Unpopular opinion alert: you need to stop taking breaks if you want to make those big, beautiful dreams you joined this industry with come true.
Hear me out. We talked about the 4 step cycle we all go through on the way to the top and the one bad word at the center of it all: break.
Break is the dirty little five-letter word that gets in the way of pushing forward and finding the drive to create everything we always dreamed as possible.
But “break” will come up several times today because we’re talking about the four Rs that hold you back and how to push through them to make progress.
The 4 Step Cycle and the 4Rs
The first part of the 4 step cycle is the inspiration phase. It’s what gets us excited to chase a new dream, start a big idea, create an amazing life, build a beautiful career. You take a class, learn a skill, get a new pro tip, and think it sounds incredible.
Next is the action phase. You start chipping away and feel like you’ll get the results you want if you can put in all the hard work. You start working on your website, but it’s hard, so you take a break. Then human nature takes over, and we focus on the fun stuff, like buying upgraded snacks for clients. You think if only clients knew about you, they wouldn’t go anywhere else because you’re the best salon in town.
But you took a break when you were building the website, so your marketing funnel is broken, meaning you’re not driving business to those new, amazing amenities.
It’s the same thing if you decide to become an educator or open up a salon. You skip to the shiny fun stuff, like marketing, sharing your videos, starting to teach, picking out the throw pillows, and choosing your name. None of that matters if you haven’t done the hard work.
We like to do the fun stuff, but when it comes to hard work, we take lots of breaks because it doesn’t feel as fun. Instead, push through that B-word, so you tap into drive every single day.
Why you should rest at the end, not the middle
Most of us choose to take a break in the middle, but what if you didn’t? What if you decided to push through knowing there is a big, beautiful break waiting for you at the end?
There’s a lot of talk in our industry about drive, no excuses, hard work, and you can sleep when you’re dead. What is the point of working hard and making good money if you’re not enjoying it? Wealth is a lifestyle; it’s not just about working. But the reason 98% of people won’t achieve everything they want in this lifetime is that they took too many breaks.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t take care of yourself or take vacations with your family. Just that you don’t need to take “breaks.”
Let look at how those four Rs hold you back from making progress.
Reset
What happens when you reset something? Your password or a clock. It starts over. By definition, reset means to set again or differently.
If you want to completely restart your momentum, redo the whole thing, and go back to step one, take a break. But realize you are literally starting over from the beginning.
That’s what happens after a break; you slide all the way back and start thinking, “Why didn’t I just push through this in the beginning?” because three months have gone by, and you have nothing to show for it.
Rest
Rest is wonderful. The problem is that most people don’t rest; they take a break.
For example, if you’re training for the Boston Marathon and, even though you’re supposed to train this week, you’re tired from working two jobs and taking care of your kids, so you decide to rest.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to compete in the race. When you’re training for a marathon, you can’t decide to take a week to rest and still expect to cross the finish line because your body starts to reset.
You don’t just get to hit the pause button, pick up where you left off, and it’s all good. If you feel like you need to take breaks, don’t take a rest. Instead, lighten your load. You’re chasing the Boston Marathon, opening a salon, becoming an educator, AND making six figures. You don’t need a break or rest; you need a more reasonable workload. What gets sacrificed?
Instead of taking a break, slough off things that can be set aside and put your eye on the prize, so what’s most important gets done.
Rejuvenation
Rejuvenation, by definition, is the action or process of making someone or something look or feel better, younger, or more vital.
Why would we get to a place in our life or business where we take a break? Because we need to feel better, aka rejuvenation. That’s why we took a break in the first place.
But what is making us like this? Resistance.
Resistance
We hit resistance when we start to feel bad about leveling up or improving our lives.
It’s all fun when you’re choosing throw pillows for the lobby or picking out cute quotes for your Instagram. Resistance comes when hard work we’ve never done before hits. We don’t have the education, information, or skills to overcome the hurdle, creating resistance.
If it’s easy, you would have done it already. It’s not easy, and that’s why there’s resistance around it.
Resistance is the feeling of everything going great, and then suddenly, there’s a barrier in the middle of the road. You can’t see a way around it, so you decide you need rejuvenation. It’s like a bandaid; it feels better, but it’s not actually rejuvenated because you haven’t actually fixed anything.
This is what happens every time you take a break. The 4Rs are temporary solutions to permanent problems.
How to own your resistance
That temporary rest, rejuvenation, and reset feels amazing until you go back to the mountain, determined to do better this time. You start to charge up and get 10 feet further than you did before. But the resistance is still there because you haven’t worked through it, so you slide back down again until you take another break. It’s an endless cycle.
Here’s your challenge: own your resistance. Find and truly understand what is holding you back from that big dream. What are you lacking? Is it education, information, or skills?
Write down two things you want to accomplish in the next year that you have mega resistance around. What do you know you should do but haven’t pulled the trigger on? Write those things down.
If your response is, “If I knew what the resistance was, I would have figured it out,” your resistance is lack of education. You haven’t educated yourself to know what it takes to build a clientele today.
If you start making excuses, it’s a good indicator you’re facing resistance. Excuses put you into a victim mentality; you see yourself as a victim of your circumstances, your environment, the people around you, or your partner. You can’t be a victim. You have to face that resistance and move past it to get everything you ever wanted.
My ask of you is to figure out what you want to achieve. You want to have the drive to do it. Focus on the resistance, so you don’t take any more B words or use any more Rs.
There is a huge difference between taking a break and taking care of yourself. If there’s one thing you walk away with, I hope it’s that you can have an amazing life balance where you have it all without taking a break.