It’s that time of year again! The holidays are upon us, and that means baking cookies, holiday parties, and creating memories with your loved ones. What it doesn’t mean is letting your business suffer for it. You don’t have to turn your business off in order to be fully present with your family.
Taking time away from your business in order to be fully present is the best gift you can give not only to your family but to yourself as well. That’s why in this episode, Kristen is talking about presence for the holidays and what it takes to unplug completely.
Let’s look at a few highlights from this episode:
- What it means to be truly present – with your loved ones as well as yourself
- Kristen’s personal experience of unplugging for an entire week
- How to plan your business around your family’s holiday experience
- The importance of focusing on income-producing activities
- Where discipline and rhythm come into play when scheduling rest
Putting your phone down and walking away for a few hours won’t cause your business to implode. Taking time off requires trust. Not only in your business or the systems you’ve created but also in yourself. It will still be there for you when you get back.
The biggest event of the year is back again! Business Reboot for Social Sellers is the brand new, highly anticipated training series to end your 2022 with a huge bang. Join Kristen LIVE December 26-28 for 3 days of intensive training to help recession-proof your business and show you how to turn your social selling business into a real financial asset. Click here to join in.
Looking for a way to maximize your sales this upcoming holiday season? Then now is the perfect time to download your copy of Kristen’s new Monetize and Maximize Holiday Guide. Inside you’ll find simple and effective strategies designed to turn the last quarter of the year into your best. Click here to buy now.
Thanks for listening! Do you have a question about network marketing? Kristen can help! Drop your question here, and she just might answer it live on the podcast: https://Kristenboss.com/question
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If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out Kristen’s live group coaching program! The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com
Transcript for Episode #141 Presence for the Holidays:
Kristen Boss (00:05): Welcome to Purposeful Social Selling with Kristen Boss. I’m your host Kristen Boss. I’m a mindset and business coach with more than 15 years experience in both the product and service based industry. I believe that social selling is the best business model for people wanting to make an impact while they make serious income. This is the podcast for the social seller who is tired of feeling inauthentic in their business and desires to find a more purposeful and profitable way of growing their business. In today’s social media landscape, in this podcast, you will learn what it takes to grow a sustainable business through impactful and social marketing. It’s time to ditch the hustle and lead from the heart. Let me show you the new way.
Kristen Boss (00:48): Hey friends. Welcome to another episode of the show. I recently just got back from a week long trip with my family. We took the kids to Disneyland and we got to see it all decked out with all the Christmas decorations and my kids got to see all the characters made the princesses. We rode the Star Wars ride, I don’t even know how many times. And it was just such a blast making memories with my family. And let me tell you something, because this does have to do with today’s podcast episode. I have to tell you that I was so delighted to not show up on my social media at all the entire week I was with my family at Disneyland. I didn’t post a single picture anywhere on my social media of my kids doing anything at Disneyland. And it was amazing. And I could’ve taken pictures, I could’ve done my stories and showing where we were going and the food we were having and the experience we were having.
Kristen Boss (01:45): But there was something incredibly precious about all of our experience. And by the way, my phone is totally loaded with pictures and videos, but there was something so precious in a world where we share everything. It felt so precious to have that be truly ours. It wasn’t shared on social media, it was just for us. And for me, it was the ultimate posture of presence with my family. And it was great because I had scheduled. And so if you’re like, okay, wait, how on earth were you able to be fully present for a week? And by the way, I’m recording this particular episode weeks before it’s actually released. And so when we actually went on the week, it was went away. It was the week before huge things were happening in my business and I made a point to batch all my work, delegate with my team, put everything in place.
Kristen Boss (02:42): This is why I preach systems day in and day out, that your systems allow your business to go without you and for people to still be served. And so the point of this episode of this show and kind of why I was sharing the Disneyland story. So I want to talk about the gift of your presence for the holidays, what it means to be truly present with your loved ones, with your family, with your friends, even the gift of being present and fully with yourself. Whether that’s downtime, rest, making memories. And I want you to know that you don’t have to turn your business off in order for you to be fully present with your family over the holiday season. And a lot of people think that’s what they need to do. They’re either either fully with my family or I’m in my business. And in order for me to be me, to be fully with my family, I need to not be in my business.
Kristen Boss (03:39): And that’s kind of all or nothing thinking. And there is a way for you to be fully present with your family without your business suffering. It’s going to take planning. It might mean that you can’t write content on the fly. And I really want you to be thinking about what is the holiday season that I want to have? What is the experience I want to create and why is this important to me? Asking yourself those questions. Because- what you’re doing is you’re framing all of the decisions you’re going to be making around the experience you want. So deciding first, what do I want? But most people, what they do is they make all of the decisions first and then they’re left with settling for what they think they can have based on a poor plan so to speak. They’re like, well, I guess this is my only option.
Kristen Boss (04:28): I can have A, B, or C. Instead of really thinking about, okay, I’m going to make all of my decision making and all of my plan of action, it’s going to be around what I want, the experience I want to create. So with you being fully present for your family this year, I want you to think about what that looks like. Think about all the memories you want to make and write it all down. Do you want to go look at Christmas lights? What are your family traditions that you want to do? What are the most important things for you? You might need to write that down set of we can’t do everything, but these are the most important traditions, the most important experiences we want to have. These are the memories I want to walk away with. And then from that place asking, okay, what do I need to be doing in my business in order to ensure I have that experience?
Kristen Boss (05:15): What do I need to be doing now? Does that look like batching your content? Does it look like waking up early a couple days? Does it look like taking what days off do you need to take? What hours are you going to work? But planning around that. And I also want to offer, what’s interesting is I’ve been talking, I’ve been interviewing a lot of students from the social science academy and they’re going to be sharing their testimonies. And here was a common thread I heard from all of our students that had crazy success, doubled their income, tripled their income. We’ve had a few that quadrupled their income doubled their overall team volume. And all of these things is, I asked my students, I said, Hey, so doubling your income, does that mean you doubled your work hours? And all of them said, no, I just learned to work more efficiently and more smart.
Kristen Boss (06:02): And this is what I teach inside the academy is we cut all the extra noise, all the extra fluff, and we only give you the activities that actually work to grow revenue and income in your business, period. I don’t believe in wasting your time because your time is too precious. So when it comes to your business and your goals, I don’t want you to think that just because you don’t can’t work more hours doesn’t mean you can’t have big goals and really crush it this holiday season. You totally can. It just means you have to be strategic, not waste your time, not scroll around, not mess around. You need to be focusing on only what are the activities that actually move the needle forward in my business that make the most impact. I want you to be thinking about what are the activities where I can leverage the most impact and serve the most people?
Kristen Boss (06:54): Think about that. That’s going live, that’s sending out an email blast, a text blast, maybe doing a video series. I just want you to be thinking what’s impactful, what matters. And then from that place, I really want you to be thinking about how you can trust that your business will always be there. Not from this apathetic place of like, I’m going to disappear for six months and my business won’t suffer. I’m literally talking about how your business will stay intact for you to unplug and be with your family, making memories with them one day at a time where you can take five to six hour windows of time to be with your family, doing the holiday bakes, doing the puzzles. I don’t know what your traditions are, but I know for me, my kids really love puzzles. We have a local hotel we like to go to that has this huge gingerbread house display.
Kristen Boss (07:47): We’ll take them to see that. So there’s a few things that we know are really important. And so I know for me, I have things set up so I am fully present, fully engaged, my phone is away. I’m not sharing it all to social media. And that could look presence, can look different for every person listening to this podcast, what does presence look like for you? What does it look like to be fully present? And again, centering back to what is the experience I want to have? And I will tell you something, it was so sweet. Kind of circling back to Disneyland. It was amazing being fully present and not looking at my phone at all. Not checking my Slack channel, not messaging my team. I was able to capture every sweet moment, every facial expression my kids made on certain rides. Which by the way, funny story, my son we were on the jungle cruise and all of a sudden in the middle of the jungle cruise, he looks over at me, he goes, ma, I lost a tooth.
Kristen Boss (08:45): I was like, wait, what? And he lost a tooth in the middle of the jungle cruise. I was like, I don’t know what kid. And it was his first tooth that he lost. He’s like, I was like, I don’t know what kid loses a tooth at Disneyland on the jungle cruise. And then the very next day we were in line at Big Thunder Railroad or whatever, and next thing I know he spits it, spits out another tooth in his palm. He’s like, mama, I just lost another tooth. I was like, are you kidding? Two teeth at Disneyland, your first two teeth, you lost a Disneyland. What is that about? My son said to me, he’s like, I guess it’s just the magic of Disneyland. So I just love that I was able to make such precious memories and be fully present, fully engaged. And not only that, fully at peace with myself knowing that yes, there’s going to be work to return to when I get home and it’s going to be okay.
Kristen Boss (09:35): And I have also put systems in place so that I can leave for a week. I have put these things in place so that my business can run without me. And so I just want you to problem solve ahead of time as you look over the next couple of weeks and your holiday agenda with all the holiday parties and family coming to town. And I want you to create a plan ahead of time instead of flying by the seat of your pants plan ahead of time. Because with a plan, you actually create more freedom and more peace for yourself. And if for my rebels that are watching this being like, I hate a plan. I feel constricted by a plan, I feel constricted by a schedule. But I would be like, how free do you feel when you’re flying by the seat of your pants and a stress case because you don’t have a plan?
Kristen Boss (10:21): Does that actually feel free to you or now? Do you feel like you are constantly having to respond to the urgency of the now? Does that feel like freedom to you? To me, because I had a well-executed plan, I had total freedom with my children at Disneyland and my husband was even, he looked at me, he is like, babe, he’s like, you are so present. I haven’t seen you go to Facebook once, get lost in your business once. And I’m going to also say, I want to be incredibly transparent here and say this took work for me. Learning to have truly unplugged rest where I wasn’t thinking about my business at all has been something I’ve been working on intentionally for two years. Because there’d be times I would be resting and away from my business, but my brain would be buzzing along with like, okay, what do I need to do and do I need to create that content and yada yada yada.
Kristen Boss (11:16): I would still be mentally engaged with my business on some level, even if I was physically apart from my business and not sitting at my desk. It has taken a lot of time to train my brain to learn the value of fully unplugging, fully resting. During my rest time and during playtime, I was asking one of my mastermind members, I said, Hey, do you have scheduled work hours? And she said, yeah. I said, do you schedule rest and play? And she said, I don’t. I was like, okay, this is your next work. And I know that was true for me too. So my first order of business when it came to managing my time was first establishing business hours. These are my business hours. I’m sticking to my business hours. But then the next rhythm I had to embody in my business was scheduling rest and play.
Kristen Boss (12:05): Because knowing myself, I am somebody who will just work, work, work, work, work. Not because I have this urge to work all the time, it’s just because I truly love what I do and work is really enjoyable for me. But for me, I’ve had to create the rhythm and the discipline. I’ve incorporating rest and play into my schedule. Because for me, if it’s not scheduled, it doesn’t happen. And I’ll just move right into the next productive busy thing because I know that about myself and I’ve had to learn and teach myself new rhythms. So one of my challenges to my students was I said, I really want you to schedule rest and play and I want you to sell yourself on the value of truly unplugged rest. And so I say that in transparency because I don’t want you to judge yourself. If your first step is learning to step away from your business physically and putting the phone down, maybe that is a huge victory for you.
Kristen Boss (13:07): And I don’t want you to judge yourself If you were like, well, I put my phone down, but then I was obsessing and thinking about my customers the whole time, even with my phone down, maybe the first step for you is just putting your phone down and then your work is learning to mentally shut off that part of your brain when you step away from your business. And the best way for you to do that is again, trusting that the work will always be there, that you can trust yourself to execute the work when it’s time to go back to the work. And that nothing catches on fire when you’re gone. Think about the reasons why we have a hard time being fully present in our life and why we want to run to our business. It’s often because we have some sort of disastrous thinking of what if somebody texts me?
Kristen Boss (13:51): What if a customer messaged me? What if my team needs something? What if there’s chaos over there? And yeah, we could live in that reality where we’re constantly afraid of what we think is going to happen or we can live in the posture of trust and certainty knowing like it’s fine. And I know I can trust myself and the business will be waiting for me when I get there and I can trust myself to execute and handle it when I get back. And when you become somebody that’s no longer dealing with urgency all the time, you start to become a fully present person because you’re no longer an urgent impulsive person. So again, with the holidays, I want you to be thinking of how can you gift your family and your loved ones with your presence, with eye contact, with putting the phone down, with being fully engaged in conversations.
Kristen Boss (14:45): And I want to say this too to you as well as I’m adjusting my headphones here I want to want to say this to you as well. I had to repair relationships because I lacked giving people my presence during the holidays for a couple of years, there were friendships and there were relationships that suffered because of my inability to be fully present. I was there in body, but I was not there in mind. I kept my phone on hand at all times. I’d kind of disappear and check social media. And anytime we pick up the phone in front of somebody when they’re having a conversation with us, what we’re saying is this, whatever I have to see here is more important than what you’re telling me here. Every time we pick up the phone, we are saying we are communicating with our body language and with all the non-verbal cues are all of it, the messages.
Kristen Boss (15:51): This is more important than you. Going back to Disneyland, my husband and I, we were coming off the ride auto topia and we were laughing because there was this guy in still on the ride in the auto topia car and he had a gal with him and my husband was like, is he on a date? I’m like, I don’t know. Can’t tell. But it looked like the dude was on a business call, like his body language. And he was on the phone again on the phone talking and being like saying a lot of important things and hand gestures and whatever. It was in the middle of an auto topia ride where there’s like, it’s so loud. If you’ve ever been on that ride, it is the loudest ride because it’s these little go-karts with these engines and it’s so loud. And I look over at my husband, I’m like, what could be so important that he had to answer a call on a Disneyland ride? What could be that important? But this is the message we send to the people we love when we’re picking up our phone at the dinner table, at the family holiday gathering. This is what we’re saying when we pick up the phone, we’re saying clearly this is more important. So if you want to really gift people this holiday season, gift them with your presence. Gift them with your love, gift them with listening ears, with eye contact, with full presence. Because isn’t that what the holiday season is about? Family, friends, I want that for you. So I hope you’ll do that. We’ll catch you in the next episode
Kristen Boss (17:41): That wraps up today’s episode. Hey, if you love today’s show, I would love for you to take a minute and give a rating with a review. If you desire to elevate the social selling industry, that means we need more people listening to this message so that they can know it can be done a different way. And if you are ready to join me, it’s time for you to step into the Social selling Academy where I give you all the tools, training and support to help you realize your goals in the academy. You get weekly live coaching so that you are never lost or stuck in confusion. Whether you are new in the business or have been in the industry for a while, this is the premier coaching program for the modern network marketer. Go to www.thesocialsellingacademy.com to learn more.
