E200 | The Importance Of Disconnecting And Why Vacations Can Be Hard

Today marks the 200th episode of The PT Entrepreneur Podcast and I wanted to discuss what I learned on my recent vacation.  I really wanted to stress the importance of self preservation of the mind and body.  I've learned that taking some time to mentally reset yourself can be a difference maker in the longevity of your entrepreneurial journey.

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Episode Transcription:

Hey, what's going on, guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and you might be watching this on Facebook live. I decided to do both because I just got back from vacation, and I wanted to get a chance to get back in front of everybody and talk a little bit about what I learned while I was on this trip.

So if you want to watch the video version, head over to Facebook, if you're going to listen to podcasts, iTunes is probably the best place to do that. So, here's. What, what I, what I want to get into, first of all, vacations hard. I don't know if a holiday is stressful for any of you, but I have a hard time on vacation.

I don't do well with it. I, if I have a lot of downtimes, I feel like. I feel like I'm just sort of squandering, time. I feel like I'm missing out on opportunities to work on things that are going to drive our business forward. And it's, it's overall a bad strategy when it comes to vacation. So those of you might be out there, might be thinking, I don't want to go on vacation with Danny.

You probably don't. But I've gotten better at it, and I kind of want to talk about some things that I've learned along the way, in particular,—this past trip. So I was in Philadelphia and New Jersey recently for a family reunion. We took the kids astronaut with the kids, to Philadelphia for a couple of days to see everything.

They're super cool town. Great people. I'm a cop, asked me in the street if I needed directions to find a new shirt cause I had a Falcon shirt on. And he, he wanted me to have an Eagle shirt on, but everybody was excellent. The food was great. And, the history is super cool up there. And then we went over to brigand T New Jersey, sort of like Atlantic.

City area for a family reunion. And we were at the beach for a few days, and on Saturday we have what's called Summerfest, which is this family reunion where we all get together at my aunt's house. And, and my godmother was there. And my godmother is a super cool lady. She lives in Houston. She owns her own company that finds, and it positions for offshore gas companies that are like.

Offshore drilling companies. And, she's had this now for a few decades, and she's done well with it. She's grown it to, you know, a hundred employees and multiple eight-figure businesses. And, you know, she's very successful when it comes to marketing. But whenever I, when I saw her, you know, I, I had heard that she had gotten sick, in roughly in the last year.

And I started talking to her. She told me everything that's been going on. And about a year ago, she came down with an autoimmune disease and that autoimmune disease hit her heart, effector, really, in a compelling way. Her health had deteriorated. And she had to do immunotherapy, just to turn everything around.

And. The specialists that she was working within Houston told her that a lot of this is derived from stressors, from external stress to life habits. And he explained that genetics loads the gun, and life habits pull the trigger. And you know, it's unusual for me to, to be, to talk to her about this stuff because we talked about this.

This idea of being preventative and looking at, you know, your sleep, your nutrition, your stress management, and how, how much you're moving and your activity level. Every single patient that comes, you know through, through our door. And here's somebody that for the last few decades has built, you know, by all means, a very successful business.

And in the process. Was probably one of the reasons that she ended up coming down with this autoimmune disease because of the stress associated with it and the amount of work and the long periods of, of a lot of work that, that she put in to, to build this business that she has. And in the process, she burned her body down.

And you know. Connecting with her on this and seeing somebody that I know that has gone through this. I work with patients all the time that maybe not to this extent have things that have happened to them, but, but for me to be able to talk to her now that she's, she's gone through that and spoke to her about her business and ways that she can start to work on.

Prioritize prioritizing her body, and still being in business for herself. What was an exciting conversation to have, but I want to talk about the idea of how not to let this happen for you and the importance of things like vacations and downregulation and self-preservation, especially the mind.

And, and we know that you know, we can, we can work ourselves hard for a very long time until we can't. You know, until you come down with an autoimmune disease and you don't understand why your body is attacking itself. And, and that's a tough place to be for somebody successful in pretty much everything she's ever done.

And, you know, as I was thinking about this, I have a lot of similar traits to her eye in terms of my ability to work hard and, and passionate about the thing that I, that I do for a living. So this was a gut check for me to be able to sit there with her and talk about this. And, and, and, and I know I talk about this with people all the time in the office, but I'm guilty of many things in terms of, you know, working

 A significant amount of hours and it doesn't feel like work. And, and that's, that's a challenge in some ways, right? It is when you're doing the thing that you like to do, and it doesn't feel like work. It feels like fun. It feels like it's your hobby. You just happened to make a living that way. And as high as that might be, you're still stressing yourself in many ways, no matter how much you enjoy it.

And downtime is something that is a great way. To reset and to give your brain some downtime at that because we may not be continually stressing our body in a manual labor job. Still, we're frequently stressing our mind as entrepreneurs, and it's one of the things that we, that we like about it, but for me, the cation in particular.

It is not something that I'm good at. I am typically distracted. I usually have some downtime to let all this crap that I've been thinking about hash itself out. And then I'm feverously writing down in a notebook the things that I want to do when I get back from vacation. And that's not a vacation.

That's work still. And I've learned some things that have helped me. And hopefully, if you fall into this category where. You know, maybe you're trying to get something started. Perhaps you know, you have a business and, and you're growing it or you're sustaining it. You may have a hard time on vacation as well.

And, what works for me is really to focus on some things that I think are more important to, number one, I get off my phone like. I get off my phone as much as I humanly possibly can. I, you know, I put it away. I don't keep it near me at all. Like if I'm around family or especially my kids, just too easy to get sucked into, social media for work or.

Emails or anything that you could check, I will check it. Right. And I'm like an addict for this stuff. No emails. And, this took me a while to get used to you because I tried to get back to people quickly, but with an autoresponder, putting up and not responding to emails is fantastic.

It's great. Except for when you get back, and you have like a hundred emails you have to respond to. But it is what it is. It's, it's actually challenging the first couple of days, and then it sort of gets easier. And then by the end of like a week, I almost wish I didn't have email anymore. Still, I understand how important it is to be able to keep up with that, but also be able to take a step back and not let it, not, not, not make it feel like you have to like respond quickly and the stress associated with.

We are not responding in what other people might think or that they might want to, you know, get a response, from you faster. And that can be hard with us, with our patients because I think with our patients, we want to respond to them quickly. You know, we know they're going through something difficult. We know they're in, they're in pain, and we can feel like it's up to us to help them feel better.

But. You can't be tied to that because it will just wear you down and you'll start to wear yourself down in a way where you really can't be helpful to them at all, especially if you end up with, you know, some sort of significant, you know, sickness associated with that. The other big thing is focusing on people that are around you.

And. Some of the people I don't see very often. You know, like my brother was there, his wife, their son. You know, my, my dad was there, my godparents were there, my aunt, some cousins. My family, you know, and focusing on these other people and asking them about their life. You see, it's, it's, I think this goes without saying for anything, but the more you can ask other people.

About what they're doing, about the things that they're interested in at the moment. The more likely it is that it's going to be a better conversation for the other person, you know, and not make this one-sided all about, about you. My, my godfather recently retired. He's in the oil business down in Houston and, it's, it's fun catching up with him. As a PT,

this happens all the time. He's talking to me about his arthritic shoulder from football back in the day. And. He was asking me if I brought any needles with me to dry needle his calf, which I didn't, by the way. I, I don't travel with needles anymore because if I did, all my family members would hit me up for grinding Ling.

But, just talking to him about what he's doing in his retirement, you know, he's hunting more. He's, Doing a lot of stuff around the house. He sounds bored, frankly. But just finding out, you know, w where he's at and, and he's a funny guy. And, and being able to play some cornhole with him and, you know, drink a little bit of whiskey was, was fun.

And I didn't think about work one that, that entire day, which, which is rare for me because typically 10 minutes doesn't go by without me thinking about something to do with, you know, with work. So this idea of letting your brain. Calm down is essential. And I listened to a book recently, and it's called digital minimalism.

And it's all about this idea of how do we manage to live in a world of technology, which ironically is, I talk about this, I'm doing a Facebook live and recording it for a podcast at the same time. So how do we live in this world where we're always connected to a phone, to a computer, through the internet, to all these other things that.

It can access our attention quickly and make it work for us. In particular, if you own a business because social media, to me, is not keeping up with my F, my friends, kids pictures, or something like that. Social media, to me, is a channel for me to produce content and distribute content, to build trust, and to build relationships with people who potentially are going to do work with us one day so we can help them even more.

Not social media in a nutshell for me. And if it didn't exist, I wouldn't care. You know, it would make marketing harder in some capacities, but for some people, social media is, is difficult. It's designed to be addictive, and it totally can be, you know, this, these random positive reinforcements and liking things and sharing things and commenting and all this, Oh, what will somebody say?

And it's enough to where your brain is always going, going, going, thinking about these other things, and it never gets a chance to actually. Downregulate, and we don't know what the longterm implications of that, you know, is. I can tell you with my godmother, it turned into a very significant autoimmune disease with her, you know, with her business and continuously thinking about her business, being on with her business, growing a business.

And if those of you that are listening to this that have a business, you know, you probably understand how something like that can happen. And in particular. You know, early in the early stages, it's easy to burn yourself down. It's easy to work so much and, and, you know, your body will maybe be the last thing that you prioritize.

That's what happened to me. You know, I, I, I didn't prioritize sleep. I didn't prioritize my nutrition. I didn't prioritize training for a good solid year and a half. Whenever I get, whenever I got out of the, out of the army and I was traveling a ton. It took a severe toll on me. And it got to the point where, you know, I just, I was sore all the time.

I wasn't sleeping. I, I was, you know, quick to get angry about stuff. And, you know, and that was, that was a moment where I burned out and I, I took a step back, and I started fixing a lot of those things. But, you know, retrospectively, if, if you can go into those things, understanding that your brain and your body needs downtime just as much as you need to work hard.

You're so much better off for it, and it's, I don't know if you can learn that lesson without having to go through it. It's, it's challenging. But you know, for me, talking with my aunt and, and seeing where she's at and just seeing how frustrated she is and how can I, I'm not confused, but I guess just kind of not sure why this happened to her when no one ever talked to her about this.

She thought she was doing everything right by and by all accounts like she was. She had a remarkable life except for the fact that she was slowly burning herself down, the stress associated with what she was doing. And, and it doesn't have to be only a business either. You can be working for somebody else and he didn't burn out.

It affects us, and it's just crazy to see what extent can happen. They can stop you in your tracks. It's a very physical person. Somebody that's skied a lot and someone very active would run quite a bit. She can't do anything right now. She can't do shit. And it's sad to see. So, you know, for me, vacation is tough.

It's something that I have to work on, which sounds stupid. I get it. You know, it's like a vacation, not hard. You just go on vacation, and you don't think about work. But if you. If you're like me and what you do, you enjoy, and you're growing something that you feel is meaningful, it's easy to work on it all the time.

And you know, after talking to my godmother, I have newer new respect for. You know, taking care of myself in a different way, in particular my brain, you know, and give myself the time to downregulate to not think about things, to let things just soak in and, and disconnect from, from work, which is very difficult for me to do.

So, for those of you that, like what you do. Congratulations. That's awesome. It's rare, and I think that should be the case then for you to hate what you do every single day. I think there's a ton of other stressors associated with that that can be much worse for you, you know, longterm. You know, for those of you that don't like what you do.

Well, maybe it's time to find another path, you know? If it's a cash-based practice, you know, head over to Finsurancebook.com, get a copy of my book and, and, and get some ideas about how to start something to that effect. If you're a practitioner, you know, maybe it's a digital business, perhaps, you know, there's something that you're passionate about that you can educate people on, you can teach people about, and you can create content around that, that can be leveraged into a digital business.

You know, maybe it's a career switch. I don't know, but that longterm stress is not suitable for you. And it's something that needs to be managed. Something that needs to be affected, cause it will lead to things. And we know full well all about them. You know, when we talk to people about them all the time. But when you see it firsthand, it changes things significantly.

So if you're like me and you have difficulty with down-regulating, here are my, my big thing is we'll go back over one more time. So get off the phone, no email, focus on the people around you, and give your brain some downtime. Just don't think about anything. Don't listen to a podcast. Don't listen to music.

Don't read a book. Just go to the beach. Sit in a chair and stare out into the ocean or play on the beach. You know, get up. Get in the water, go surfing. Do something that doesn't involve any technology, any sort of cognitive problem-solving necessarily in that capacity, like work and give your brain some downtime, just like you have to give your body some downtime.

So, guys, that's it for this one. Thanks so much for your time. If you like this, share it. Comment. Tag somebody in it. If you're, if you're a listen to this on the podcast, I greatly appreciate that. Head over to iTunes, subscribes, you can get all the new podcasts, and if you have the time and you liked the podcast, leave me a five-star review and let me know a little bit about what you want about the podcast, and we can do more of that.

So guys, thanks so much for your time and for listening and until next time, take care.

Do you want more cash, PT, biz help? If so, get a copy of my book, Fuck Insurance. It's your playbook—so successful performance, PT practice, and never having to deal with insurance again. You can get a free copy at Finsurancebook.com. Inside this book, you'll learn the direct techniques that we've used to become one of the fastest 100% cash PT practices in the country.

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