I'm Sam Wood, and this is your motivational moment for this week, and we are going to, funnily enough, take some time for you to prioritize time for yourself. It came to me while I was recently in Perth over the school holidays. Now our mad family all went over there, all six of us, so I wouldn't say it Sam having a little solo holiday.
But what we did have.
Over there was Snazz's incredible, beautiful family. But what that did was actually gave Snazz and I a little bit of time either together or even alone, where we could hear ourselves think for perhaps the first time in a long time. And it just made me, I guess, think about the power and the value and the importance of
having that alone time. So I did a little bit of research into I guess what the benefits are in having some alone time, because I do I do know from speaking to my clients a lot of them are parents. They often don't think that they have that time available to them, or if they do provide it to themselves or create it for themselves, there's often an element of guilt there. So I did a little bit of digging
and there was one great article. I did find a few, because there's one great article about the benefits of alone time and how it actually improves drastically productivity.
It's exactly sort of as I thought.
I know, when I have my alone time, then when I put the head down, I'm so much more productive because I feel like I've organized my thoughts. You know, I almost feel like the walk I gave myself for the little bit of reading time I gave myself for the whatever.
You know.
Sometimes I sit in my sauna at home and just do some breathing exercises, whatever it might be.
It's you know, it's fifteen minutes.
I'm not talking about it spending two hours by yourself relaxing every single day. But when I do that, it's almost like I metaphorically tidy my desk, and my desk is my brain, if that's makes sense. And therefore, when I do sit down to do some work, I don't spend the first fifteen thirty forty five minutes fartassing around to try and get stuff organized before I actually put pen to paper or ideas down, because I've almost subconsciously or inadvertently done that when I've had that.
Alone time earlier in the day, all the day before.
So the key message here is we often feel like making time for ourselves. And I say making time rather than finding time, because I do think you have to make it, you have to actually be in charge of yourself. So I do think that making time for ourselves is often misconstrued as something that is going to reduce our productivity, because that's time we could have spent doing something else and we chose not to do it. We chose to be alone or find a quiet space or whatever it
might be. And actually the research tells us it does the opposite. So I think the first thing that I'd love you to do or listening to me chat to you now is really think about that and really importantly accept that. You know, I speak to a lot of
mums about you can't pour from an empty cup. You know, they're always trying to do things for other people, but they never fill up their own cup, and therefore they're always trying to pour from an empty cup, and as soon as they're not doing that, they have this overwhelming feeling of guilt that they should be doing something for someone else. So giving yourself some time, some alone time, some peace and quiet, some sanity, will actually help you on the other end.
It doesn't detract, it adds.
And I think that's the really important message that I want you to accept my listener task for you. And I'm sure you're realizing where I'm heading with this, but it's really important. I want you, over the next four weeks to map out when you're going to take some time for yourself, and I want you to be specific, what's the day, what's the time of day, and how long it's going to be for and I want you to program that in and I want you to stick to it, and I want you to find at.
Least fifteen minutes five times a week.
Now, if you want to go for more, if you want to go for thirty minutes seven days a week, great, but I'm trying to be as realistic as possible. I'm trying to make this as achievable for all of us as possible.
And again, you can always lay you can always.
Add to these things later, but as a starting point, fifteen minutes a day, at least five days a week, and you're going to map that out over the next month, over the next four weeks, and it's going to be set in there in stone and I want you to see this through. I'm going to check in with this in four weeks time to see how you've gone