How To Take A Clean Rest Week Leave a comment
Clean Rest Weeks will make it way easier to follow through on what needs to be done in your business. So in this episode, I’m sharing what a Clean Rest Week is, why you want to take one (even if you feel behind) and how to do it without being all-or-nothing about it. I also share when you want to do it and where to do it too.
If you’ve been limping along in your business, tune into this episode to learn an incredibly simple tool that will help you get more done in less time without burning out.
If you’re a perfectionist building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.
I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.
Sam Laura Brown
Welcome to today’s episode. Today what I want to talk about is how to take a clean rest week. So I’m going to be sharing what a clean rest week is, why you want to take one, even if you have a bit of a contentious relationship with rest and you feel like your preference is that I would rather rest once everything is done.
If that is you, this episode is going to be really important. How to take a clean rest week, when to take a clean rest week and where to take a clean rest week. So I had a clean rest week last week and this is something that I’ve been doing for a long time and I was getting a lot of questions about it inside Perfectionist Getting Shit Done.
So I said I’ll do a whole episode for you on it and I’m going to share it here on the podcast so that you can learn what this practice is and why it’s going to be so helpful for you because it’s such a counterintuitive thing, especially for Perfectionists where like, I’m so behind already, why would I take time off if I’m already behind? I literally cannot afford it plus I like working, I like being productive, why would I want to rest? Or if you are the person who’s like, I really want to rest but literally I just I don’t even think if I planned that week off, I’d follow through with it, like there’d just be something that would come up, I’d just be working anyway so what’s the point? So I’m going to be talking to all of that throughout this episode as well. So to start with, I’m just going to assume that you listening to this aren’t familiar at all with my concept of clean rest and if you already are, this is just going to be a refresher but it’s really important to understand what I mean when I say clean rest, otherwise this whole concept of a clean rest week is going to be a bit hard to understand. So clean rest is what I call it when you are resting without guilt, it is a skill.
So when you first take clean rest away from your business, so it’s particularly this is for entrepreneurs, in your clean rest time you can be doing parenting as I often am in my clean rest time, I have four little ones, you could be working at your day job, you could be doing a bunch of other things in your clean rest time but you are not working on your business, it’s time that you have said this is not business time so that you can mentally switch off and have those boundaries and parameters around it instead of just thinking to yourself, I should be working like if my eyes are open, I should be working on my business and then what happens if you think that way, I know this from experience and from coaching so many perfectionists on this is that you resent anything that takes time away from your business, so you resent seeing your family, seeing your kids, going to family events, you resent seeing your friends, you resent having to do anything to take care of yourself, like I remember really clearly that before I was really doing this.
I would do meal prep on a Sunday and I would prep my lunches for the week to take to work and I resented that because that was time I could have been working on my business, once I switched to having that time be clean rest time, it was guilt free, I wasn’t going to be working on my business anyway so I may as well do something that would take care of myself and it just even without me actually changing anything like if you looked at me from the outside, it would have looked the same but my internal experience was so different because of how I had categorized that time in my mind, so if you are constantly feeling resentful or bitter about going to your day job and that’s time you could be working on your business, like if everything feels like if you’re not working on your business, you should be and you hate anything that’s taking time away from it, this is going to be so helpful because if you think about it, if you are constantly resenting everything in your life and when it gets to business time, like your brain is going to be so fatigued from all of that resentment and you constantly in this thought pattern, this perfectionist thought pattern of I’m behind, I’m behind, I’m behind, I should be working, I’m behind, I should be working that you’re not going to make the best decisions you could be making during your business time anyway.
So I’ll talk more about that in this episode too but clean rest, so it is a skill, so when you first start clean rest, often people will say that they felt guilty while they were resting, they felt like they should be productive and to that I say it’s such a perfectionist thing, I should be good at it as soon as I start doing it, this is a skill, learning how to mentally switch off and to create safety in not being productive, like if you currently get all of your emotional safety, meaning like if you when you’re being productive, if you that’s what helps you feel like I am lovable, I am worthy, I am deserving, people want to hang out with me, like if currently you get all of your emotional safety from being productive, it will be a little bit of a process to feel emotionally safe in rest and if that is you, that is even more reason to do this, not a reason not to do it because and I’ll talk about it more in this episode but because if that is how you were thinking then ultimately in your business, you are going to be making business decisions from a place of trying to prove, trying to prove that you’re smart, that you have what it takes, just trying to prove even if it’s to yourself, when we’re making decisions from this trying to prove place, we make often bad business decisions because we’re only thinking about us, we’re not really actually thinking about the needs of the business, we’re thinking about our needs more than the business’s needs, we think about our need for being loved more than the business’s needs, so a clean rest week is a week of time that you are deciding this isn’t time for my business.
So again you could be parenting, working at your job, anything else like that during that time, it’s not like you have to be lounging by a pool on vacation for it to be a clean rest week, it’s really about what’s going to be happening mentally in your brain during this time, so I had a clean rest week last week and I’m going to share as well like specifically what I did during that week and also just want to mention here that my most recent ones like in the last six months when I’ve had a clean rest week it has not gone to plan, my kids have been homesick from daycare during my clean rest week and so I have three days where the kids are out of the house and typically they’re my work days and during those days I was parenting and I didn’t get to do the things that I had wanted to do but it was still worthwhile, so even if you’re like the kids will probably be sick or something will come up, it’s still worthwhile for the reasons I’m about to share, so with clean rest how it started and then I’ll get on to why to do a clean rest week and also if a week feels like too much what to do, so when I was a university student.
So in uni I did a law degree, a finance degree and a diploma of French and I had the mentality that I should be studying 24 7 like if I’m not studying I felt guilty even if I had decided not to study because I went to a party or went out to something I felt guilty, I should be studying, I’m behind in my studies, I should be studying and so I noticed that when I was operating that way I didn’t actually study that much like I was also doing a lot of procrastination like when I did have time to sit down at my desk it wasn’t like I was studiously working, I would be scrolling, I would be procrastinating, I would be perfecting like the formatting of my law notes instead of actually doing a practice exam for example.
So I noticed that me being in this mentality of I should be studying 24 7 didn’t actually help me study well and so what I experimented with it was over a summer, so I’m in Brisbane, I live about an hour away from the beach a little bit over an hour away from a really nice beach, I love being by the water, I am a Pisces but I love being by the water and I wanted to go to the beach every weekend even if it was just for an hour and even if I didn’t get in the water like I just wanted to be at the beach and to have that be a regular thing and even if I was by myself so sometimes I went with a friend sometimes I went by myself and I just literally sat on the beach for an hour and read a book and then drove home and I just was like well even if I’m driving that’s I can listen to a podcast like I can enjoy the drive so what I did was I started saying okay I’m not going to do any study on the weekend and that’s when I’m going to the beach and I’m going to just study during the week.
And at the time I would have documented this on my blog because I’d started my business at that point so I started doing that and because it was off the table now to work on the weekends I actually had so much more reason to be productive during the week because what I was doing was I was saying well if I don’t get it done today this morning I can do it tonight and if I don’t get it done tonight I can do it tomorrow morning if I don’t get it done tomorrow morning I can do it tomorrow night if I don’t get it done tomorrow night I can do it the next morning so it’s like constantly if you’re working all the time and you don’t actually have any clear parameters between when it’s work time and when it’s not then it really enables procrastination because you can just constantly say oh I don’t have to do it now but I have time soon to do it but then you don’t do it soon and so I was just constantly kicking the can a little bit down the road but when I didn’t have weekends that I could do study if I didn’t get things done by Friday I knew I’d have to wait the whole weekend to be able to do it again and that felt like well I can’t wait until next week even though literally previously I would have for sure waited that long anyway because I was just constantly procrastinating and then doing things at the last minute and burning out like that’s how I operated as a uni student I did really well in terms of grades.
I didn’t retain much because I was just like cramming information into my brain but that cycle just didn’t work for business so many important things in business don’t have a deadline so if your only strategy for getting shit done is is meeting the deadline you’re gonna have such a hard time in business because literally like if you want to say start a YouTube channel there is no deadline for doing that and if you don’t have self-trust even just deciding on a date you’ll just shift the date so you need to know how to actually follow through that’s why I teach follow through specifically to perfectionist entrepreneurs so having that that was my first clean rest experiment and I got so much more productive I actually did study during the week and then I rested my brain on the weekend I had more time for my personal life without resentment which meant I went into the following week more recharged and there was no downside to it I felt better I did better and I was not constantly beating myself up feeling behind feeling guilty all of that it was a practice I just need to say because I’m talking to perfectionist we want to go into like I’m going to be good at this from day one you’re probably not but it is still worth learning we want to develop skills skills required developing which means you’re going to suck a bit just keep going so why do we want to take a clean rest week when we could just keep plodding along so that’s reason number one if you don’t have clean rest weeks or clean rest so when you’re power planning you put clean rest in your calendar throughout the week as well but you want to have a clean rest week why because you will be plodding along so if you think about if you’re say on the treadmill and you have two options you can either sprint for a minute and rest for two minutes.
Or you can just for that three minutes you can just go at a like slower place pace that you can maintain for a long time so that between those two options right now there’s not really much to compare with but if we look at okay let’s say you’re going to be working out for an hour would you rather and this don’t get too caught up on the running analogy if you’re like I hate running I hate sprinting but if you’re sprinting for a minute you know all I have to do is sprint for this minute then I’ve got two minutes of rest coming so I can catch my breath like basically most of that time I’m not going to be sprinting I’m going to be resting but I’m going to get a lot of running done in that time I’m going to be working on my fitness in that time like I’m going to be really doing meaningful work on my fitness during the time I’m sprinting and I get lots of rest and recovery so that when it comes time again I can sprint without that rest period you’re not going to be able to sprint for the whole period you need to have and we understand this fundamentally when it comes to our body you need to have rest like athletes a very important part of their training is resting it’s the same thing in business but because we can physically it’s like less intense physically especially if you have a job or business like me where I’m just sitting at my desk I can sit at my desk for 16 hours a day if I wanted to physically or I have a standing desk I could stand at my desk for that amount of time so it doesn’t invite rest as much as physical activity does because your body is literally and your brain is screaming at you like you need to take a break so and often your brain might be screaming at you already you need to take a break and you’re just ignoring it which doesn’t help self-trust.
So if you are able to sprint and be productive and then intentionally rest and sprint and be productive and then intentionally rest and sprint and be productive and intentionally rest you will be building your business you will be making meaningful progress if you are just plodding along because you know there’s no break coming I might even even if I just keep plodding along I just have to keep plodding along forever there’s not even a break at the end of the workout like I’m just going to be on this treadmill forever you will plod you will procrastinate you will overthink you will do all those things to try and buy yourself rest.
We procrastinate as a way to get rest if we’re not actually intentionally giving ourselves rest we will literally do things like scrolling not just because the algorithm is designed to keep you scrolling but because you’re not giving yourself rest so your brain is like I’ve got to get it myself and you will just like the pace at which you will work will be a lot slower because you know there’s no break coming you can’t afford to sprint you can’t afford to be truly productive if there is no rest coming.
Rest is the fuel so this is the other thing too that I say that rest isn’t the reward at the end for doing a good job or for getting things done rest is the fuel so it’s not that oh I had a clean rest week because I earned it from all the work I did in the previous block no I had a clean rest week to fuel me up for the things that I was doing after the clean rest week so you want to start thinking about it that way like it’s the fuel it’s not the reward it’s not the thing you get at the end for being good and doing a good job so having a clean rest week will help you get out of this plodding along mentality where you’re always kind of working but kind of not working it will help you recharge your brain your brain gets tired and if you are constantly working it doesn’t actually have a chance to recharge.
So again you’ll be procrastinating and overthinking and doing things like that so that you don’t have to be working so intensely so that your brain can have a break having a clean rest week gets you out of the weeds of your business like it gets you out of the day-to-day so for example for the clean rest week I just had I’ve been working on my wardrobe and having clothes I love that fit me and all of that kind of thing so I went shopping a couple of times while the kids were at daycare which was so lovely and I love going by myself so I just did that I worked on the twins big boy room that we’re doing see that I went to bunnies and I did that and also I did quite a bit of work on our personal finances as well so during that time I didn’t try not to think about business.
It wasn’t like I was like I have to not think about business but it allowed me to zoom out and just feel like out of the day today I had a lot of insights during that week about my business that I wouldn’t have had and didn’t have when I was just in the day-to-day of my business and in the week so I had time to zoom out just by switching off it gave me perspective that I it is really challenging to get when you’re just in the day-to-day constantly and you’re always just looking at where I need to get done today what I need to get done today I actually what I was thinking about during my clean rest week was like okay what’s my bigger goal that I have for this year and what’s the painfully simple way to get there and what’s in the way of that mentally like what thoughts are stopping me from doing that and then solve like solving unconsciously starting to for them so I knew exactly as well what to return to.
When I got back to work. I felt, I just felt, also I say, you know, the saying, not my saying, absence makes the heart grow fonder. It is great to miss your business a little bit and to be excited to get back to work.
Putting time, this is another reason why, putting time and energy into your personal life and relationships, this is really important. I also have another note, it makes your business feel less precious and then therefore you can keep things simpler, have more courage, just get shit done more easily. So if your business is your whole personality, it obviously then feels very personal and like a reflection of your own worth and how you’re doing in life, which will make every decision feel heavier.
It will make every no feel more painful, every refund request, every time you post and you don’t get as many likes as you want to get, all of that feels so much harder when business is the only real thing that you’re up to and you’re just kind of like treading water in the rest of your life. Having a clean rest week allows you to actually put time and care into your personal life and your relationships, which again, this is part of like getting out of the weeds and zooming out, but when you have a more developed personal life, business doesn’t feel like such a big deal. It doesn’t feel that deep and that will free you up.
If you’re a perfectionist, anything we feel precious about, our perfectionism handbrake is going to come on. So having stuff outside of your business, like having a life outside of your business, because this is the thing too, if you’re like, but literally I only work a few hours a week on my business because I have a job and I have other hobbies and things like that. But if mentally you’re always thinking about your business and how behind you are and how you wish you could be successful, like if that’s the soundtrack in your brain, this is what we’re talking about here.
What’s going on in your brain, not just like what are you physically doing, because all of this is so relevant to someone who’s literally just working a few hours a week on their business because you’re in a full-time job and you have a family and you have other hobbies and fitness and things like that. It’s about what is going on up here in your brain. What is the story you are telling yourself as you are going about your day? And even if you are spending time with loved ones, but if in your head you are in your business, then business will feel super precious and you’ll be very perfectionistic about it, which makes it really hard to grow up because perfectionism reduces action and action is a requirement for business to grow.
Practicing rest, a clean rest week helps you practice clean rest. You got to get your practice in. Also, if you want to rest when you’re successful, if you’re like, well, I love like when I’m successful in my business, I’d love to be able to have like two weeks off and take all my family on a vacation, or I’d love to just sit around the house for a week and like Bill Gates style, just read a bunch of books and go to a haven or whatever.
If you don’t practice now, you are not going to be able to do that when you get to success because you will be in the thought pattern that, oh, I’m successful because I didn’t rest. And also you’re probably still thinking I’m behind. I should be further along because you’ll have bigger goals than you do now.
So even though from your vantage point today, that’s success to you now, when you’re there, you’ll be like, oh, when I’m at this point, then I can finally rest. So how you get there is how you will be there. So if you want rest to be part of your life, when you’re successful, you need to practice resting now.
And also you’re probably already successful in a lot of ways, but even if you don’t believe that’s true whatsoever, you need to practice resting now. It’s like how Tony Robbins talks about if you want to be able to donate money and be philanthropic, I believe is the word, when you are wealthy, then don’t just wait until you’re wealthy to do that. Start donating a percentage of your money now to a cause that you believe in so that you have the habit and the identity and the ability.
I think he says if you can’t let go of $1 out of 10, what makes you think you’d let go of $100,000 out of a million? It’s just developing that up. So the same thing with the clean rest, you need to practice it if you want to be able to do it. You can also with a clean rest week, just see what breaks when you’re not there, see what systems are missing because there might be a lot of things that you have in your head or that you didn’t realize you were doing that actually do need to get done and you’ve just been doing it in a very inefficient like, oh yeah, this just popped up, I’ll do it.
So I have found, especially when I had time off after having each of my kids, that having time away allowed me to really put systems in place that wouldn’t have, that were needed but wouldn’t have been discovered by me as needed until I actually took that time. I was like, oh I’m doing this in such an ineffective way and that is really important for your business. So this will help you clean up your business and run a smoother, leaner, cleaner business and I’ve already mentioned about making the business less precious and yeah, you can work harder when you get back after the clean rest week.
Then if you just plot it along, so I know for me last week, if I just plotted along, it’s so easy to just be like, well it doesn’t matter if I get it done this week or next, like to just be in that mentality even though I’m not in that mentality nearly as much as I used to be but instead I was like, so the week before my clean rest week, I was so intentional wrapping things up, we’ll talk about that in a second, in the how of a clean rest week. I had my week off, for me it was nearly two weeks because I had from the Friday off to the Monday week after that and then I just got to work. So even though Jack and James were sick and I was home with them when they needed time to just chill and watch some TV, that I got really effective work done.
I did the absolute needle mover for my business instead of previously be like, okay I’m just going to do like a little bit of this and check in on this and whatever but what I had done is set myself up and I’ll talk about this in a second, set myself up to just get straight back into things and I was able to do that even while having Jack and James, mom, more blueberries please, mom, like constantly at me, I got really effective work done that is really meaningful for the business and is just more so, way more meaningful than if I just put it along and just be like, oh well I’ll just tinker away at this and they’re sick and I’m like all that instead of like actually I only need a couple of hours, I’m going to be really intentional with this time. I could do that because and I could like access higher quality thoughts because my brain was rested. So how do you do a clean rest week? So I want to say this, it’s not an all or nothing thing.
So if you’re like well I’m the only person in my business and I have client deliverables and like I just need, I need to be there. I don’t want you to say I can’t do a clean rest week. What I want you to do is just do the bare bones.
So typically this will just involve client delivery and client support or like your customer support inbox for example. It depends on the kind of business you have but being able to do instead of I have to do everything or nothing of like okay what’s, what’s the bare bones of what I’m going to do. So for me for example currently I’m doing all of the PGSD coaching calls so I still did the PGSE coaching call during the week and I was still replying to ask a coach in PGSD and I had set times that I did that and also for me client delivery and like PGSE calls is the easiest, funnest thing that I do in my business.
But that aside I just was very clear here’s the work I am going to do and I’m not going to do anything else and I’ll talk about mentally wrapping up. It’s so important to talk about. There might be things you need to prepare in advance like if you had marketing that would go out that week you might need to get it done the week before.
So really it would just be anything typically client or customer delivery related but don’t be all or nothing about it. You can have a clean rest week. Decide ahead of time when it will be.
If you want to say next week I’m going to have a clean rest week great I’m not opposed to that but what I find to be the most powerful the most optimal but again sufficient to just say next week or like as of today I’m having a clean rest week but to decide it ahead of time because that’s when you get the full benefits which is for example I already had that clean rest week mapped out months in advance and I had no plans during that week like I wasn’t going on vacation or anything else like my plan was just to not be working during that week.
And so we had organized like not scheduling client calls with my one-on-ones I didn’t do any one-on-one calls during that week we’d already scheduled like hey I’m having a clean rest week that week we’re going to just skip that week and have a call the week after so it was easy to organize from that perspective I had less that I needed to deliver on because I already didn’t have commitments because I knew that week off was coming up also in the lead up to that I knew that a clean rest week was coming and it’s kind of like if you think about formula one and how they have the pit stops like if you know a pit stop is coming or the treadmill analogy like if you know a rest is coming and if you know not just one rest but if you know multiple rests are coming to you throughout the year I have my clean rest weeks mapped out throughout the whole year I have quite a lot of them in quarter three and quarter four of this year.
Then it really just adds a sense of urgency and positive pressure during your other weeks so I was talking about this with a one-on-one client yesterday she’s saying well if I have less time then I feel more pressure because then I have to make sure I’m doing the perfect thing but actually when you have more time it’s harder to do things because there is no sense of urgency and like it’s easier to just be so much lazier in your thinking so I have mapped out all of my clean rest weeks all the weekly workshops that I’m teaching all the PGSD launches that I’m doing for the year you don’t have to do all of that like I am an established business at this point I know what my plan is for the year but I have that so I’m like oh I know how many working days I have this year and the cost of procrastination feels a lot higher than if I had all the time to be working and then the cost of procrastination feels a lot lower so if you decide ahead of time it really just creates a positive pressure around your time and power planning really helps you to handle the positive pressure like create and handle positive pressure and to know your needle movers and we’ve is like to really know that what you’re working on is going to be the best use of your time also going to plug the power planning workshop that’s free that I’m teaching on it’s happening next week actually when you listen to this it will be happening very soon.
So I will just share the link to go to samlorebrown.com slash workshop if you go there you can sign up for the workshop to learn all about power planning how to get started really excited to be teaching that because I get so many questions about how to get started with power planning so if you want to be able to do this like power plan is going to be super supportive.
So if you decide ahead of time when you’re getting your clean rest you will just be able to have positive time pressure and know the cost of procrastination in a way that you currently aren’t present to right now and you’ll be able to get your needle movers done I’ll talk about that in the workshop too you’ll be able to get your needle movers done so that you don’t need to have lots of time what you do with your time matters.
So much more than how much you have you can be working a job parenting and doing other things during your clean rest week and what you want to do is mentally wrap up the week so I’ll just mention a couple things my pgs equals is starting in five minutes so I’m going to wrap this episode up within five minutes so mentally wrapping up the week if you want to hear my full process for this then you want to go to the episode there’s two episodes that are super helpful number one I don’t have the episode number at top of hand but you can just top of hand top of mind but you can go to my podcast and just search the title and it should pop up the first episode is creating a feeling of completeness even when everything isn’t done and the second episode is the art of finishing your day exactly on time aka landing the plane so in those two episodes I go a bit more into my specific process for wrapping up a week so what I did because everything wasn’t done on my last work day before the clean rest week.
Everything wasn’t done I hadn’t recorded a podcast episode there was just a bunch of stuff that hadn’t gotten done and also we decided to put an offer on an investment property and so I had chosen that afternoon to spend I think it was like three hours in total going to look at this property doing all the offer forms and all of that instead of the work stuff I had planned and I made that decision intentionally I just did my power planning accordingly.
So I wasn’t going to be able to do everything that I had wanted to do before it and so what I did was a process of making decisions so I decided I’m not going to do a podcast next week it’s okay to not do a week I do it almost every week it’s okay to miss a week there were other things I decided about like email marketing so I made a bunch of decisions and so that I could wrap up the week.
So this will be a requirement you won’t just magically get to a point where everything’s done and then it’ll be obvious to rest you will need to have the skill set too of mentally wrapping up and creating a feeling of completeness even when everything isn’t done you have a business everything will never be done so you literally need that skill regardless of if you’re having a clean rest week or not if you want to have any mental bandwidth for anything else other than business you will need to mentally wrap things up also if you want to be better at business you will need to have that skill even during your work time a bit how to not constantly have this really heavy mental load.
So what I did this is something I’m going to mention because it’s new to me and the idea just popped in my head I was mentally wrapping up the week which was to record a podcast episode for myself so I recorded a 15-minute episode for myself for me to listen to when I got back to remember what I was up to what I was thinking about what I was wanting to work on and that also allowed me to rest really cleanly because I knew like when I get back I’m just going to listen to an update from me right at the end of that week being like hey future Sam here’s what you were thinking about here’s what the plan is to do.
So I listened to that on Tuesday morning I listened to that and I was able to just get going so that was like a great thing that I did that I’d never done before but go and listen to this episode so objections to this I can’t afford it I’m too behind as it is I just want to mention if you’re too behind as it is that means your current approach isn’t working so try the rest see what it might be like when your brain has more energy and isn’t so tired but also behind is a thought pattern that doesn’t relate to actually how much you’ve gotten done or not which is why you always feel behind no matter how much you do.
You might have a few glorious minutes of feeling on top of things but then you remember something else you feel behind again so in PGSE we literally do coaching on this there’s lessons on this because being behind feeling behind is a perfectionist thought pattern it isn’t a circumstance or a fact so you actually need to solve that directly not trying to solve it by never taking time off and if you believe you wouldn’t follow through anyway, part of this is trusting that future you might be more skilled and have a better mindset than you do today.
So by the time the clean rest week comes you will be able to take that clean rest week but even if you don’t follow through on it just actually the act of planning it out so you might have for example the first time you do this you plan out a clean rest week and it doesn’t actually happen then you get to study and we talk about this a lot in PGSE then you get to study okay what went on what for me were the specific thought patterns or circumstances that stopped that clean rest week from happening and then you solve that so that the next time you do it you can actually follow through with it so instead of I wouldn’t follow through on it anyway.
So and I can never learn that we actually by you attempting it you get to learn it so when to do it ideally once per quarter start with a clean rest weekend if you feel like a clean rest week just feels like too much and if you work weekends and you can either do it at home or you can be on vacation during a clean rest week I recommend at least once once a year having a clean rest week where you aren’t also on vacation I find them to be the most restorative especially with four kids under five having a vacation feels a lot harder mentally than a work week.
So having a clean rest week at home for me is really like I get different kinds of recharging for both and both are valuable but there is so much valuable value in having a clean rest week where you don’t have a specific plans with anyone else or to go anywhere you can just like let yourself be so with that said I’m going to go to my pgsd coaching call I hope this was really helpful and I will talk to you in the next episode.
Outro
If you want to learn the basics of power planning, then I invite you to sign up for the video series that I’ve put together for you on how to plan properly as a perfectionist. By the end of this series, you’ll be in a position to start using power planning to get your perfectionist mindset on your side and get out of your own way. So to sign up, you can go to samlaurabrown.com/planningseries. The link will be available for you in the show notes as well.
