I hope you had a fantastic holiday weekend and got some rest. I spent a lot of time resting both my body and my brain – and ended the weekend with a day trip to Lake of the Ozarks (more on that later this week). I know there were a lot of you out there who spent the weekend enduring some challenging circumstances. Maybe you released tryout results and had some unhappy parents or you got a few more drops from rec kids that came through the email.
If working on the weekends is pretty normal for you, you’re going to find yourself in a constant pattern of highs and lows. You’re going to work hard until you’re too burned out to work. When you get to that point, you’ll rarely find rest right away. Instead, you’ll find frustration (because your body and brain are used to working all the time) and you’ll find exhaustion.
I’ve talked to owners that worked themselves to sickness. Some have told me that when they finally got too burned out, they took a day and just slept. Another said she worked so much, and was starting to get sick. She kept working and didn’t stop to care for herself until it had become pneumonia.
We love our gyms (at least when we’re not completely burned out we do.) But why do so many of us work beyond the point of exhaustion to complete burnout and even illness. I’m not sure if this culture extends outside the U.S., but I know it’s common in American culture.
You know who else suffers when we get to this point though? Our kids. Our spouses. Our staff. Our customers. If I can talk to a Next Gen owner once a week on Zoom and I can tell they’re mentally and physically exhausted, imagine what their family and friends can see. Imagine what their customers and staff can see. When we get to this point, others try to take care of us, but it’s not always a good thing:
- Staff stop telling you when something is bothering them and they hold it in until they burst as well.
- Customers get frustrated that you’re saying you have an “open door policy” but you seem too busy to listen to them.
- Your kids see how busy you are and resent the gym.
I have a friend who isn’t in the cheer industry but has an equally demanding job of taking care of others. She’s someone people go to when they experience a tragedy or are dealing with a hard time in life. People turned to her a lot over the past few weeks to ask for help. They had emotional, spiritual and physical needs that she was there to help with. At the end of the second week, she said she sat down and her three-year-old daughter said, “Mom, just sit with me. You’re so busy all the time.”
She said it was eye opening that her toddler recognized she needed rest and she, herself, had not recognized it.
Whether you worked this past weekend because you had to or you just “rested” with that phone in hand, I hope you’ll take some time soon to truly rest. Figure out what rests your mind and go do it. (A vacation is not always the answer. I’ve been on vacations where I come back even more exhausted.) For me, it’s zoning out to TV for a few hours. I don’t do it often, but when I do, I’ve learned to not listen to any shaming about it. People who tell you how bad TV is for you don’t know how peaceful it is for me. My brain can go somewhere else for a bit and that’s the only way it rests. It’s different for everyone, but I hope you find what helps you rest and embrace it.
