolved into so that we can reflect that back into the physical matter of the business.

This is the real conversation about business that nobody talks about.  In order to get to the root cause of business success, we have to take a look at the energetic drivers that are responsible for organizing what we see in the physical world.  This is why I believe that entrepreneurship is a spiritual game and we need to understand the metaphysics and root cause behind everything we’re creating. 

Ultimately, the challenges we all face in our business today, in the present moment, are a result of the dissonance that’s been created as we’ve evolved as energetic, spiritual beings.  There’s a gap between who we were in the past when we started our business and who we are today.  So for us to achieve the levels of growth, success, and flow that we want in our business, we have to take back control of the way we’re operating the business itself through our current habits of thought, emotion, and energy.

When To Step Away

As far as I’m concerned, the solution is simple.  We need to step away from the business.  What I mean by that is that we need to take a step back, check in with ourselves, take inventory of who we’ve become, and then go back into the business with a newfound understanding of where that dissonance has occurred.  We have to do this with an understanding that the business will inevitably reorganize itself if we take this space for ourselves.  Nothing is going to burn to the ground.  Things will be okay.  The real crisis only occurs if we continue to entangle a business that hasn’t fully caught up to the higher level of frequency that we’re creating internally.

So how exactly do we take this space?  Well, a big reset in the form of taking a few days or a week off can help.  But ideally, this should be an everyday practice, where we take the time to separate ourselves from our business and create the space for new ideas to emerge.  Because if you pay attention to your thoughts, you’ll realize that they come from nothing.  But as they evolve, thoughts become emotional feelings, then actions, and then results – which are things.

For us to access the ideas that we need to support our business into the alignment and frequency of who we’ve become, we need to create that space for thoughts to occur and evolve.  This can be anything but working in or on your business.  It might be taking a walk in nature, working out, going to a coffee shop, connecting with friends, meditating, reading, or playing with your kids.  There’s no “right” way to create space.

The “Don’t Work On Your Business” Business Plan

Ultimately, this is a “feeling-based” decision.  You need to recognize when you’re in a season of too much busyness and stress and decide that you’re no longer going to respond to your business as if it owns you.  Be forewarned that there will be a transition period where it’s uncomfortable.  Stuff’s going to show up that feels like it owns you and it’s okay for you to do those actions, but do it from a different emotional place.  Do it from a place of gratitude, excitement, and acceptance that your business is going through an evolutionary “catch-up” period to match your current level of vibration.  Don’t do it from a place of thinking “I have to hustle and grind…or else”.

I understand that this can feel paradoxical.  It can seem counterintuitive that to grow your business, you should take more time to go for a walk in nature or go dancing with your spouse.  But it’s the truth and it works.  I tell my private coaching clients all the time: “Your business plan is to stop spending so much time on your business, start doing the things you enjoy doing, and remain fully present in those moments.”  Why?  Because for your business to reach its next level of growth, you need to operate your business as the truest expression of the current version of you.

Escaping The Paralysis of Inaction

If you’re the type of person who can recognize that you might already be in a season of resting too much, to the extent that you’re not using your time efficiently, taking enough aligned action, or spending more time thinking about what you should be doing than actually doing it – the prescription I’d give you is a little bit different.  Chances are that your business and life are offering you the opportunity to work for the fear and resistance that are currently bringing up those feelings.

You should still be aware that these are old programs and limiting beliefs coming up for you.  Maybe it’s that you’re not going to do things the right way, so you struggle to do them at all.  Or you believe that things aren’t going to work out, so why bother doing them?  These beliefs cause us to get into a debilitating loop of procrastination, overwhelm, and self-sabotage.

The way out of this season is to first address those beliefs.  You might need to go through our Decision Matrix exercise to replace your limiting belief with a more empowered one that motivates you to take action.  In most cases, the way to break through the resistance of inaction is to simply take action – to do the thing you’ve been avoiding doing.  

Every time we do this, we start to prune the neural networks and increase the capacity of our built-in willpower mechanism.  Whether it’s writing the email, doing the presentation, making the sales call, or any other thing we’ve been avoiding, when we can do it once it becomes easier to do the next time…and the next time.  In this season, it’s not so much about taking more space to rest and recharge, it’s about doing the things we know we need to do to produce the results we want.

Striking The Balance Between Action & Rest

So how do we find the balance between action and rest?  Simply put, it’s an emotional awareness.  If you’re currently in a place of running your business where you’re taking a lot of action, but you’re stressed and overwhelmed – you need space and rest.  There’s a misalignment between you and your business and by stepping away, you can reorganize yourself and come back with a higher frequency, more enthusiasm, and creativity.

If right now, you’re resting too much, but you’re doing so from a place of resistance and fear, the prescription is to do the things you’re avoiding doing.  Work through your beliefs and develop a regimen of acting despite the discomfort.  Do the thing, knowing that each time you do it you’re going to get better at it and reinforce new beliefs in the process.