Is your business vacation-proofed?

Summer has a way of revealing the truth about our businesses.

If the thought of stepping away from your business for a vacation, family visit, or even a long weekend fills you with anxiety, this episode is for you.

In this episode, I'm sharing a real-time lesson I learned while my parents were visiting during the middle of a coaching cohort. For the first time, I had intentionally designed my program to give clients more tools, more self-owned support, and more opportunities to implement on their own.

And then something unexpected happened: the chat got really quiet.

At first, my nervous system interpreted that silence as a problem. But what I discovered completely changed the way I think about coaching, client empowerment, and building a business that truly supports my life.

We'll talk about the nervous system patterns that keep entrepreneurs tethered to their businesses, why being constantly needed isn't the same thing as creating transformation, and how I'm building a Joy-First Business that allows for both impact and freedom.

If you've ever worried that taking time off means losing momentum, falling behind in your business, or letting your clients down, this conversation will help you reimagine what's possible.

In this episode, you'll learn:

✨ Why summer can expose the places where your business still owns you
✨ The surprising lesson I learned when my coaching container got quiet
✨ How to create client empowerment instead of client dependency
✨ Common nervous system patterns that keep entrepreneurs overworking
✨ Signs your business may not be vacation-proof yet
✨ Practical ways to build more freedom, spaciousness, and sustainability into your business
✨ Why I believe your business should expand your life, not consume it

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you! Send me a DM on Instagram and let me know: If you stepped away from your business for two weeks, what would happen?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, and welcome to Fuck Around and Get Paid, the only podcast that is completely dedicated to you putting your joy first so you can get paid doing what you love. I'm your host, Jennifer Liss, and in this episode, we're gonna talk about how to vacation proof your business and how I'm personally building more freedom into my business. Let's dive in. Hey there, friend. Welcome back to the podcast. It's summer, summer, summer time. Time to kick back and unwind, right? It is summer. People are traveling, family is visiting, perhaps you're going and visiting family, maybe your routines have changed, the kids are home, maybe you're thinking about stepping away from your business, but feeling a little anxious about it. If that's you, this episode is for you. Or even if you have been implementing strategies in order to uh perhaps calm that anxiety, or you've been working at this already, this episode also might be for you because you might pick up on some of the things that I'm throwing down in my own business to support me in creating more freedom. Because most of us started businesses. We are not in the corporate world. We're not doing all of the other things that we could possibly be doing because we want more freedom. We want to create a business and a life that we love that is in full alignment with our joy, our desires, the contribution that we desire to make in this world, so that at the end of the day, at the end of our lives, we look back and say, damn, that was a good life, right? But what is the truth? And what has been modeled for us is that entrepreneurship requires that we just take ourselves to the edge all the time, the Alex Hermosy model of just give, give, give, give, give until you're completely depleted. Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold for everyone. Right, ladies, we end up building businesses that leave us feeling less free than the jobs that we actually left. And I'm not okay with that. And in fact, I refuse to do two things. I refuse to build a business that does not allow me to live the life that I love. I'm just not doing it. I would rather personally, honestly, go back to corporate and just work some boring ass job than be trapped by my own design. The other thing that I refuse to do is to build a business that does not allow me to be my whole effing self, which is you can see that in fuck around and get paid. I'm like, I curse, I am myself. I'm going to continuously unfurl the places where I feel like I cannot be fully myself because otherwise, what's the freaking point? Again, I could go work in a corporate office and feel like I need to be somebody else all day, every day, if I'm gonna feel like I'm trapped in my own business, not doing it. And I don't think that you should have to do it either. I want your your business, your life to feel like the freedom that you know is possible for you. And so in this episode, I want to really break down what it is that I'm actively doing. This is real time, guys. I'm gonna be telling you about a core cohort that I just moved through, the changes that I made, the lessons that I learned that I want to share back with you because you might be running cohorts or perhaps your business doesn't have cohorts, but you can relate to some of the things that I myself have done in the past, and so many entrepreneurs are continuously doing. Okay. So a few weeks ago, this was the coolest thing in the world. My parents came all the way from Wichita, Kansas, out here to Portland, Oregon. This was a genuine dream of mine to be able to show my parents the things out here in Portland that I love. I did not think that they would ever come. My dad had claimed that he would never come to Portland. And so uh that that was really, really very cool for me to get to have that experience with them. And it wasn't because I knew that they were coming to town, but because I was, I have slowly been finding the ways where I am tethering myself to be overly responsible. It's all up to me as a lens, it is a perspective that many of us look through, particularly us ladies. It's all up to me. And so I've been undoing all of the places where I hold that perspective and create experiences and design cohorts, design all kinds of things through the lens of it's gotta be all up to me. If if you can't do it right, do it yourself. If it can't be done right, do it yourself, right? That kind of thinking is definitely what I grew up with. And so I knew coming into this next cohort that I wanted to design it differently. I wanted to have more self-paced support. I wanted to have more empowerment resources, which I created through AI tools. I wanted to have more live implementation happening on the calls and more opportunities for each individual to take their power back and hold themselves accountable. And I knew the from the beginning of launching this cohort, the messaging, everything that I put out there needed to be speaking from the place of calling that kind of person forward, the kind of person who was ready for that, which of course makes for a different pool than some of the offers that I had launched in the past. And I had many lessons along the way of shifting my messaging to really meet people in that place of empowerment. Think about that for yourself. Is my messaging holding for people, saying that I'm gonna hold things for them, or is it placing the power in the hands of the people who I want to work with? But here's the thing that happened. Some of these things that I had done in this cohort was very different for me. It was less of me being as hands-on as I have been in the past, because again, I created tools that I was like, okay, me, human being who is out here doing the dang thing, what do I do? How do I support myself? And so I created things for them that would help them to do as I would do. And so they had these things available because of that, and because of one other decision that I made, which was to tell everybody in our group chat, you don't have to feel like you have to reply to every single woman. You do not have to make every single person feel seen. You didn't it does not incumbent upon you to ensure that every single person in this cohort feels seen because we know that we are seen. We know that we are valued, we know that we are infinitely worthy of all of the support. We do not need that recognition. And I'm really all about us building that internal support. That doesn't mean that we don't love each other and support each other and get excited about things. But I wanted to experiment with what is it like if I state that simply hearting somebody's post is acknowledgement enough. You don't have to comment. And that was a very interesting experience for many of us in the cohort, myself included, because my nervous system immediately noticed how much quieter the group chat was than it has been previously. And you know, I love, I love a really loud, rowdy room. And so this was very different to my system. And I noticed it. And I'm sure that other people in the cohort also noticed it. And we got to have our own experience with that because part of me was wondering: is something wrong? Are people disengaged? Is nobody getting results? And a year ago, this would have completely wigged out my nervous system. I would have thought definitely something is wrong. We need to go get in there and just start getting engagement up. And right as business owners, that's been the thing. Keep engagement high, get in that Facebook group, daily engagement posts. But I believe we don't need that. And especially at a certain level, we don't need that. But I also think the world doesn't want that right now. I don't think that that's what people are wanting. I think we're actually wanting a bit less. I think we're not wanting to be so always on and just responding to things. Like certain times, there's a time and a place for it, but I don't think that we want it to be 24-7 all the time. And especially not when we can tell it's simply for the sake of engagement or because we feel like we have to hold other people. It's exhausting. And I don't want that for my clients. And I really want to retrain our systems to not feel like we have to hold that for everybody and that we don't need other people holding that for us either. Because, girl, you got yourself. You really do. That doesn't mean that we don't seek um support in the places when and where we need it, but we can make it known when and where we need it. And it doesn't have to be all the time. Because I know how much time and energy we spend supporting other people. You're doing it in your life. You don't also need to be doing it in all of these other places. And what happens in, especially in a coaching cohort, is that when we are spending so much time supporting others, we are spending very little time actually implementing for ourselves. It is a very sneaky nervous system trick that feels like you're doing something, but you're not actually doing at all, anything at all. What I want to flip the switch on for my clients is when you support someone in a certain way, that also helps you to actively see, like giving some very supportive feedback to somebody else and looking at what they created, that actually helps them to say, ooh, what would I do differently in mine, versus just saying, good job. And that's wonderful again. I know that we all are supportive of one another. It's taking it that one step further and giving each person the power to do that. So when people started reaching out to me and saying that they had made more progress in this container than in almost any other of their coaching experience experiences, my nervous system did experience a little bit of relief. Like, wow, okay, this was definitely something intentionally different. And I wasn't entirely sure how it would land for any and all of us. I'm so glad that I did it. I was also not at all surprised that people told me they were having such massive ajas and were really doing the work more so than they had ever done it before, because I had intentionally set in these mechanisms of personal empowerment. I'm gonna talk about the relief and what that really meant for me here in a little bit. But first I want to talk about summer, right? Like you're having your own summer experience too. And summertime, it's got the it's this beautiful way of exposing all of the places and all of the ways where our businesses still own us. Because if you want to travel, if you're really wanting to have slow mornings, you've got kids who are at home with you, maybe you want to be able to take them out on a spontaneous adventure. I remember some of the things that my mom did with us in the summer. One time she decided we would all ride the city bus for the first time ever. She thought it would be a very quick trip to the downtown library. It ended up taking all day long. I completely understand, even though I don't have kids, how having your kids at home is a whole different experience. And I'm sure you want to be fully present with the people who you love, just like I wanted to be fully present with my parents while I was with them. But when we step away during these beautiful events and we want to really be fully present with the people that and our anxiety sets in, like I get that. I've I've lived it, I understand exactly what that feels like. But I have firmly decided if I'm building this business that I love, it must be vacation-proofed. And if you're wondering, is my business vacation-proofed? Well, let me give you some of the signs that maybe it's not quite vacation-proofed yet. And I'm not going to claim to be perfect on all of these. Again, I'm implementing one at a time for myself different ways to do this. So if you cannot unplug for a full day and feel okay with it, can you do that? Can you take time off without it meaning that you're completely starting from zero again when you come back? Do you feel anxious when your clients don't need you? Reflection of what we were just talking about. Does your business completely stop and come to a halt the second that you stop? Do your clients depend on you more than they trust themselves? Again, this is not judgment. This is just information. I want you to look at your social media. I want you to look at the way that your business is running across the board. Does it require continuous inputs from you to keep things going? If you stopped and you went on a one-week cruise, would everything completely come to a halt? Now, back to the moment with my parents when they were here, we went out to the coast and there's no service out there. We're driving through the woods and then out there on the coast, there's the service is incredibly spotty. We're taking these train tours, we're doing things where I literally couldn't be on my phone, even if I had wanted to, and I didn't want to be, and had really set things up so that I couldn't be. Now there's a few things that I learned, but I really had mostly intentionally set this up to be successful so that I could enjoy my time with them. But I knew that the quiet of the chat was not a problem. I had again intentionally said, we're gonna stay focused, we're gonna stay focused on our work. The quiet was because people were actively implementing on their own. They weren't just there consuming and looking for some kind of dopamine hit happening in the chat. They weren't waiting for me to come and save them. They were using the tools, they were doing the work, and they were creating real results in their positioning and their messaging, getting clear on who they are and what they do, which is the entire point of coaching. I will fully admit that in the past, I have really confused what powerful coaching is. And most of this, honestly, was a reflection of my own nervous system patterns that I had going on in my body because I myself, like many entrepreneurs, and this goes to both of my businesses. This is back when I did hair too. I believed if I'm not available, then people are not going to get results. I have to be there. I have to be present. It's going to require me physically in my body, with my brain, with my mind, to get somebody the results. I have believed that if I'm not posting constantly, my business is just going to disappear into the ether and everybody's going to forget about me. I will have this feeling that if my clients don't need me, I'm not valuable, placing my value completely in the needs that I am fulfilling. If I stop, I'm going to lose momentum. If you felt any of these, I want you to know these are such normal things that we hold in our systems and they start long before your business. It has to do with where we see our own value in our relationships, where we see our own value in our work. It probably happened during school. And, you know, I gotta get the A, or I've got to be seen as good, or I've got to be seen as the kid who's doing the work, right? And especially as women, we've been conditioned to believe that being needed equals valuable. And we will even put that on other people too. Like if they're not available for me, then they're not doing the work that they need to be doing, right? So if you notice yourself doing that to other people, please know. And this is just with love, this is not with judgment. If you are expecting people to continuously be there for you, you're putting that expectation on yourself as well. And so these reveals can be very triggering, but that it's really powerful to notice them because only when you notice them and when you bring your loving awareness to them that you can realize that your worth does not come from holding everything together. Your worth does not come from what you are doing for other people. You came here to have fun. You came here to experience the bigness, the boldness, the beauty of life. That's truly what your soul came here for, is to have this incredible experience. It did not come here to be needed by other people. I'm just gonna say that again. It did not come here to be needed by other people. Now, do we, along the journey of our lives and the process of having experiences, desiring things, trying to get what we want, not getting what we want, doing all of the things, do we begin to learn that we need to be needed 100%? Do we actually enjoy the experience of being needed and contributing? 100%. That's where it comes into some of our purpose being that, that we find purpose in doing these things. But again, that is very different from what you actually came here for, which is to experience the beauty of life, what it feels like to be free, what it feels like to break free, what it feels like to experience. That's what you really came here for. So, as a business owner, there is a difference between building empowerment versus building dependency. So my job is not to carry my clients. Your job is not to carry your clients, your job is not to carry anybody or anything, in fact. Your job is not to appease anybody else's nervous systems, your job is to provide whatever it is that you provide. For me, that is tools, guidance, support, a safe space for people to grow. That is my job. That is what I am focused on. Do I trip on that? For sure. Sometimes I do. Do you trip on that? Probably. Sometimes you do, but that's the real job that we are creating. And so we need to look at where are we moving from with the things that we are creating, because what they do with that, what your clients do with that, what people do with that, is their choice. It's on them to do what it is that they said that they're going to do, especially when it comes to businesses where we're working with people and helping them to accomplish a goal. That's true empowerment. Handing them the power and saying, I will give you everything that I know is possible to support you in this. Like, this is what I know that for me, this has worked. This is what I know that I've seen work for other people. I'm going to give this to you and I'm going to give it to you in the way that I believe is the best way possible at this moment in my life to help you get to the outcome that you desire. And then you let people have their experience with that. Let people do what they will with that. You create the conditions for transformation, they act within the space of that. We don't have to force anything at all. And so let me get back to my little moment of relief that I experienced for myself, which was the realization that wow, I really did this. When I was looking at the feedback forms that everyone was filling out from the cohort, the transformation that happened for people was the most powerful. And again, this was the cohort where I gave them the power, the most that I ever have. I gave them tools that I knew would empower them. And there was less of me that was needed in this cohort. I still love, I love to be able to give support where support is needed. And in fact, I was able to give better support and better reflections and really step into my own authority of my uh prowess of marketing, of sales, of Really leading people back to themselves better this time than I ever had before. And that was because I took me needing to be the person to do the work out of the system. And so I was able to step in in the places where it really meant. So what I'm doing is building what I'm calling a joy first business. And as you know, I believe that joy is the strategy. And that's everything that's in the expansion room is all guiding people to their own joy first business. So what could that mean for you? What does that mean for you? If you disappeared for two weeks, if you went on vacation, even if you're running a cohort, how could you still create it so that people still get results? This is the question that I'm sitting with coming out of this. It's the question that I encourage you to sit with. If I completely disappeared, if I was just not there, could people still get results? How could you do that? How could you accomplish that? What would you implement in order to help people get that? Would it be something like what I've created, which is a membership model? Resources that people can access on their own schedule. One of the things that I did in my own membership is I took every time that I get on a one-on-one call with somebody, there's one thing that is absolutely required so that I can work with them, which is to understand what lights them up. What is their joy? What is it that drives them? What does their soul just like desire so much that they're continuously going after getting it? I made that into the very first step that anybody does when they enter into the expansion room because otherwise it takes 45 minutes to an hour on a one-on-one call with me in order to make this happen, but I've made it so that they can go and do that on their own. And it doesn't have to require me. They can do it in the middle of the night if they want to. They can do it at five o'clock in the morning if they want to. They can do it on their terms. I've also created meditations, nervous system practices. I took my process of emotional processing, somatic emotional processing, and I made it into a tool with a video that walks through it. I made a PDF of all of my nervous system tools, which was an ask from one of uh my clients and one of my cohorts. So, how can you create your resources where people can access them on their terms? Maybe you think about the way that you do delivery to your clients and include integration weeks and spaciousness. One of my friends does an integration week with her clients all of the time. So maybe uh one of the things that I definitely could have done, this was a learning lesson for me, is communicating your availability at in a better way. I've actually done this better in other cohorts before, where I said, this is the day that you'll hear from me, blah, blah, blah. And I didn't do it this time. And about halfway through the cohort, I thought, why didn't I do that this time? So creating your own, this is the way that I do things. This is about creating actual standards for the work that you do, which is an SOP. So at the beginning of every cohort, we do this and this and this. One of the things that I've made an SOP of mine is that I begin every cohort by saying, we are all one. We're equal. There's no hierarchy here. I am a human just as much as you are a human. You are fully empowered to take action on all of these things and reminding them that I'm not holding, that this is for you. You have commitments to yourself. And so I also do a feedback survey at the beginning of the cohort and one at the end to implement that. So things like that that can help people to stay accountable to themselves. Again, if you disappeared for two weeks, could people still get results? So this is top of mind for me because of course I'm closing out this cohort. Maybe there's something that you're beginning. Maybe you've got something going on in your business. Maybe you recognize some of these nervous system patterns that you might be holding for other people too. But I firmly believe none of us came here to hold everything for everyone. We did not come here to work 24-7. We came here to live extraordinary lives, to travel, to lay in the hammock in our backyard, to play with our kids on the beach, to just take a walk whenever we feel like taking a walk, to spend time with the people that we love doing things that we love and to make an impact, which you can do through the purpose that you have found in this life. And so, how can you implement that in a way that it makes the biggest difference possible and also simultaneously allows you to have the life that you desire? It is possible for you, my friend, choose the model that works for you, find ways to implement this that work for you. And I'm gonna continue to do the same for myself as we vacation proof our businesses. If you love this episode, if you gained something really juicy for yourself to consider about your nervous system, about your business, and you want to take this a step further, I would freaking love to have you inside the expansion room with us. We are continuously having a conversation about this. We're celebrating one another, we're encouraging one another to put things down in the places where we don't need to and to lean into our truest joy. You can go to genlist.comslash expansion and it will take you straight there to join. Right now, it's only $27 a month. Would love to see you inside. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye bye.