Refresh Your Spirit with a Staycation
Is it Time to Hang a ‘GONE FISHIN’ Sign on Your Door?
A LOT OF MY READERS can’t afford a traditional vacation these days, either for financial reasons or because the nature of their home business makes getting away from home for any length of time difficult or even impossible.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money, or even ANY money, when you give yourself a “staycation” from work. This word, which became very popular in 2008, is simply a coined word for a vacation taken at home. And this kind of break can be beneficial at any time of the year, even it’s only for a couple of days. During those years when my husband and I were so involved in our mail order and publishing business that even a week’s vacation was almost impossible, we would often take four or five days off over a weekend, totally ignoring business for that period of time. We always shipped orders so fast anyway that our customers never knew the mail had sat unopened for a few days.
On those relaxing days, we might take a day trip somewhere, check out a couple of new restaurants, or order in Chinese or ribs so I didn’t have to cook. If we elected to stay at home, we would work on a personal project in the same room, just to be together. (Note that working together at home with your loved one is not the same things as “being together.”) We might bring our scrapbooks up to date, do a jigsaw puzzle, or get involved in some other project we seldom had time for. Because music was so essential to both our lives, we always had great music playing in the background. After only a few days like that, we always felt ready to take on the world again and deal with the stress of our deadline-oriented business.
Brabec’s Rules for a Beneficial Staycation
For a staycation to work for you, you have to stop doing what you normally do every day. You must break the pattern that’s causing you stress or worry. For many of you, that means you need to totally disconnect from the Internet for awhile. Forget about reading your email, posting on Twitter, communicating with the world on Facebook or other social networking sites, and stay off your blog if you have one. Contrary to what some experts say, you do NOT have to make a blog post every day. Do we really think that all anyone else has to do is read our blog posts? That we’ll even be missed if we’re not there for awhile?
You may protest by saying you just love to be constantly online checking for orders, doing your email, posting or reading tweets on Twitter, communicating with friends on Facebook and other social networking sites, or making posts to your blog. You may think you’re connecting with the world by doing this sort of thing, but in truth, you are actually distancing yourself from both your family and the real world – the one God created for our pleasure and enjoyment. Being an electronic junkie means you probably never have time to just ponder nature, which can be a great stress reliever and emotional healer.
As Lupe, one of my regular readers puts it, “Sometimes we all need a ‘Gone Fishin’ sign on our door.” In a creative funk because of disturbing economic news and changes, stressors at work, and dealing with everyone’s life schedules, Lupe told me how she was spending this summer’s staycation.
“I’ve planned several one-day trips in different directions. I love quiet woods, lakes, rivers and isolation to disconnect from life’s madness and reconnect with who I am. During this time I’m going to write, study Navajo language CDs, embroider, weave, read books that lift my spirit and feed my entrepreneurial soul. I’ll study for ministry, improve my health with new habits, and generally invest in myself for a change. I have three weeks of vacation and each week I will have a main theme of activities. Ultimately, I know I will come out refreshed, refilled, and ready for the direction my life has been taking since last fall.”
What a wonderful plan! In my books, I’ve often written about how most home business owners rarely take vacations, and how they often burn out as a result. I know from decades of self-employment that it is often virtually impossible to stop and take a vacation for more than a few days because of the very nature of a business or the fact that we’ve locked ourselves into a lifestyle of business deadlines and appointments. Sometimes, though, we just don’t want to admit that we’re workaholics. That’s what I am, and always have been, and I can’t count the number of times this has caused me to burn out through the years. That’s where I once again found myself this spring–at that place where I knew I needed to pull back, reassess my situation, and do something else for awhile.
Suggestions for Dealing With Burnout
In my personal post this month, I talk about the wonderful and very long staycation I’ve allowed myself this spring and summer. My idea of getting away from it all isn’t likely to be yours, but it illustrates how I broke the monotony of my business this year and refreshed my soul. Each of us knows exactly what our spirit yearns for; the challenge is actually doing something about that yearning.
I’ll bet some of you are at burnout stage now and don’t even realize how much being glued to the Internet may be contributing to the problem. Trust me when I say that the world will keep if you just “disconnect” from the Internet and all your other techie time killers for awhile.
If you’re an Amazon Marketplace or eBay seller, do what you need to do to temporarily close your listings, or make checking for sales the only computer-oriented thing you do that day, and then get offline.
Set up an automatic reply for incoming emails, change your voice mail message advising business prospects that you’ll contact them when you return from vacation, and stop posting to all your social networking sites. If you have a following of customers, clients, or readers, they will still be there when you get back. If you have a blog, you can always write several posts and schedule them to publish over a two-week period of time so no one will know you’re even gone.
Share Your Staycation Ideas
What’s your idea of a great and inexpensive or no-cost vacation at home? How do you refresh your spirit when you’re suffering from burnout? I hope you’ll share your comments below. Meanwhile, consider these inspirational quotes from Ralph Marston, publisher of The Daily Motivator.
“When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing – just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park?”
“Rest when you’re weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind, your spirit. Then get back to work.”
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