Living FROM Rest-5 Attributes

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This article has been reposted from The Grip on plenteouslife.com.

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Rest is not a place to get to; it’s a place to come from. Regardless of which day of the week you designate as your rest day, I’d like you to start seeing it as Day One from which the following six days will be fueled.

Seeing your rest day as the start rather than the end of your week fundamentally shifts it from being a day to crash in exhaustion to a day intentionally designed to support your wellbeing.

In today’s issue of The Grip, we explore Five Essential Attributes For Designing Weekly Rest. As we work through each attribute, keep two questions in mind: 1-What Will I Do? and 2-What Will I Cease To Do? These two questions, informed by the following five attributes, will equip you to structure your own day of rest.

With that, let’s dive in!

FIVE ESSENTIAL ATTRIBUTES

1. RESTORATIVE ACTIVITY

The big idea here is to set aside the tasks and activities that you usually engage in throughout the week and focus your attention on other activities that recharge and replenish you; physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

As long as it’s restorative, engage in activities that challenge you differently than the other six days of the week. If you normally work inside, spend time outdoors. If you are normally booked with meetings or otherwise around many people, spend some time alone in introspection and reflection. If you generally work with your mind, engage your hands. If you’re normally leading, find an outlet where you can follow. If your work is emotionally taxing, take in lighthearted, even silly, content.

Sometimes, a restorative activity is doing absolutely NOTHING AT ALL. I’ve had many rest days like that.

PRO TIP: Pay attention to which activities energize and which deplete you. Recognize that the activities which energize you may absolutely deplete your spouse, kids, and others with whom you do Weekly Rest, and vice versa.

2. DISCIPLINE

When you love what you do for work, your work is often enjoyable and energizing. So you will have to discipline yourself to engage in other activities for your Weekly Rest. When you are new to this practice, I highly recommend that you identify in advance options of restorative activities for when your thoughts or actions drift back toward work. You will drift, I promise. That’s part of training your brain to take a break when it’s not used to it.

I LOVE coaching my clients, I LOVE writing The Grip for you, I LOVE professional development. These things energize and fuel me. And, once a week, I put them aside for 24 hours. When I return to them a day later, I am clear, inspired, and much more effective as a result. Even after years of practice, each week I must still consciously choose to focus my mind differently for this window of time. The drift is still present, but the habit I’ve established helps me to quickly recognize the drift when it occurs and to easily return to rest.

PRO TIP: One of the great benefits of Weekly Rest is the quality of ideas it inspires. The only potential downside to this is that these ideas are likely to spontaneously drop into your brain throughout your day off. So keep a notebook (paper or digital) handy to quickly capture these ideas before they disappear, and then return your attention to rest.

Rest is not a place to get to; it's a place to come from.

3. ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Food: The feeding of people and animals still needs to happen on a day of rest. So how does the person that usually handles this responsibility get a break from cooking when there are hungry mouths to feed? Prepare meals ahead of time, have others take turns cooking for the day, order out, hire a meal-prep service. Get creative—the chef needs a day off from his/her work, too.

Children: If you have children, you have the bonus of teaching them to rest as well. Put the homework and devices aside for 24 hours. This is a great time to connect, play, and grow together as a family.

Business Operations: If your company runs seven days a week, seriously consider scaling back to six. The six-day model implemented by Truett Cathy for his restaurant, Chick-fil-A, demonstrates that a rest day for your business can be highly profitable. In 2023 Chick-fil-A made over $20.5 BILLION in sales. From their website: “Our founder, S. Truett Cathy, made the decision to close on Sundays in 1946. He knew what it was like to work seven days a week in restaurants, so he saw the importance of letting his employees set aside one day to rest and worship if they choose. That’s a practice we still uphold today.”

If scaling back isn’t an option for you, at the very least organize your leadership so that every person in your business, including YOU, is taking at least one day off every week.

Emergencies: My husband and I call these “Ass-in-ditch” situations. On a rare occasion, life will throw a curveball that must be dealt with on our scheduled day of rest. When that happens, we deal with it—we get our ass out of the ditch. Then as quickly as possible, we either get back to our day of rest or we reschedule it for another day that same week. To give you an idea of what I mean by a rare occasion, we might have an emergency crop up once or twice a year. Interestingly, the more we practice Weekly Rest, the fewer emergencies we experience.

PRO TIP: Schedule your prep work for Essential Responsibilities far enough in advance that you have margin to handle The Unexpected in your schedule and still complete your prep work. For example, if your rest day is Saturday, work to have your Essential Responsibilities sorted by Wednesday of that week. You don’t want to be scrambling Friday evening to get them done.

4. BOUNDARIES

A potential challenge of doing Weekly Rest with others in your household is the wide variety in what constitutes Restorative Activity for any individual.

My husband loves to ideate and contemplate the universe seemingly 24/7, and I’m right there with him six days a week. Since I give my thinking mind a break during Weekly Rest, I even refrain from deep or philosophical conversations. So several years ago I said to my dear man, “I respect that you recharge and re-energize by ideating. And, I absolutely do not recharge that way. So if you want a sounding board for those kinds of conversations during our rest day, you’ll need to Phone-A-Friend, because Becky’s brain is closed for maintenance.” And that arrangement has worked great ever since.

PRO TIP: Be responsible for knowing what is and isn’t restorative for you, communicate it proactively with others, and enforce it. Also, respect that others will pursue Restorative Activity that is different than yours.

5. THE UNDIVIDED MIND

The resting mind doesn’t hustle. The hustling mind doesn’t rest. Fully commit to Weekly Rest and and allow yourself to enjoy it fully. There is no sense taking a day off work and spending it fretting over what isn’t getting done, ruminating on problems and issues, or periodically answering work email and phone calls. Don’t be that guy working on his laptop at the beach. A divided mind serves only to create more stress, so either go all in on your rest or don’t go in at all.

Also, if you have lived many years with a divided mind in general, it will take practice to become fully present at rest. So be patient with yourself as your transition into this new mental state. Pre-planning your options for Restorative Activity as discussed in DISCIPLINE will help you here.

PRO TIP: Clearly communicate with clients, employees, and others as necessary that you’re unavailable during your rest day. You might set an out of office message for email and voicemail letting folks know when you’ll next be available and who to contact in case of an emergency.

Use these Five Attributes as your framework upon which to build what you will Do and Cease To Do for Weekly Rest. Experiment. Discover what works and what doesn’t work.

Model Weekly Rest at work and at home. Your people are too important and your mission too critical not to.

May you prosper in every way.

Becky & TPL Team