5. How to Take Time Off Without Feeling Stressed and Anxious
When you think about taking time off of work, how do you feel? Do you spin in drama about all the things that could go wrong while you’re gone? Do you avoid taking time off at all because of your worries?
Having anxiety around work is common for high-achievers, but this year especially, taking your paid time off can feel fraught and you might even think it’s not worth it. But shifting how you frame your brain’s concerns and questions can be game-changing, not only in the realm of work but in all areas of your life, and this is what I’m inviting you to do this week.
Listen in today as I highlight just how beneficial taking your paid time off can be for you and your wider team and company. So many of you have a complicated relationship with taking a break, and I want to show you some better ways to start thinking about it so you can actually truly relax and enjoy it when you do.
To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to be giving away 3 deep-dive strategy sessions with yours truly! These are 90-minute sessions where we come up with a plan to get you where you want to go.
To enter, leave a rating and review of the show on Apple Podcasts. You can find all the details on entering the giveaway here. I can’t wait to announce the winners!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why many people have a complicated relationship with taking time off.
The one thought that is underneath all of your worry about taking time off.
Why you might be focusing on the possibility of things going badly if you take time off.
How to spend your paid time off wisely and thoughtfully while enjoying it.
Questions you can ask yourself to set yourself up for success and relaxation.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to be entered into my giveaway of 3 deep-dive strategy sessions!
Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we’re talking about paid time off and how to take your time off without feeling stressed and anxious the whole time.
You are listening to Love Your Job (Before You Leave It), the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. We are talking about paid time off today and it’s going to be awesome. This is a topic that I love to talk about and I think it’s one that’s often underrepresented in the discussion of work. Probably because it’s time that we’re not at work. But I think it is just as important.
But before I get into that, I just wanted to mention that I just finished the third book in a trilogy I’ve been reading. And I don’t know if this ever happens to y’all but I am so sad because I feel like all of my friends that I was hanging out with have left.
When I read books, especially something like a trilogy where there’s three books and I have a lot of time to spend with the characters, I get attached to them and feel like they’re my friends. And I just finished the last one and I feel so sad and lonely. Even in quarantine, it’s been like I’ve had the comfort of this group of people who are totally fictional characters.
And if y’all are curious, the trilogy is the Winternight trilogy by Katherine Arden. And if you like badass female leads who give no fucks and do what they want, I suggest you check it out. It is set way back in the day, so there’s a lot of stuff that you may be angry about if you identify as a feminist.
But I still think it’s worth reading. We have time maybe for some reading coming up because we have holidays approaching. And maybe you have some time off scheduled. Maybe you don’t. But either way, I want to talk to you today about taking time off because I think that it, like I said, is important and underrepresented.
So it’s almost Thanksgiving here in the United States and I’m not going to get into the problematic origins of the holiday, although you may know about them or want to look into them if you don’t. Suffice it to say that now this holiday may be about gratitude and having a delicious meal with people you love, but the history is anything but warm and fuzzy.
But that’s not actually what I’m going to talk about because the way I want to talk about this is less about a specific holiday and more about how to actually take time off work and give yourself really permission to be off work when you are off work.
And for the purposes of this podcast, I’m also specifically going to be talking about paid time off, although I realize that for some people, taking time off comes with the added concern of losing income. Over the years, I’ve worked many jobs where this was the case and it’s not ideal.
That being said, I do think time off is so valuable, that it’s worth taking it, even when it impacts pay, when we are feasibly able to do so. And then for those of us who do have paid time off, using that time might seem simple at first glance, but I find that a lot of people have kind of a complicated relationship with time off.
The idea is that you pick days you’d like to have off, or the company tells you specific days you have off based on their schedule and maybe the country you’re in, and then you take those days. But as you already know, and as I’ve said, it’s often not simple.
For high-achievers, especially those of us who sometimes feel anxious about work and I think that many people are feeling anxious these days about work, but also especially with everything 2020 has brought us, taking time off can feel a little fraught.
It’s like we always want a day off when we don’t have one, but then when we do have a day off, we’re quietly checking our work email just in case at 10am. I remember this would happen when I worked in corporate. I would wake up on Monday mornings and just stare at my phone and be like, when is the next day I can sleep in?
I meant weekends, but I also meant days off, but then on a day off I’d be like, yes, this is amazing, for like five seconds, and then I’d be like, wait, what do I even do? How do I even do a day off? This was way before coaching obviously.
And then that’s normal, but on top of that, many of us are not going to be able to see our friends, family, and other loved ones we normally spend our holidays with this year due to COVID-19. So I think that is making taking time off feel a little bit different too.
You may even be thinking like, why take time off at all? And for those of you who are not Americans, you may be wondering about the winter holidays, which are a little further off, where just the idea of wanting to take some time off but not being sure if it’s worth is, since you may be in quarantine or otherwise unable to see people you want to see or go to the places you want to go.
And on top of concerns about taking time off during COVID, there are all the other things we wonder about when we’re considering taking time off. When is the right time? What if something bad happens while I’m gone? What if someone is disappointed or stressed because I’m not there to help or handle things that I’d normally handle?
What if there are mountains and mountains of work when I return and it’s super stressful to catch up? What if I’m the only one who can do my particular job and I’m afraid the company will suffer in my absence?
A lot of these questions could be boiled down to one basic worry. This could go badly for me or others in some way. Does that seem too simple? It is, but it also isn’t. When we look at the more specific questions, the nuances seem important. A project you’re working on could hit an unexpected snag. A coworker could be irritated that you’re out of office or feel like now they can’t take time off because you are.
But it’s also true that the way all of these questions and concerns were phrased focuses on the negative, on the possibility of things going badly. And that consistency among them is important for us to notice.
The human brain has a negativity bias, which basically means that it gives more attention to things it perceives as bad or dangerous. And that bias definitely comes into play when it comes to taking time off. As much as we may want to use our PTO and use it wisely, our brains also want to scan for threats.
The brain wants to scan for every single possible thing that could go badly. For some of y’all, this makes total sense, right? I know that you’re like, yeah, that is what my brain does all the time. And I also want you to know that it does this because it wants to keep you alive. It’s not like your brain is just behaving badly. It wants to keep you alive, and so it’s constantly scanning for threats, just in case it can see one and then it can deal with it.
But often when the brain does this, it just keeps you feeling stressed and overwhelmed and like there’s no good time to take PTO and then before you know it, it’s December and you’re trying to figure out how to use all your remaining PTO days, unless you’re one of those lucky few who can roll their days over into the new year.
But even so, is that really lucky or are you just less likely to use your PTO at all because you can just rack it up instead? Here’s what I want you to see about this way of doing things. When we’re afraid that using PTO could go badly, that’s what we experience.
Maybe we don’t use the PTO at all, maybe we interpret every time we do use it through the lens of what went wrong versus the lens of what went well. Either way, we kind of set ourselves up for this self-fulfilling prophecy that PTO isn’t fun and it’s hard to use well.
And that’s no good because what we actually want is to use it. So the brain loves questions and it loves to answer them. And as you discovered from my earlier list, when we let our brains run the show, as we discovered from my earlier list, but also as you probably know as the owner of a brain, when we let our brains run the show, they ask a lot of threat-scanning questions about what could go badly.
Then they obsess over those questions and their many potential answers. Instead, I’m going to invite you to engage your brain’s question loving nature in a new way, a way that will help you find your own best answers when it comes to spending your PTO wisely and thoughtfully and enjoying it while it’s happening.
The way to do this is simple. Ask better questions. Like I said, left to its own devices, your brain will ask threat-scanning questions, and threat-scanning questions have negative assumptions built in. When we ask threat-scanning questions, we find what the brain is looking for: potential threats.
A little bit of threat scanning can be useful, but more than a little bit tends to turn into ruminating. Instead, what we want to ask your brain is questions that have positive assumptions built in. We can call these solution-scanning questions, or we can call them powerful questions, or we can just call them better questions.
Here is an example. Your brain says what if something falls through the cracks while I’m on PTO? And then your brain answers that question by listing all the things that could fall through the cracks and all the terrible consequences that might come to pass if it happened
And if your brain is like most brains, it will catastrophize all the way out to worst-case scenarios that are actually wildly unlikely and then obsess about them as if even if they did happen, as if then you wouldn’t be able to do anything. And when the brain does this, it completely ignores our own capacity to figure things out and to course correct, even if something does go wrong.
A powerful question you could ask here instead could be something like, how can I use PTO and set myself up to relax during it, even if it’s possible something could come up while I’m gone? Or how can I set things up to be successful while I’m gone? And also, can I trust that I can fix it later if something does get missed? Or even how can I trust my team to handle it if something does come up?
These questions focus on setting ourselves up for success and relaxation, and choosing to trust our larger team even if things don’t go perfectly. This is important because we are all humans and things don’t go according to plan sometimes. We can set things up well and yeah, things can still fall through the cracks.
We can leave someone a detailed to-do list of items and then something else may happen that means those things don’t get accomplished, and we can handle that too. I want to be clear though that it’s not about lying to ourselves that everything will definitely be fine. It’s about setting things up to go as well as we can and then trusting our future selves to work with whatever happens and trusting our team to handle whatever arises while we’re gone but also once we get back.
It’s also about framing in the positive. How can we set ourselves up for success and how can we handle what arises? Versus framing in the negative, what if something terrible happens? What if everything is ruined?
So I want to give you another example of a powerful question you can ask about PTO. Why is it beneficial to the company and my teammates for me to use PTO? Now, this question may hurt your brain at first, like you have a job, you create value for the company by doing your job.
You support your teammates by being there and being part of the team and doing work. The idea that you could benefit the team and the whole company by going away and not doing your job for a period of time may seem illogical to you.
But let’s think about it. Companies give employees PTO for a reason, or even for many reasons. Take a moment to imagine what some of those reasons might be. Why would companies choose to do this? Is it possible that they do it because it does benefit them?
Now consider this. How are you a more valuable asset, not less valuable, more valuable asset to the company and to your team when you do take PTO versus when you don’t? You may find that this is an area where your brain is creating a false dichotomy and assuming that PTO only benefits the person taking it, versus benefiting the whole team and the company as well.
You may find that this is an area where your brain was presenting you with a false dichotomy. And if you don’t know what that is, a false dichotomy is a false choice. It’s a false either or, where your brain’s like, either it can be this or it can be that, versus maybe it could be both. Maybe it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
So if your brain is creating a false dichotomy around this idea, your brain might be having the assumption that PTO only benefits the person taking it versus benefiting the whole team and the company as well. Since PTO means you will be out of the office, your brain might think it means that others will suffer.
But like I was saying before, what if this dichotomy, what if this either or is false? What if PTO is actually a yes and situation? I think it is a yes and. Here’s why. Taking time off makes us more productive when we are at work. This is one of those counterintuitive things that seems weird but is actually true.
When we try to push ourselves and when we work too much, we become less productive. Then we need even more time to create results that aren’t as good. But when we don’t overwork ourselves and moreover, when we take time to recharge, via PTO days or even weeks, we supercharge our productivity.
And you do not have to take my word for it. There’s tons of research on how employees taking time off is better for business on the whole. And you can just Google that shit. Check it out and let your mind be blown. Because like I was saying, I think so many of us think PTO is something that they let us do because they can’t stop us or I guess people have to be able to take vacation, but I prefer to think that PTO is something that can help you be a better employee, and there is data to support that.
Now, it’s true, your teammates might miss you while you’re gone. But when we take time out of the office, it also gives our team a chance to try different kinds of work, work on different tasks, and do all kinds of stuff. In order to take PTO, the whole team will have to be clear on what needs to be done and how it happens and documenting and sharing these processes can be deeply beneficial for the whole team and it can create the opportunity for potential improvements and streamlining of workflows.
Here’s another fun benefit of taking PTO. Your brain may actually go to work solving problems, like work problems, even when you’re not at work, even when you’re not thinking about those problems.
We experience this all the time. When we get a good idea while we’re taking a walk or suddenly come up with a solution to a big problem while we’re cleaning out a closet. While we can apply our brains to tasks directly, giving them time away from work tasks can allow them to get some perspective on things we haven’t been able to solve via the direct approach.
Most of us most of the time try to solve problems by going at them directly, and that is definitely one way to solve them. But sometimes we can also make a lot of headway on something we’ve been stuck on by working on something else and by giving our brain a break from the direct approach.
Here’s one final thing I want to leave you with. Paid time off is a benefit your work provides to you, just like it provides you with a paycheck. Both PTO and paychecks among other things are part of your compensation package. But many people struggle much more with taking their paid time off than they do with the pile of cash that gets direct deposited into their bank account.
We certainly don’t try to return part of our pay at the end of the year, and yet we may leave some of our PTO unused, which is essentially like returning a portion of our paychecks.
This year, instead of leaving any part of your compensation package on the table, what if you chose to ask yourself some powerful questions that will help you feel confident using all of it? What if you chose to take days off and really let yourself be 100% off work? What if you did this because it’s part of how you’re compensated for your work? And also because it can help you keep showing up and keep overachieving when you are working. And also of course, because it’s fun to let yourself truly have a day off.
And when you ask yourself better questions about your PTO, you’ll be able to have a true day off and to enjoy that time and let it recharge you so that when you’re back at work, you can really be back at work.
And speaking of fun, I have something fun to tell you about. I’m doing a giveaway with just a few deep dive strategies and they are going to be awesome. I want to be very clear that these are not consult calls, they’re not actually even coaching calls.
They are 90-minute sessions where we unpack exactly what’s going on with you and your career, and then come up with a point-by-point plan for how to get you to where you want to be instead. I know exactly what it’s like to have an amazing job, and I also know exactly what it’s like to leave that job and launch a six-figure business, and I can walk you through what that might look like for you, whether you want to stay and love your job or whether you want to leave and launch a six-figure business too.
I’m going to be giving away just three of these sessions. In order to be eligible, all you have to do is subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts.
It doesn’t even have to be a five-star review, although I really hope it will be and I hope you really love the show. What I really want also is your honest feedback so I can keep working on the show and make it something that will blow your mind and help you change your life every week.
So for details on that, visit korilinn.com/podcastlaunch and there’s very specific instructions and the contest form where you can enter. Again, that’s korilinn.com/podcastlaunch. And you can find it in the show notes as well. And then I’ll be announcing the winners on an upcoming show. It’s going to be awesome. So make sure to sign up for that and I will see you next week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilynn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job (Before You Leave It), the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. We are talking about paid time off today and it’s going to be awesome. This is a topic that I love to talk about and I think it’s one that’s often underrepresented in the discussion of work. Probably because it’s time that we’re not at work. But I think it is just as important.
But before I get into that, I just wanted to mention that I just finished the third book in a trilogy I’ve been reading. And I don’t know if this ever happens to y’all but I am so sad because I feel like all of my friends that I was hanging out with have left.
When I read books, especially something like a trilogy where there’s three books and I have a lot of time to spend with the characters, I get attached to them and feel like they’re my friends. And I just finished the last one and I feel so sad and lonely. Even in quarantine, it’s been like I’ve had the comfort of this group of people who are totally fictional characters.
And if y’all are curious, the trilogy is the Winternight trilogy by Katherine Arden. And if you like badass female leads who give no fucks and do what they want, I suggest you check it out. It is set way back in the day, so there’s a lot of stuff that you may be angry about if you identify as a feminist.
But I still think it’s worth reading. We have time maybe for some reading coming up because we have holidays approaching. And maybe you have some time off scheduled. Maybe you don’t. But either way, I want to talk to you today about taking time off because I think that it, like I said, is important and underrepresented.
So it’s almost Thanksgiving here in the United States and I’m not going to get into the problematic origins of the holiday, although you may know about them or want to look into them if you don’t. Suffice it to say that now this holiday may be about gratitude and having a delicious meal with people you love, but the history is anything but warm and fuzzy.
But that’s not actually what I’m going to talk about because the way I want to talk about this is less about a specific holiday and more about how to actually take time off work and give yourself really permission to be off work when you are off work.
And for the purposes of this podcast, I’m also specifically going to be talking about paid time off, although I realize that for some people, taking time off comes with the added concern of losing income. Over the years, I’ve worked many jobs where this was the case and it’s not ideal.
That being said, I do think time off is so valuable, that it’s worth taking it, even when it impacts pay, when we are feasibly able to do so. And then for those of us who do have paid time off, using that time might seem simple at first glance, but I find that a lot of people have kind of a complicated relationship with time off.
The idea is that you pick days you’d like to have off, or the company tells you specific days you have off based on their schedule and maybe the country you’re in, and then you take those days. But as you already know, and as I’ve said, it’s often not simple.
For high-achievers, especially those of us who sometimes feel anxious about work and I think that many people are feeling anxious these days about work, but also especially with everything 2020 has brought us, taking time off can feel a little fraught.
It’s like we always want a day off when we don’t have one, but then when we do have a day off, we’re quietly checking our work email just in case at 10am. I remember this would happen when I worked in corporate. I would wake up on Monday mornings and just stare at my phone and be like, when is the next day I can sleep in?
I meant weekends, but I also meant days off, but then on a day off I’d be like, yes, this is amazing, for like five seconds, and then I’d be like, wait, what do I even do? How do I even do a day off? This was way before coaching obviously.
And then that’s normal, but on top of that, many of us are not going to be able to see our friends, family, and other loved ones we normally spend our holidays with this year due to COVID-19. So I think that is making taking time off feel a little bit different too.
You may even be thinking like, why take time off at all? And for those of you who are not Americans, you may be wondering about the winter holidays, which are a little further off, where just the idea of wanting to take some time off but not being sure if it’s worth is, since you may be in quarantine or otherwise unable to see people you want to see or go to the places you want to go.
And on top of concerns about taking time off during COVID, there are all the other things we wonder about when we’re considering taking time off. When is the right time? What if something bad happens while I’m gone? What if someone is disappointed or stressed because I’m not there to help or handle things that I’d normally handle?
What if there are mountains and mountains of work when I return and it’s super stressful to catch up? What if I’m the only one who can do my particular job and I’m afraid the company will suffer in my absence?
A lot of these questions could be boiled down to one basic worry. This could go badly for me or others in some way. Does that seem too simple? It is, but it also isn’t. When we look at the more specific questions, the nuances seem important. A project you’re working on could hit an unexpected snag. A coworker could be irritated that you’re out of office or feel like now they can’t take time off because you are.
But it’s also true that the way all of these questions and concerns were phrased focuses on the negative, on the possibility of things going badly. And that consistency among them is important for us to notice.
The human brain has a negativity bias, which basically means that it gives more attention to things it perceives as bad or dangerous. And that bias definitely comes into play when it comes to taking time off. As much as we may want to use our PTO and use it wisely, our brains also want to scan for threats.
The brain wants to scan for every single possible thing that could go badly. For some of y’all, this makes total sense, right? I know that you’re like, yeah, that is what my brain does all the time. And I also want you to know that it does this because it wants to keep you alive. It’s not like your brain is just behaving badly. It wants to keep you alive, and so it’s constantly scanning for threats, just in case it can see one and then it can deal with it.
But often when the brain does this, it just keeps you feeling stressed and overwhelmed and like there’s no good time to take PTO and then before you know it, it’s December and you’re trying to figure out how to use all your remaining PTO days, unless you’re one of those lucky few who can roll their days over into the new year.
But even so, is that really lucky or are you just less likely to use your PTO at all because you can just rack it up instead? Here’s what I want you to see about this way of doing things. When we’re afraid that using PTO could go badly, that’s what we experience.
Maybe we don’t use the PTO at all, maybe we interpret every time we do use it through the lens of what went wrong versus the lens of what went well. Either way, we kind of set ourselves up for this self-fulfilling prophecy that PTO isn’t fun and it’s hard to use well.
And that’s no good because what we actually want is to use it. So the brain loves questions and it loves to answer them. And as you discovered from my earlier list, when we let our brains run the show, as we discovered from my earlier list, but also as you probably know as the owner of a brain, when we let our brains run the show, they ask a lot of threat-scanning questions about what could go badly.
Then they obsess over those questions and their many potential answers. Instead, I’m going to invite you to engage your brain’s question loving nature in a new way, a way that will help you find your own best answers when it comes to spending your PTO wisely and thoughtfully and enjoying it while it’s happening.
The way to do this is simple. Ask better questions. Like I said, left to its own devices, your brain will ask threat-scanning questions, and threat-scanning questions have negative assumptions built in. When we ask threat-scanning questions, we find what the brain is looking for: potential threats.
A little bit of threat scanning can be useful, but more than a little bit tends to turn into ruminating. Instead, what we want to ask your brain is questions that have positive assumptions built in. We can call these solution-scanning questions, or we can call them powerful questions, or we can just call them better questions.
Here is an example. Your brain says what if something falls through the cracks while I’m on PTO? And then your brain answers that question by listing all the things that could fall through the cracks and all the terrible consequences that might come to pass if it happened
And if your brain is like most brains, it will catastrophize all the way out to worst-case scenarios that are actually wildly unlikely and then obsess about them as if even if they did happen, as if then you wouldn’t be able to do anything. And when the brain does this, it completely ignores our own capacity to figure things out and to course correct, even if something does go wrong.
A powerful question you could ask here instead could be something like, how can I use PTO and set myself up to relax during it, even if it’s possible something could come up while I’m gone? Or how can I set things up to be successful while I’m gone? And also, can I trust that I can fix it later if something does get missed? Or even how can I trust my team to handle it if something does come up?
These questions focus on setting ourselves up for success and relaxation, and choosing to trust our larger team even if things don’t go perfectly. This is important because we are all humans and things don’t go according to plan sometimes. We can set things up well and yeah, things can still fall through the cracks.
We can leave someone a detailed to-do list of items and then something else may happen that means those things don’t get accomplished, and we can handle that too. I want to be clear though that it’s not about lying to ourselves that everything will definitely be fine. It’s about setting things up to go as well as we can and then trusting our future selves to work with whatever happens and trusting our team to handle whatever arises while we’re gone but also once we get back.
It’s also about framing in the positive. How can we set ourselves up for success and how can we handle what arises? Versus framing in the negative, what if something terrible happens? What if everything is ruined?
So I want to give you another example of a powerful question you can ask about PTO. Why is it beneficial to the company and my teammates for me to use PTO? Now, this question may hurt your brain at first, like you have a job, you create value for the company by doing your job.
You support your teammates by being there and being part of the team and doing work. The idea that you could benefit the team and the whole company by going away and not doing your job for a period of time may seem illogical to you.
But let’s think about it. Companies give employees PTO for a reason, or even for many reasons. Take a moment to imagine what some of those reasons might be. Why would companies choose to do this? Is it possible that they do it because it does benefit them?
Now consider this. How are you a more valuable asset, not less valuable, more valuable asset to the company and to your team when you do take PTO versus when you don’t? You may find that this is an area where your brain is creating a false dichotomy and assuming that PTO only benefits the person taking it, versus benefiting the whole team and the company as well.
You may find that this is an area where your brain was presenting you with a false dichotomy. And if you don’t know what that is, a false dichotomy is a false choice. It’s a false either or, where your brain’s like, either it can be this or it can be that, versus maybe it could be both. Maybe it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
So if your brain is creating a false dichotomy around this idea, your brain might be having the assumption that PTO only benefits the person taking it versus benefiting the whole team and the company as well. Since PTO means you will be out of the office, your brain might think it means that others will suffer.
But like I was saying before, what if this dichotomy, what if this either or is false? What if PTO is actually a yes and situation? I think it is a yes and. Here’s why. Taking time off makes us more productive when we are at work. This is one of those counterintuitive things that seems weird but is actually true.
When we try to push ourselves and when we work too much, we become less productive. Then we need even more time to create results that aren’t as good. But when we don’t overwork ourselves and moreover, when we take time to recharge, via PTO days or even weeks, we supercharge our productivity.
And you do not have to take my word for it. There’s tons of research on how employees taking time off is better for business on the whole. And you can just Google that shit. Check it out and let your mind be blown. Because like I was saying, I think so many of us think PTO is something that they let us do because they can’t stop us or I guess people have to be able to take vacation, but I prefer to think that PTO is something that can help you be a better employee, and there is data to support that.
Now, it’s true, your teammates might miss you while you’re gone. But when we take time out of the office, it also gives our team a chance to try different kinds of work, work on different tasks, and do all kinds of stuff. In order to take PTO, the whole team will have to be clear on what needs to be done and how it happens and documenting and sharing these processes can be deeply beneficial for the whole team and it can create the opportunity for potential improvements and streamlining of workflows.
Here’s another fun benefit of taking PTO. Your brain may actually go to work solving problems, like work problems, even when you’re not at work, even when you’re not thinking about those problems.
We experience this all the time. When we get a good idea while we’re taking a walk or suddenly come up with a solution to a big problem while we’re cleaning out a closet. While we can apply our brains to tasks directly, giving them time away from work tasks can allow them to get some perspective on things we haven’t been able to solve via the direct approach.
Most of us most of the time try to solve problems by going at them directly, and that is definitely one way to solve them. But sometimes we can also make a lot of headway on something we’ve been stuck on by working on something else and by giving our brain a break from the direct approach.
Here’s one final thing I want to leave you with. Paid time off is a benefit your work provides to you, just like it provides you with a paycheck. Both PTO and paychecks among other things are part of your compensation package. But many people struggle much more with taking their paid time off than they do with the pile of cash that gets direct deposited into their bank account.
We certainly don’t try to return part of our pay at the end of the year, and yet we may leave some of our PTO unused, which is essentially like returning a portion of our paychecks.
This year, instead of leaving any part of your compensation package on the table, what if you chose to ask yourself some powerful questions that will help you feel confident using all of it? What if you chose to take days off and really let yourself be 100% off work? What if you did this because it’s part of how you’re compensated for your work? And also because it can help you keep showing up and keep overachieving when you are working. And also of course, because it’s fun to let yourself truly have a day off.
And when you ask yourself better questions about your PTO, you’ll be able to have a true day off and to enjoy that time and let it recharge you so that when you’re back at work, you can really be back at work.
And speaking of fun, I have something fun to tell you about. I’m doing a giveaway with just a few deep dive strategies and they are going to be awesome. I want to be very clear that these are not consult calls, they’re not actually even coaching calls.
They are 90-minute sessions where we unpack exactly what’s going on with you and your career, and then come up with a point-by-point plan for how to get you to where you want to be instead. I know exactly what it’s like to have an amazing job, and I also know exactly what it’s like to leave that job and launch a six-figure business, and I can walk you through what that might look like for you, whether you want to stay and love your job or whether you want to leave and launch a six-figure business too.
I’m going to be giving away just three of these sessions. In order to be eligible, all you have to do is subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts.
It doesn’t even have to be a five-star review, although I really hope it will be and I hope you really love the show. What I really want also is your honest feedback so I can keep working on the show and make it something that will blow your mind and help you change your life every week.
So for details on that, visit korilinn.com/podcastlaunch and there’s very specific instructions and the contest form where you can enter. Again, that’s korilinn.com/podcastlaunch. And you can find it in the show notes as well. And then I’ll be announcing the winners on an upcoming show. It’s going to be awesome. So make sure to sign up for that and I will see you next week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilynn.com for more guidance and resources.
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