Take a Vacation!

Speaker 1 · 0:00

Welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast, number seven. Why can't you play hide and seek with a mountain? Because it's always peeking.

Speaker 2 · 0:16

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become irreplaceable, game-changing leader assistants. This episode's leadership quote is from John Maxwell. Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.

Jeremy · 0:35

Welcome to episode seven of The Leader Assistant Podcast. I am excited to talk about paid time off, aka vacation days. Taking time off is seen, unfortunately, today as lazy. Many people don't use their allotted paid vacation time. In America, especially, we are notorious for not taking time off. And so today I want to encourage you not to wait until you retire to take a vacation. I want to remind you and remind myself that the world does not revolve around you. So take a vacation, celebrate, encourage others to take vacation, even require our teams to use all of their paid time off. As I prepared for my family vacation this year, I thought about how, as I mentioned, Americans are terrible at taking vacations. In fact, I recently heard someone say, I get four weeks of paid time off each year, but I only use three or four days. It sounds kind of crazy, but yeah, I used to operate in the same way. After a few years, though, of not taking my vacations, I burned out and decided enough was enough. You can call me lazy, say I'm not a team player, make me feel bad for being offline or going out of town. I honestly don't care. I'm taking my vacations. Many of us have a hard time taking time off, and I'm like this. I admit and I'll be honest that I'm this way. I have a hard time taking off because I feel like there's too much work to do. I tell myself there's just too much to do. There's, again, the world revolves around me, and there's so much reliant on me that there's no way I can take an extended amount of time off. Others imagine or can't imagine what they'd do with themselves if they weren't at work. So some of it is you really don't have a hobby, you don't have a plan or an idea of what you might do if you took a vacation, so you just decide to just keep working. But some of you are great at taking a vacation, but you make others feel guilty when they leave or when they get to take a break. Some of you assistants listening might have a boss who lets you take time off, but when you get back, you really hear about it. Or when you're gone, you get pinged constantly, even though you're supposed to be offline and on vacation. So I'll share a link in the show notes, leaderassistant.com forward slash seven. A blog post I wrote to executives about leaving their assistants alone during off hours. But whatever the reason is for you, the assistant, not taking your time off, it's honestly not a good one. Sure, there are seasons where you need to delay your time off or you need to just strategically plan it during an off time. But there are a few benefits to taking your allotted time off. One, you'll be a better employee because you'll be rested, you'll be more productive when you get back. Two, you'll be a better family member, a mom, dad, son, sister, friend. You'll be more pleasant to be around. You'll be a better neighbor. Your neighbors will actually see you every once in a while hanging out, enjoying a day off in the yard. And you'll be healthier. We'll just burn out and run ourselves into the ground if we don't take time off. So I really just wanted to encourage you to celebrate, encourage, and even require your team members to use all of their paid time off. And if you don't have any admins that work for you, or if you're a remote assistant, virtual assistant, just wanted to encourage you to use your time off and be intentional about taking all of the time off and sometimes even more than you're allotted every year. It's just crucial for us to stay healthy. I once heard about Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and how he hadn't taken a full week off in like 18 years. And the only week that he had taken the extended week off that he had taken in that time was due to the fact that he had malaria. And I just think that's crazy. I think he obviously feels like the world revolves around him and that he can't afford to take time off, according to that data in the New York Times article. So we can't be like that. I love Tesla cars, and I think SpaceX is amazing, but don't be like Elon. Don't feel like the world revolves around you. Take your time off. And the last thing I'll say is, if your executive or your boss is guilt tripping you, every time you take time off, confront them about that. Talk to them about that. Bring it up with HR. Say, listen, I'm not able to enjoy my time off, or I have a more difficult time having confidence to ask for time off, because every time I do, you say, oh, you're going to be gone? Oh, great. What am I going to do? Or, oh, I can't believe you were gone so long. Or, please don't go that, don't leave me for that long again. You know, it's manipulative, guilt tripping notes like that, that you just can't put up with and shrug off as not a big deal. So anyway, those are my thoughts. Take a day off every week at least. Hopefully, you can take two days off every week. Shut your email off in the evenings. But overall, take extended time off. Don't let people make you feel like you're not contributing or that you're lazy because you took some time off. You got to take care of yourself if you want to be a leader. You've got to initiate those conversations about getting the time off and being okay with taking the time off. And you've got to really take care of yourself if you're really going to take care of your work and serve your executive and be the leader that I know you can be.

Speaker 1 · 7:44

Help my dad out and leave a review on iTunes.

Jeremy · 7:53

Thanks for listening. Check out today's show notes at leaderassistant.com forward slash seven.

Speaker 1 · 8:00

My dad is ticklish. goburrows.com.