We built our businesses for freedom—but it’s easy to forget we’re the ones who get to choose what that looks like.
In this episode, we’re talking about building breaks and sabbaths into real life—like how Becky planned her postpartum time off and how Laurie gave her team December off last year.
Together, we’re unpacking how rest can be strategic, time can be led with wisdom, and seasons can actually serve the life we’re building.
Here’s what we’re covering:
- How to lead with emotional intelligence in how we plan and protect time
- The difference between rest that restores and rest that distracts
- What we learned from planning intentional time off (and what we’d do differently)
- Practical ways to design seasons that fit your real life and business
Links Mentioned:
Get Your Free Action Guide: A Smart Soulful Rhythm Reset Planner
Join the Smart Soulful Business Facebook Community:
www.smartbusiness.thrivecart.com/soulful-strategy-community
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Listen On:
007: You’re the Boss of Your Time: Breaks, Sabbaths & Seasons That Work for You & Your Business
Becky Brown 0:01
If you’re a Christian woman building a business and want it to be purposeful and profitable, we’ve got you covered. I’m Becky,
Laurie Graham 0:08
And I’m Laurie. We have both built successful businesses that we love without losing our faith, humor, or our sanity. This is Smart, Soulful Business.
Becky Brown 0:17
Real conversations to help your business fit your life and not the other way around.
Laurie Graham 0:26
Hey, welcome back to Smart, Soulful Business with Becky and Laurie.
Becky Brown 0:31
Together, we help Christian women build businesses that are soulful, strategic, and successful without losing who they are in the process.
Laurie Graham 0:39
Becky and I built our businesses individually to add something good to our lives, not more stress, not more struggle, not more confusion, not more weight. It’s not like, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I want to add a business so I can have more stress in my life,” right? Both of us, starting out, have really different stories, but we both built our businesses to add good stuff to our lives. And we know you’re doing this too, right, whether it’s money because we need to pay our bills, whether it’s significance or impact, like maybe God’s laid something on your heart, or even just adding joy. That’s one of the reasons I got started: my life was in a place, and I was like, “I just want to do something fun for me.” And so no matter why you’re starting, or in the middle, or doing what you’re doing, it’s really easy to forget that we’re the ones who get to decide what this looks like.
Laurie Graham 1:32
In this episode, Becky and I are super excited to be talking about breaks, sabbaticals, and seasons that work for you and for your business. We’re going to share about Becky planning her postpartum time off, which, by the way, I thought was amazing. Becky, I could not believe the way that you set it up, and how much time you took off without adding—oh, it was just, it was so cool—and without impacting your bottom line, really, which I thought was amazing. We’re going to talk about how my team took the entire month of December off last year. It was amazing.
Laurie Graham 2:06
So this episode is all about creating rhythms that honor your values, your people (not just if you have a team, but the people in your lives, your family, your friends), and also your own capacity.
Laurie Graham 2:17
This week’s free action guide is called Design Your Next Rest Season. I’m highlighting this at the beginning. We will talk about it at the end, but I just want wherever you’re listening to know that every episode is coming with a free download because we don’t want you just listening and saying, “Rah, rah, that’s good.” We actually want to impact lives. We want to help your life get better. We want to help you apply what you’re learning so that you can experience the freedom and even the rest and joy that we feel in our businesses.
Laurie Graham 2:46
So whether you’re listening from a place of just starting your business, thinking about it, maybe you’re years in, you have something already successful, and you’re going through some redefining systems or seasons, this conversation is so important, because if you’re just getting started, learn from us. Skip the mistakes we’ve made, because it is so easy to get in there, build a business, and realize we ended up recreating the same grind or stress or weight that we were actually trying to escape. Sometimes, it’s almost like we swapped one boss for 100 invisible ones instead, you know, the demands that we have when we are dealing with our audience, or social media feedback, or our own expectations on what we’re creating, especially our own inner critic.
Laurie Graham 3:38
Okay, so Becky, let’s dive in. Why do you think it’s so hard for women, and I really think especially women who technically can choose our time, why is it so hard for us to design something that gives us permission for the joy and the rest and the ease that we wish we would have?
Becky Brown 3:59
Okay, so one of the things I realized along the way, not early on, not when I first started, is that I was the only one who could and should decide the boundaries in my own business. I had come from a whole lifetime where I was used to relying on my job description or my boss or my specific position. I was used to somebody else setting those boundaries for me: “These are your work hours. This is when you go home. This is what’s expected of you while you’re here, and then you’re done.” I was used to following somebody else’s directions. So, me defining the directions—that was new for me. That was a new skill for me.
Becky Brown 4:35
But the kinds of businesses that we’re building—and this was an important realization for me, too—the businesses that don’t fit an eight-to-five with the boundary of clocking out and going home at five o’clock… these businesses can be black holes. They can take everything that we allow them to take and suck us completely dry. So, it doesn’t shock me at all when I see burnout all over the place. I experience it, too, when, like you said, the tables get flipped, and all of a sudden, like, you know, you and I, we talk about it all the time: we’re our own worst critic, and we set expectations for ourselves way higher than other people do for us. So, it’s no wonder that when we are our own boss, we are just working into this black hole that’s taking everything from us, and the demands just never stop.
Laurie Graham 5:28
So, yeah, you know, I want to just jump in. I’m totally interrupting you, because as you’re talking, I’m like, the reason we do this is because it’s how our brain works. Our first inclination is to go with what we’ve seen, right? So, if we’ve seen eight-to-five, nine-to-ten, twelve-hour days—”this is what makes us successful”—then when we go to create something that we’re in charge of, we normally pattern off of what we’ve seen. We’ll have to do a whole podcast someday on the Industrial Revolution, because there’s nothing magical about this eight-to-five or 40-hour workweek. But I think because we’ve seen it, you know, we think we’re creating something new, but we go back to these patterns of what we’ve seen because we think that’s what it should be.
Becky Brown 6:15
It’s such a good point of, like, “Full-time work, that is what a job looks like. Full-time means you have to be working 40 hours a week for your business to be successful.” That’s such an interesting thing. And these boundaries that we’re talking about here, it’s not a purely practical thing. It’s not like, “Oh well, we should just be setting these like, ‘Oh, my business ends at five o’clock every day and I’m done.'” It’s not purely practical. There’s an emotional edge here to setting these boundaries.
Becky Brown 6:40
So, your question for me of, “Why do you think it’s so hard for us to give ourselves permission to actually rest?” Part of that is because we have these things in our heads telling us, “Well, if you stop now, then you’re just being lazy.” “Well, if you decide to be a mom here, that’s you being irresponsible with your business.” “If you haven’t finished this thing on your list…” We have these judgments that we hold against ourselves when we’re not meeting these unspoken expectations that you were just talking about, of “this is what a responsible business looks like.” And so, I think there’s a lot to it, as to why we do that.
Laurie Graham 7:21
Yeah, oh, for sure. And it often feels like resting or taking more time is harder than actually working. It just feels hard.
Laurie Graham 7:29
So let’s jump ahead a little bit, Becky. Why can this change everything when we actually implement something different? Why does this change everything? Or why could it change everything? I just think of most people listening right now, and us too in most of our lives, right? We get to this place where “this is just what it is.” But you and I have seen different.
Becky Brown 7:53
We absolutely have. We’ve experienced the difference now. When we build these real breaks and actual rhythms into our business, everything changes—our clarity, our creativity, and even the way we lead our teams, our audience, our members, whatever that is.
Becky Brown 8:09
Rest is not lazy; it’s leadership. It’s like modeling a different way. And again: Rest isn’t lazy, it’s leadership, and it teaches our team and our members and our clients and our families that we value sustainability over hustle. You and I always talk about we bristle at hustle culture.
Becky Brown 8:29
But I want to get super practical, because you started this episode by bringing up two specific examples, and one of them was you allowing your team to take all of December off. What shifted for your team when they saw you take all of December off, when they got to take all of December off?
Laurie Graham 8:46
You know, let me just give a little background to this. Last year was hard, like emotionally hard. Every single one of my team members—I have a couple employees and contract workers and myself personally—we just had really hard personal things going on in our lives, every one of us individually, and it was wearing on us. I talked to you about this maybe mid-year, Becky, I’m like, “Gosh, what do we do?” And you had mentioned somebody that you follow who takes… do you remember who that was?
Becky Brown 9:24
… Takes a month off of social media, June and December, I think.
Laurie Graham 9:27
And that’s the mainstay of her business. And it was like, “Well, if she can do that, could we do that?” And I was like, “What if I took, like, for me, the month of December off? What if I gave my whole team the month of December off?” I remember thinking of school teachers. Well, school teachers have a rhythm. They have, you know, June and July off, and they have a longer Christmas break. Why do we feel like we have to push through, right?
Laurie Graham 9:51
And so we planned. We planned ahead, and it looked possible. We prescheduled things. We recorded podcasts early. One of the things I saw shift in my team is like our work rhythms shifted. Like, “Oh, we can plan ahead more. Oh, we could take December off.” It was pretty beautiful. I think they felt honored. I felt like I was honoring myself. I ended up not taking the whole four weeks off, but I worked a lot less on the couple weeks that I did work, and then I took more time off. What can I say? It felt like we were almost giving ourselves our power back.
Becky Brown 10:34
The way you talked to me about it was like you were so happy. It was like the best gift that you could give your team was this space, time, break to kind of reset for what you guys had planned next. It was a beautiful gift. It was beautiful.
Laurie Graham 10:52
I needed it! You’re talking about your team, but I needed it. And after that happened, quite honestly, what I’m looking forward to soon—which I know we don’t have it planned out, but I know I’ve talked to you about it, Becky—is I want to work into a rhythm where I have the month of June off every year and the month of December off every year. I want to work into that rhythm for me and my team. And we probably will have a team member who’s doing customer service or things in those months, but they’ll get a different time off. I think it’s renewing. I think it’s important. I think it’s so godly. And then when we come back, it’s like, “Wow, that worked! I can take more time off.”
Laurie Graham 11:32
Becky, for you, talk about planning for rest. You can talk about your postpartum thing here, if you want, or just other rhythms that you have in your life now. But how does planning for rest change how you lead now—yourself, your team, your family, wherever you want to go with that word?
Becky Brown 11:52
And I think we’re talking—again, there’s not enough space in one podcast to tell you about all the things—because I think you and I build daily rest in, weekly rest, and monthly rest, differently than we ever have. But I think today, let’s just focus on these two big seasons of rest that we intentionally built for ourselves in our business.
Becky Brown 12:11
You know, talking about my postpartum story, there were so many… like, these are the things that are really challenging: living into the freedoms that we’re building our businesses for. I built my business to have the flexibility for me to be a stay-at-home mom. No, it’s a work-from-home mom, right? It’s not the same thing as being totally stay-at-home. But postpartum was kind of the kickoff for that. I had worked regularly all the time up until that point in my life. And so preparing for postpartum was a really new, different thing for me.
Becky Brown 12:46
I knew that I had to get really organized with all of the pieces of my business, which is always a helpful, good thing. And I also had to get really honest with myself about what I actually could do and the things that I needed to be okay letting go of. I started out by creating this really, really good list, and I kind of prioritized it by the things that made the biggest impacts on my business. And then I created systems.
Becky Brown 13:14
And I guess one of the things that I really want to point out here is that this was not easy, clear, somebody-told-me-what-to-do, and I felt totally fine with it. At the time, I was running two businesses. I had my own website, with posts, with Pinterest, with social media—I had all of that going on, products—at the same time as I was running this other business. I had a membership. I had courses. When you run a membership, you’re expected to show up regularly. But I also had a business partner at the time, and I absolutely struggled with guilt, expecting her to keep showing up when I couldn’t, right?
Becky Brown 13:55
Like, there was a season postpartum where I had a colicky baby. I’m not going to lie and say my postpartum time off work season was all restful. It wasn’t restful at all. I wasn’t sleeping. Colicky baby. It was challenging. And being able to step back from my business during that time because of all the work I had done to prepare for that, it was like you talk about the space and the gift of that. It was a gift.
Laurie Graham 14:22
That’s what was in my head. I was like, it’s such a gift.
Becky Brown 14:25
It was everything I needed during that season, so that I could be present, not only for myself—my physical healing, my emotional and mental healing from all of that—but also be present with this baby who really needed me to be present, fully present with him. And, you know, this was also during COVID, and so my husband was going out of town to work crazy things that wasn’t the plan before. And so there were all these things out of control, but I had more space to navigate it and manage it because of these very specific plans and order and organization. I kind of brought some chaos into order during that season of my life.
Becky Brown 15:02
And like you said, the best part about that is that I proved to myself that it was possible. I proved to myself that I can step away and my business can keep running and keep earning money. It’s not perfect, and it’s possible.
Laurie Graham 15:16
You know, I remember watching you do that. I remember seeing it and going, “How can she do this? Is this possible in our lives? Right, in our running our own business lives?” And I really believe your modeling that for me is what encouraged me or made me think that it would be possible for me to take a month off. Because how much time did you take off, Becky? Three months. Three whole months. So if Becky could take three months off, I really believe when we see other people exemplify something, we’re like, “Oh, I can do that. Oh, I can do that.”
Laurie Graham 15:52
And I think that’s hopefully part of what we’re doing with Smart, Soulful Business. I want women to go, “I can actually enjoy my business. I can have fun. I can be successful. I can love Jesus. I can have time for my family. I can take trips.” And I don’t have to be in this—I always hate the word hustle, but sometimes I can’t think of a better word for it—like I don’t have to be in this stressful, heavy place while I build my business.
Becky Brown 16:21
And, you know, one of the things that came to mind as you were just talking was that this time off… sometimes it feels like, “Oh my goodness, I am putting a brick on my business, like I’m stopping everything. This break will stop all momentum I’ve built here.” And that’s not what happens, right? It’s the opposite! Yeah, yeah. So I would say the time off that we are talking about here, the December off, did not slow your business’s momentum; it actually increased it. That’s absolutely what happened after that. And it’s so important to remember that and reset our expectations, challenge what we assume to be true about things like that.
Laurie Graham 17:09
I want to talk about that for just a minute, because you and I talk about making decisions from a place of fear or a place of trust, you know. And we talk about a lot of different nuances with that. But I remember trying to plan December, and I did have some fear. I was like, “What if…” And the fear of slowing my business down, or not showing up the same on social media, not answering emails as quickly as I used to. None of the things I feared actually happened. And when you said it didn’t slow your momentum, it increased it. Part of that was my own capacity and free thinking. Like, my creativity, my dreams about my business—when we clear out the stress and the grind and the schedules, our brains kind of clear out in a different way.
Laurie Graham 17:55
And I want to say I’m looking forward to taking more breaks. The more breaks I take, the more space I create in my own business—for myself, for my team—the happier we are. And I believe I hear God more clearly. I believe I have better creative ideas. I trust my intuition more. So these breaks and these seasons are so important. And you and I talk about emotional intelligence or emotional awareness, being in tune with how God uses our emotions. When we are not taking breaks, our emotions get so messed up.
Becky Brown 18:39
Yeah, well, and okay, so you and I, we’re mentioning often, we went through this together. You went through the postpartum with me, and I was with you, like we were talking about you taking this break off. So naming your season and allowing it to fit your life—this is where emotional intelligence meets strategy. When you can name your season and let your capacity, your actual capacity (not your hope for your capacity), guide your pace of your business, instead of guilt or comparison or fear, like we were just talking about, that is really, really huge.
Becky Brown 19:18
So, all right, Laurie, how do you tell the difference between needing a break or just needing more motivation to keep going in your business and power through and do the things?
Laurie Graham 19:29
That’s really funny, because I need a break all the time. I’m a worker. It’s like I always need breaks. I call myself lazy sometimes internally, right, when I’m taking a break. But the reality is, I prefer to be working. I prefer to be making an impact. I prefer to be—I talk about being a light, you know. And so I need breaks often. And so for me, it’s not even a matter of what do I need in the moment? It’s instead of being reactive, it’s planning ahead.
Becky Brown 20:02
Ooh, I love that.
Laurie Graham 20:04
So for me, I can’t even trust how I feel in the moment. I’m super ADHD. I always need breaks. I always need motivation, you know. So for me, it’s the planning the rhythms ahead of time and having people in my life like you who says, “Hey, Laurie, you didn’t sleep well. Let that go.” It’s almost sticking to rhythms that I plan. So I need rhythms planned ahead of time, honestly, because I think my brain almost always needs a break.
Becky Brown 20:30
So rest for you, instead of being reactive, needs to be proactive. It needs to kind of be pre-planned. That’s the word.
Laurie Graham 20:42
So Becky, let’s get super practical. We want to wrap up this podcast in about five minutes. Y’all, we’re challenging ourselves to try to keep episodes to 25 minutes. And because this is new, Becky, can you tell everybody why we’re trying to keep the episodes to 25 minutes?
Becky Brown 20:58
Yeah. So we want this to fit into your life. We want to try to be focused, and we value your time highly. And so, yeah, we want to make the most of it, and we want you to have time to not only consume the information, but go get the action guide and put it into practice. So that’s really important for us to honor your time in this and give you a good bang for your investment of time here.
Laurie Graham 21:20
Yeah, as we dive into Smart, Soulful Business, what we just did right there, to me, I’m picturing a book, and when there’s like a sidebar, like, we want to model what we’re teaching. Yeah, we want to be showing you how to build what you want to build, you know, with your own adaptations and things. But I think it’s kind of cool to say, “Hey, this is why we’re doing this. We’re going to try to keep these to 25 minutes.” We both have kind of listened back to our episodes. We’re like, “Gosh, we’re just a little long.” So let’s get more focused. Let’s really look at what we’re talking about and the impact we want to have and what we want to leave you with, right?
Laurie Graham 21:55
So as we’re talking about what rhythms are working for you now, Becky, can you just dive into a little bit of what’s working for you, and then we’ll get into recapping and give everybody a push forward here?
Becky Brown 22:08
Yeah, for sure. So this kind of pulls back from the big season planning to just the daily rhythm that I’m in right now. With young kids in my house, where I am a work-from-home mom and they’re here a lot of the time, so I have nap time working sessions right now. And full disclosure, my five-year-old has some screen time and time alone during that time that sometimes I don’t feel totally okay with, but it’s what supports both motherhood and working to support my family in this season.
Becky Brown 22:41
My Sundays are off work completely. I don’t even open my computer. I try to stay off of social media, all of those things. And I want to add in here that I try to be just as intentional with my relationships, with my momming, with my being a wife, as I do with work. So I rarely work in the evenings, and I try to build intentional connection time in with my kids. I have a night a week that I cook with each of my boys. My husband, one of the things that he just enjoys with me is watching TV together after the kids go to bed. And so even though I technically have space there that I could fill with work, I’ve chosen not to, to honor the relationships in my life. So that’s just a glimpse of the work-life balance rhythm that I’ve created for this season. That’s kind of where we are right now.
Laurie Graham 23:25
And I’m in such a different season because I’m an empty nester. You know, my kids randomly call at the worst times ever about bigger things, you know, in their 20s—bigger issues and health stuff and job stuff. And it’s so different than having a three- and five-year-old. But some of the things for me that are newer, even in this season, even though I can work long hours, I’m shutting my computer in the evenings.
Laurie Graham 23:51
I am making a lot more space to talk to friends, even if they’re far away. I’m also planning more weekends off. Like this weekend is off. This coming weekend is off because I have a really great friend who I’m going to spend time with, who’s coming in from out of town. And I’m just excited to have that space. So when I get off here, I’ve got two hours, and I’m done, until that weekend is over, and to be able to just shelve something out of my mind and know that it’s okay. It’s going to be what it is, and I’m going to return to it. And looking forward to planning next year, I’m already planning on how I can take June off and December off again. So, now and later and in it, right?
Laurie Graham 24:34
So, okay, let’s get to our little recap here.
Becky Brown 24:37
Okay, all right, so here’s what we covered today: Rest and rhythm are leadership decisions, proactive leadership decisions. Breaks can be strategic and intentional, and the best seasons are the ones that actually fit your real life, your real capacity.
Laurie Graham 24:53
I love that. And this week’s Action Guide is called, Design Your Next Rest Season. Please download this, use it, work through it, reflect on it. It’s a simple rhythm reset planner to help you look ahead, spot what’s coming up in your life—not what’s happening in Becky’s or my life, not our rhythms—but to really look at your real life and design some rest that actually works for you and your business.
Laurie Graham 25:21
So if you want some help designing these rhythms that fit your real life, and you want some real-time, real-life support, please come join us inside the Soulful Strategy Community. We share tools, conversations, and encouragement for building a business that actually feels like the life that you wanted in the first place, right? So you can find a link for that. Definitely check us out at smartsoulfulbusiness.com.
Laurie Graham 25:21
We’ll drop the link to join the Soulful Strategy Community in the show notes, but let’s keep designing the lives that we want to be living. Right? Yes, all right. Go team! Go team!
Becky Brown 0:01
If you’re a Christian woman building a business and want it to be purposeful and profitable, we’ve got you covered. I’m Becky,
Laurie Graham 0:08
And I’m Laurie. We have both built successful businesses that we love without losing our faith, humor, or our sanity. This is Smart, Soulful Business.
Becky Brown 0:17
Real conversations to help your business fit your life and not the other way around.
Laurie Graham 0:26
Hey, welcome back to Smart, Soulful Business with Becky and Laurie.
Becky Brown 0:31
Together, we help Christian women build businesses that are soulful, strategic, and successful without losing who they are in the process.
Laurie Graham 0:39
Becky and I built our businesses individually to add something good to our lives, not more stress, not more struggle, not more confusion, not more weight. It’s not like, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I want to add a business so I can have more stress in my life,” right? Both of us, starting out, have really different stories, but we both built our businesses to add good stuff to our lives. And we know you’re doing this too, right, whether it’s money because we need to pay our bills, whether it’s significance or impact, like maybe God’s laid something on your heart, or even just adding joy. That’s one of the reasons I got started: my life was in a place, and I was like, “I just want to do something fun for me.” And so no matter why you’re starting, or in the middle, or doing what you’re doing, it’s really easy to forget that we’re the ones who get to decide what this looks like.
Laurie Graham 1:32
In this episode, Becky and I are super excited to be talking about breaks, sabbaticals, and seasons that work for you and for your business. We’re going to share about Becky planning her postpartum time off, which, by the way, I thought was amazing. Becky, I could not believe the way that you set it up, and how much time you took off without adding—oh, it was just, it was so cool—and without impacting your bottom line, really, which I thought was amazing. We’re going to talk about how my team took the entire month of December off last year. It was amazing.
Laurie Graham 2:06
So this episode is all about creating rhythms that honor your values, your people (not just if you have a team, but the people in your lives, your family, your friends), and also your own capacity.
Laurie Graham 2:17
This week’s free action guide is called Design Your Next Rest Season. I’m highlighting this at the beginning. We will talk about it at the end, but I just want wherever you’re listening to know that every episode is coming with a free download because we don’t want you just listening and saying, “Rah, rah, that’s good.” We actually want to impact lives. We want to help your life get better. We want to help you apply what you’re learning so that you can experience the freedom and even the rest and joy that we feel in our businesses.
Laurie Graham 2:46
So whether you’re listening from a place of just starting your business, thinking about it, maybe you’re years in, you have something already successful, and you’re going through some redefining systems or seasons, this conversation is so important, because if you’re just getting started, learn from us. Skip the mistakes we’ve made, because it is so easy to get in there, build a business, and realize we ended up recreating the same grind or stress or weight that we were actually trying to escape. Sometimes, it’s almost like we swapped one boss for 100 invisible ones instead, you know, the demands that we have when we are dealing with our audience, or social media feedback, or our own expectations on what we’re creating, especially our own inner critic.
Laurie Graham 3:38
Okay, so Becky, let’s dive in. Why do you think it’s so hard for women, and I really think especially women who technically can choose our time, why is it so hard for us to design something that gives us permission for the joy and the rest and the ease that we wish we would have?
Becky Brown 3:59
Okay, so one of the things I realized along the way, not early on, not when I first started, is that I was the only one who could and should decide the boundaries in my own business. I had come from a whole lifetime where I was used to relying on my job description or my boss or my specific position. I was used to somebody else setting those boundaries for me: “These are your work hours. This is when you go home. This is what’s expected of you while you’re here, and then you’re done.” I was used to following somebody else’s directions. So, me defining the directions—that was new for me. That was a new skill for me.
Becky Brown 4:35
But the kinds of businesses that we’re building—and this was an important realization for me, too—the businesses that don’t fit an eight-to-five with the boundary of clocking out and going home at five o’clock… these businesses can be black holes. They can take everything that we allow them to take and suck us completely dry. So, it doesn’t shock me at all when I see burnout all over the place. I experience it, too, when, like you said, the tables get flipped, and all of a sudden, like, you know, you and I, we talk about it all the time: we’re our own worst critic, and we set expectations for ourselves way higher than other people do for us. So, it’s no wonder that when we are our own boss, we are just working into this black hole that’s taking everything from us, and the demands just never stop.
Laurie Graham 5:28
So, yeah, you know, I want to just jump in. I’m totally interrupting you, because as you’re talking, I’m like, the reason we do this is because it’s how our brain works. Our first inclination is to go with what we’ve seen, right? So, if we’ve seen eight-to-five, nine-to-ten, twelve-hour days—”this is what makes us successful”—then when we go to create something that we’re in charge of, we normally pattern off of what we’ve seen. We’ll have to do a whole podcast someday on the Industrial Revolution, because there’s nothing magical about this eight-to-five or 40-hour workweek. But I think because we’ve seen it, you know, we think we’re creating something new, but we go back to these patterns of what we’ve seen because we think that’s what it should be.
Becky Brown 6:15
It’s such a good point of, like, “Full-time work, that is what a job looks like. Full-time means you have to be working 40 hours a week for your business to be successful.” That’s such an interesting thing. And these boundaries that we’re talking about here, it’s not a purely practical thing. It’s not like, “Oh well, we should just be setting these like, ‘Oh, my business ends at five o’clock every day and I’m done.'” It’s not purely practical. There’s an emotional edge here to setting these boundaries.
Becky Brown 6:40
So, your question for me of, “Why do you think it’s so hard for us to give ourselves permission to actually rest?” Part of that is because we have these things in our heads telling us, “Well, if you stop now, then you’re just being lazy.” “Well, if you decide to be a mom here, that’s you being irresponsible with your business.” “If you haven’t finished this thing on your list…” We have these judgments that we hold against ourselves when we’re not meeting these unspoken expectations that you were just talking about, of “this is what a responsible business looks like.” And so, I think there’s a lot to it, as to why we do that.
Laurie Graham 7:21
Yeah, oh, for sure. And it often feels like resting or taking more time is harder than actually working. It just feels hard.
Laurie Graham 7:29
So let’s jump ahead a little bit, Becky. Why can this change everything when we actually implement something different? Why does this change everything? Or why could it change everything? I just think of most people listening right now, and us too in most of our lives, right? We get to this place where “this is just what it is.” But you and I have seen different.
Becky Brown 7:53
We absolutely have. We’ve experienced the difference now. When we build these real breaks and actual rhythms into our business, everything changes—our clarity, our creativity, and even the way we lead our teams, our audience, our members, whatever that is.
Becky Brown 8:09
Rest is not lazy; it’s leadership. It’s like modeling a different way. And again: Rest isn’t lazy, it’s leadership, and it teaches our team and our members and our clients and our families that we value sustainability over hustle. You and I always talk about we bristle at hustle culture.
Becky Brown 8:29
But I want to get super practical, because you started this episode by bringing up two specific examples, and one of them was you allowing your team to take all of December off. What shifted for your team when they saw you take all of December off, when they got to take all of December off?
Laurie Graham 8:46
You know, let me just give a little background to this. Last year was hard, like emotionally hard. Every single one of my team members—I have a couple employees and contract workers and myself personally—we just had really hard personal things going on in our lives, every one of us individually, and it was wearing on us. I talked to you about this maybe mid-year, Becky, I’m like, “Gosh, what do we do?” And you had mentioned somebody that you follow who takes… do you remember who that was?
Becky Brown 9:24
… Takes a month off of social media, June and December, I think.
Laurie Graham 9:27
And that’s the mainstay of her business. And it was like, “Well, if she can do that, could we do that?” And I was like, “What if I took, like, for me, the month of December off? What if I gave my whole team the month of December off?” I remember thinking of school teachers. Well, school teachers have a rhythm. They have, you know, June and July off, and they have a longer Christmas break. Why do we feel like we have to push through, right?
Laurie Graham 9:51
And so we planned. We planned ahead, and it looked possible. We prescheduled things. We recorded podcasts early. One of the things I saw shift in my team is like our work rhythms shifted. Like, “Oh, we can plan ahead more. Oh, we could take December off.” It was pretty beautiful. I think they felt honored. I felt like I was honoring myself. I ended up not taking the whole four weeks off, but I worked a lot less on the couple weeks that I did work, and then I took more time off. What can I say? It felt like we were almost giving ourselves our power back.
Becky Brown 10:34
The way you talked to me about it was like you were so happy. It was like the best gift that you could give your team was this space, time, break to kind of reset for what you guys had planned next. It was a beautiful gift. It was beautiful.
Laurie Graham 10:52
I needed it! You’re talking about your team, but I needed it. And after that happened, quite honestly, what I’m looking forward to soon—which I know we don’t have it planned out, but I know I’ve talked to you about it, Becky—is I want to work into a rhythm where I have the month of June off every year and the month of December off every year. I want to work into that rhythm for me and my team. And we probably will have a team member who’s doing customer service or things in those months, but they’ll get a different time off. I think it’s renewing. I think it’s important. I think it’s so godly. And then when we come back, it’s like, “Wow, that worked! I can take more time off.”
Laurie Graham 11:32
Becky, for you, talk about planning for rest. You can talk about your postpartum thing here, if you want, or just other rhythms that you have in your life now. But how does planning for rest change how you lead now—yourself, your team, your family, wherever you want to go with that word?
Becky Brown 11:52
And I think we’re talking—again, there’s not enough space in one podcast to tell you about all the things—because I think you and I build daily rest in, weekly rest, and monthly rest, differently than we ever have. But I think today, let’s just focus on these two big seasons of rest that we intentionally built for ourselves in our business.
Becky Brown 12:11
You know, talking about my postpartum story, there were so many… like, these are the things that are really challenging: living into the freedoms that we’re building our businesses for. I built my business to have the flexibility for me to be a stay-at-home mom. No, it’s a work-from-home mom, right? It’s not the same thing as being totally stay-at-home. But postpartum was kind of the kickoff for that. I had worked regularly all the time up until that point in my life. And so preparing for postpartum was a really new, different thing for me.
Becky Brown 12:46
I knew that I had to get really organized with all of the pieces of my business, which is always a helpful, good thing. And I also had to get really honest with myself about what I actually could do and the things that I needed to be okay letting go of. I started out by creating this really, really good list, and I kind of prioritized it by the things that made the biggest impacts on my business. And then I created systems.
Becky Brown 13:14
And I guess one of the things that I really want to point out here is that this was not easy, clear, somebody-told-me-what-to-do, and I felt totally fine with it. At the time, I was running two businesses. I had my own website, with posts, with Pinterest, with social media—I had all of that going on, products—at the same time as I was running this other business. I had a membership. I had courses. When you run a membership, you’re expected to show up regularly. But I also had a business partner at the time, and I absolutely struggled with guilt, expecting her to keep showing up when I couldn’t, right?
Becky Brown 13:55
Like, there was a season postpartum where I had a colicky baby. I’m not going to lie and say my postpartum time off work season was all restful. It wasn’t restful at all. I wasn’t sleeping. Colicky baby. It was challenging. And being able to step back from my business during that time because of all the work I had done to prepare for that, it was like you talk about the space and the gift of that. It was a gift.
Laurie Graham 14:22
That’s what was in my head. I was like, it’s such a gift.
Becky Brown 14:25
It was everything I needed during that season, so that I could be present, not only for myself—my physical healing, my emotional and mental healing from all of that—but also be present with this baby who really needed me to be present, fully present with him. And, you know, this was also during COVID, and so my husband was going out of town to work crazy things that wasn’t the plan before. And so there were all these things out of control, but I had more space to navigate it and manage it because of these very specific plans and order and organization. I kind of brought some chaos into order during that season of my life.
Becky Brown 15:02
And like you said, the best part about that is that I proved to myself that it was possible. I proved to myself that I can step away and my business can keep running and keep earning money. It’s not perfect, and it’s possible.
Laurie Graham 15:16
You know, I remember watching you do that. I remember seeing it and going, “How can she do this? Is this possible in our lives? Right, in our running our own business lives?” And I really believe your modeling that for me is what encouraged me or made me think that it would be possible for me to take a month off. Because how much time did you take off, Becky? Three months. Three whole months. So if Becky could take three months off, I really believe when we see other people exemplify something, we’re like, “Oh, I can do that. Oh, I can do that.”
Laurie Graham 15:52
And I think that’s hopefully part of what we’re doing with Smart, Soulful Business. I want women to go, “I can actually enjoy my business. I can have fun. I can be successful. I can love Jesus. I can have time for my family. I can take trips.” And I don’t have to be in this—I always hate the word hustle, but sometimes I can’t think of a better word for it—like I don’t have to be in this stressful, heavy place while I build my business.
Becky Brown 16:21
And, you know, one of the things that came to mind as you were just talking was that this time off… sometimes it feels like, “Oh my goodness, I am putting a brick on my business, like I’m stopping everything. This break will stop all momentum I’ve built here.” And that’s not what happens, right? It’s the opposite! Yeah, yeah. So I would say the time off that we are talking about here, the December off, did not slow your business’s momentum; it actually increased it. That’s absolutely what happened after that. And it’s so important to remember that and reset our expectations, challenge what we assume to be true about things like that.
Laurie Graham 17:09
I want to talk about that for just a minute, because you and I talk about making decisions from a place of fear or a place of trust, you know. And we talk about a lot of different nuances with that. But I remember trying to plan December, and I did have some fear. I was like, “What if…” And the fear of slowing my business down, or not showing up the same on social media, not answering emails as quickly as I used to. None of the things I feared actually happened. And when you said it didn’t slow your momentum, it increased it. Part of that was my own capacity and free thinking. Like, my creativity, my dreams about my business—when we clear out the stress and the grind and the schedules, our brains kind of clear out in a different way.
Laurie Graham 17:55
And I want to say I’m looking forward to taking more breaks. The more breaks I take, the more space I create in my own business—for myself, for my team—the happier we are. And I believe I hear God more clearly. I believe I have better creative ideas. I trust my intuition more. So these breaks and these seasons are so important. And you and I talk about emotional intelligence or emotional awareness, being in tune with how God uses our emotions. When we are not taking breaks, our emotions get so messed up.
Becky Brown 18:39
Yeah, well, and okay, so you and I, we’re mentioning often, we went through this together. You went through the postpartum with me, and I was with you, like we were talking about you taking this break off. So naming your season and allowing it to fit your life—this is where emotional intelligence meets strategy. When you can name your season and let your capacity, your actual capacity (not your hope for your capacity), guide your pace of your business, instead of guilt or comparison or fear, like we were just talking about, that is really, really huge.
Becky Brown 19:18
So, all right, Laurie, how do you tell the difference between needing a break or just needing more motivation to keep going in your business and power through and do the things?
Laurie Graham 19:29
That’s really funny, because I need a break all the time. I’m a worker. It’s like I always need breaks. I call myself lazy sometimes internally, right, when I’m taking a break. But the reality is, I prefer to be working. I prefer to be making an impact. I prefer to be—I talk about being a light, you know. And so I need breaks often. And so for me, it’s not even a matter of what do I need in the moment? It’s instead of being reactive, it’s planning ahead.
Becky Brown 20:02
Ooh, I love that.
Laurie Graham 20:04
So for me, I can’t even trust how I feel in the moment. I’m super ADHD. I always need breaks. I always need motivation, you know. So for me, it’s the planning the rhythms ahead of time and having people in my life like you who says, “Hey, Laurie, you didn’t sleep well. Let that go.” It’s almost sticking to rhythms that I plan. So I need rhythms planned ahead of time, honestly, because I think my brain almost always needs a break.
Becky Brown 20:30
So rest for you, instead of being reactive, needs to be proactive. It needs to kind of be pre-planned. That’s the word.
Laurie Graham 20:42
So Becky, let’s get super practical. We want to wrap up this podcast in about five minutes. Y’all, we’re challenging ourselves to try to keep episodes to 25 minutes. And because this is new, Becky, can you tell everybody why we’re trying to keep the episodes to 25 minutes?
Becky Brown 20:58
Yeah. So we want this to fit into your life. We want to try to be focused, and we value your time highly. And so, yeah, we want to make the most of it, and we want you to have time to not only consume the information, but go get the action guide and put it into practice. So that’s really important for us to honor your time in this and give you a good bang for your investment of time here.
Laurie Graham 21:20
Yeah, as we dive into Smart, Soulful Business, what we just did right there, to me, I’m picturing a book, and when there’s like a sidebar, like, we want to model what we’re teaching. Yeah, we want to be showing you how to build what you want to build, you know, with your own adaptations and things. But I think it’s kind of cool to say, “Hey, this is why we’re doing this. We’re going to try to keep these to 25 minutes.” We both have kind of listened back to our episodes. We’re like, “Gosh, we’re just a little long.” So let’s get more focused. Let’s really look at what we’re talking about and the impact we want to have and what we want to leave you with, right?
Laurie Graham 21:55
So as we’re talking about what rhythms are working for you now, Becky, can you just dive into a little bit of what’s working for you, and then we’ll get into recapping and give everybody a push forward here?
Becky Brown 22:08
Yeah, for sure. So this kind of pulls back from the big season planning to just the daily rhythm that I’m in right now. With young kids in my house, where I am a work-from-home mom and they’re here a lot of the time, so I have nap time working sessions right now. And full disclosure, my five-year-old has some screen time and time alone during that time that sometimes I don’t feel totally okay with, but it’s what supports both motherhood and working to support my family in this season.
Becky Brown 22:41
My Sundays are off work completely. I don’t even open my computer. I try to stay off of social media, all of those things. And I want to add in here that I try to be just as intentional with my relationships, with my momming, with my being a wife, as I do with work. So I rarely work in the evenings, and I try to build intentional connection time in with my kids. I have a night a week that I cook with each of my boys. My husband, one of the things that he just enjoys with me is watching TV together after the kids go to bed. And so even though I technically have space there that I could fill with work, I’ve chosen not to, to honor the relationships in my life. So that’s just a glimpse of the work-life balance rhythm that I’ve created for this season. That’s kind of where we are right now.
Laurie Graham 23:25
And I’m in such a different season because I’m an empty nester. You know, my kids randomly call at the worst times ever about bigger things, you know, in their 20s—bigger issues and health stuff and job stuff. And it’s so different than having a three- and five-year-old. But some of the things for me that are newer, even in this season, even though I can work long hours, I’m shutting my computer in the evenings.
Laurie Graham 23:51
I am making a lot more space to talk to friends, even if they’re far away. I’m also planning more weekends off. Like this weekend is off. This coming weekend is off because I have a really great friend who I’m going to spend time with, who’s coming in from out of town. And I’m just excited to have that space. So when I get off here, I’ve got two hours, and I’m done, until that weekend is over, and to be able to just shelve something out of my mind and know that it’s okay. It’s going to be what it is, and I’m going to return to it. And looking forward to planning next year, I’m already planning on how I can take June off and December off again. So, now and later and in it, right?
Laurie Graham 24:34
So, okay, let’s get to our little recap here.
Becky Brown 24:37
Okay, all right, so here’s what we covered today: Rest and rhythm are leadership decisions, proactive leadership decisions. Breaks can be strategic and intentional, and the best seasons are the ones that actually fit your real life, your real capacity.
Laurie Graham 24:53
I love that. And this week’s Action Guide is called, Design Your Next Rest Season. Please download this, use it, work through it, reflect on it. It’s a simple rhythm reset planner to help you look ahead, spot what’s coming up in your life—not what’s happening in Becky’s or my life, not our rhythms—but to really look at your real life and design some rest that actually works for you and your business.
Laurie Graham 25:21
So if you want some help designing these rhythms that fit your real life, and you want some real-time, real-life support, please come join us inside the Soulful Strategy Community. We share tools, conversations, and encouragement for building a business that actually feels like the life that you wanted in the first place, right? So you can find a link for that. Definitely check us out at smartsoulfulbusiness.com.
Laurie Graham 25:21
We’ll drop the link to join the Soulful Strategy Community in the show notes, but let’s keep designing the lives that we want to be living. Right? Yes, all right. Go team! Go team!
