The RV Entrepreneur host Kimberly Crossland helps us implement active recovery in business with the 3R framework: Rest your mind, restore your energy, and recover to get stronger.
A phrase gets bandied about in the fitness world quite often — active recovery. Active recovery is when you take a day off from a heavy workout but don’t go sedentary. Rather than pushing your body to the max, you push your body just enough to get the blood moving, keep the lactic acid from building up, and build mobility.
I love finding parallels between our physical world and our mental world. Active recoveries aren’t just for our muscular system. They’re for our limbic system, too. Recognizing the importance of mental recovery in business can lead to more balance and productivity.
Eight months ago, I found myself on the brink of burnout. This wasn’t the first time I had experienced this, and the physical signs of overwork and fatigue were all too familiar. What made it worse was that I was advocating for a lifestyle that didn’t endorse this kind of burnout. It was clear that a change was needed. So, I made a conscious decision to implement active recovery in my business.
Eight months is a long time for active recovery in physical health. It’s probably too long for a business to stay in active recovery. Thankfully, the framework I followed afforded me a longer period to restore my business mindset and continue making money while healing that burnout.
If you need to rest but are unsure how to gain that type of mental freedom in your business, here’s the 3R framework I used to scale back so I could scale up when ready.
Rest Your Mind
Before you can get clear, you have to get quiet. But quiet doesn’t come from a mind that’s constantly in motion. It requires rest to silence the noise and tune into the bigger picture for your life and business.
In business, rest isn’t exactly easy to come by. You have commitments. You still need to earn an income. And, you know that if you take your foot off the gas, people will forget you’re there — or will they?
The reality is, most people navigate the world through the deafening sound of their own obligations. They’re not as tuned into what you’re doing or not doing as you might think. If you need to rest creatively, take your foot off the gas pedal and coast for awhile. Keep your commitments to your clients. Keep your biggest income generators. Leave the rest. Be intentional with what you let in.
Restore Your Energy
When you actively pursue rest, you’ll get the opportunity to restore your energy. This rest period will quickly give way to more creativity, ideas, and possibility, but be careful before you leap too soon.
In my eight month hiatus from any kind of product creation or business growth, I lived in a swirl of ideas. I called it my idea tornado. It felt like I was standing inside of a cash machine where ideas were flying all around and I had no idea which one I’d grab or if it would be the one that would bring in revenue.
Rather than reach up, grab an idea, and start running with it again, I paused. I let the ideas float for awhile. I did market research. More importantly, I talked to a small (emphasis on small) group of people who knew me, my skillset, and my life goals. These people not only helped me shine a light on the areas I could no longer see in myself, but they helped uncover the areas with the fastest path to profit so I could come back restored without risking the same burnout.
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Recover to Get Stronger
Clarity breeds momentum. As you get laser focused on where you’ll earn money and feel crazy good about it in the process, you’ll be able to recover from the burnout faster because you’ll be showing up with a crystal clear direction.
I recently shared a post on my blog about narrowing your arrow, a phrase that hit me during this active recovery season. When you shoot an arrow that’s heavy with other people’s opinions or weighted down by trying to be all things to all people, it’s enormously more difficult to hit the dot int he middle of the target. However, when you narrow your arrow, you get stronger. You can go faster because you’re only going in one direction.
As you rest your mind and restore your energy, you’ll become stronger equipping yourself to move with more momentum toward your goals.
Have you ever practiced active recovery in your business? Share with us in The RVE Community Group on Facebook. Let’s cheer each other on at every one of these three critical stages.
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