Episode 101: How Rest and Gratitude Can Make You a Better Leader
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When you start to rest, this is where your brain consolidates information, your body has the opportunity to repair itself, ideally, creativity flourishes because you free up some space for new ideas to come into your brain, and without resting you risk burnout, decreased productivity, and even health issues.
You’re listening to Prospecting on Purpose, where we discuss all things prospecting, sales, business, and mindset.
I'm your host, Sara Murray, a sales champion who's here to show you that you can be a shark in business and still lead with intentionality and authenticity. Tune in each week as we dive into methods to connect with clients, communicate with confidence, and close the deal.
Welcome back to Prospecting on Purpose. This is our fourth installment of our four-part mini-series on the eight biggest lessons that I've learned in two years of business and 100 podcast episodes. This is episode 101. We officially hit the triple digits and it releases the week of Thanksgiving for the listeners in the United States.
So it'll be a short and sweet episode and it will just kind of put a nice cherry on the end of our, you know, takeaway ice cream Sunday I lost my thread for that particular analogy, but to recap our first six lessons this ice cream Sunday, we've been building.
This is really looking at respecting the season you're in, embracing the unknown, and going with the flow network network network. Your network is your net worth. Get good at asking for and receiving help. Keep planting seeds. You never know when they'll bloom, but if you keep doing the right things, the results will follow, and then look at your mistakes as simple opportunities to grow. It's never losing if you're learning.
So the final two lessons I want to share are fitting with our Thanksgiving holiday, and those are- find time to rest and then, practicing gratitude and embodying gratitude. So first I want to talk about rest and, and this concept of recharging our batteries. You know, it's really easy to fall into the trap of constant hustle, especially during the holidays, especially during times of overwhelm.
There's a lot coming at us all the time, all the time. And so this particular concept of taking the time to rest, if we don't do this, it almost works against us and it's counterproductive. Because when you start to rest, this is where your brain consolidates information. Your body has the opportunity to repair itself.
Ideally, creativity flourishes because you free up some space for new ideas to come into your brain. And without resting, you risk burnout, decreased productivity, and even health issues. My dad has a phrase, and I'm sure you've heard it, but you've been burning the candle at both ends, and I notice whenever I get sick, it's because I've been burning the candle at both ends, and I'm deprioritizing the things I need to keep myself healthy and moving forward.
So, when you're looking at rest from not only an investment in your health and well-being, and you know, our healthy bodies are our moneymakers, in a very high-level sense of the word, but, the other thing that's really important about when you think about rest, is it allows all the information that you've been just gathering, whether it's intentional or just stimuli coming at you.
It allows your brain to just kind of disseminate that, and then what I have also found is it allows for new information to come in, and so if you're not looking at rest as like a luxury or being lazy or selfish, but if you start looking at it as a really crucial part of your success strategy because that's where ideas are going to flow, you're keeping your body healthy and so on.
If it's part of your success strategy and we're more intentional about it, I have learned to not view rest as a luxury or, a way of avoiding something or being lazy or being selfish. If you have, you know, other people depending on you, sometimes it can be hard to take that risk without guilt. But if you reframe this as taking the rest is allowing space for new ideas to come in and to disseminate all of the information that's been bombarding you, then if you can look at it as a part of your success strategy and be very intentional about your rest and your recharging, then it becomes a lot easier to take that rest guilt-free. And so that's really what I want us to focus on is looking at it as an intentional building block of our next reiteration of ourselves or our next level of ourselves.
If you want more on this, listen to Episode 84: 8 Essential Tips on How to Set Boundaries at Work and I loved Episode 20: An Introduction to Meditation. So the last lesson we're going to cover, of course, is the power of gratitude, and this is one of the most transformative, and as we approach Thanksgiving, it's the perfect time to reflect on this practice and really how it can change your life. And, this is not new information for most of you. Practicing gratitude is backed by science and improves mental health. It boosts happiness, and it enhances our physical well-being.
In my own personal experience, it's made me more resilient, more empathetic, more calm during times of turbulence, and then more aware of the abundance in my life, and this is especially when things aren't going well. So for this particular episode, I am not going to dive into gratitude techniques. There is an amazing episode on gratitude, it's one of my favorites. It's Episode 48: Embodying Gratitude: How to Positively Shape Your Professional and Personal Life.
But what I do want to talk about in this episode, and the reason why so many people talk about the importance of gratitude is that it needs to be embraced as a mindset. It's more of a mindset versus, you know, this thing you do every once in a while, and it's a way of viewing the world and acknowledging and appreciating the good in our lives, no matter how small. Because that's going to help you when times are tough, and this is especially important in a business environment because things don't go the way that we thought they would. Oftentimes, if you make a mistake, if you didn't close a deal, what can you learn from it, what can you be thankful for the takeaway or the lesson, and then move on and course correct for next time.
Something lately that I've been noticing is that when something doesn't go the way I thought it would, it either comes back to fruition, you know, six months later, we covered that in Episode 100, the seeds that we plant, you know, are always coming to harvest.
But the other thing that I have started to realize is that when something doesn't go my way, or I have a weird interaction with someone, it kind of illustrates all of the Good interactions that I have and I'll share 2 examples quickly.
Recently, I was introduced to a woman through a mutual contact, and she's doing what I want to do in my business, but probably 20, 30 years ahead of me. She has a big team team of 40 and it's an area that I want to start to position my business in. And so our mutual contact put us in touch with each other. The person wrote back right away saying, you know, here's my number. Let's hop on a call. How can I help you? So I hop on this meeting with her and she basically says, well, if I help you, you would be a direct competitor to us. So I'm not going to share this information with you.
And it was eye-opening for a couple of reasons, but in the best possible ways. 1st, I mean, she didn't help me, which was okay, but it made me realize how many people do help me. All the time I have people offering to help me, especially in some competitive spaces, because there's enough business for most of us if we have this abundance mindset versus this lack mindset. And all it did, I'm just kind of thinking about it and I'm thinking, well. She has a team of 40 people and she's viewing me as a threat. She's been in this industry 20 years and she's viewing me as a threat or not a threat, but a competitor. And now like I'm thinking about, I was dang, I must be doing something right?
You know, and I think that it also illustrated how often people do really help me, all the time. And so, sometimes when we look at things that maybe we'd be grumpy about or disappointed or angry or irritated, like whatever the feelings that come up, if you come from it from a place of gratitude, you can say, wow, I'm so lucky. I have people help me all day long. All the time. I have people help me. I hope I never say that to someone else. I hope one day I get to have a team of 40 that I can say, yeah, actually, here's the person you need to try to target, here's some of the things that this industry needs. Let me know how I can help you.
But, you know, You just never know until you're in it, but it was a really interesting eye-opener for me. The other quick example I was going to share is that probably a year ago - I had this really nasty flight attendant on a plane and when I'm out and about, I'm pretty easy-breezy, friendly, happy. I don't have a lot of drama when I'm interacting with other people around, you know, out in life.
But this woman, Was just so not nice to me. And I think that I was irritated. I was a little riled up and I just stopped and I took a breath and it just made me realize how very rarely I have any type of interaction like that. And especially when you interact with other people, she might just be having a bad day, I was having a good one. I'm just going to let her energy and her negativity roll right off of me and I know I can react this way and be peaceful and move on because I practice gratitude consistently and it has been a big, big game changer for me, which is why we had to bring it up and talk about it on this show.
Gratitude helps me appreciate each milestone, no matter how big or small. It allows me to buy balloons for myself to celebrate the 100th episode because I want to celebrate these wins and be grateful for the incredible support system that I have. So from my clients, my listeners, my team, my family, and my friends, it is nice to pause and look at all of the good in our lives.
So to wrap up our episode, we are letting ourselves rest and recharge. We're doing it guilt-free because it's part of our continued growth and evolution and strategic planning for ourselves. And we're embodying gratitude all along the way. That concludes our four-part mini-series, ushering us into the triple-digit episode count.
In the next couple of episodes, we have some great guests. So tune into those. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next week.
Thank you so much for listening to the Prospecting on Purpose podcast.
If you loved what you heard today, subscribe to the podcast and please rate and leave a review. For more info on me, or if you'd like to work together, feel free to go to my website, Saramurray.com. On social media, I'm usually hanging out @Saramurraysales. Thanks again for joining me and I'll see you next time.
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