77: Working from Rest

We are hiring here at Team Bonnie Christine and I'm so excited to share about it with you. We're looking for a Marketing director, someone to step into the shoes of this position that combines creativity, strategy and leadership to help amplify our mission and maximize our impact. As Marketing Director, you'll spearhead departmental initiatives creating create compelling marketing strategies and lead a dynamic team, all while fostering an environment of growth and success. If you're someone who thrives in a data driven, results oriented setting, but also has a passion for creativity and marketing, we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know someone who would be a great fit, please let them know. You can learn more about this position and everything that comes with being a member of Team Bonnie over@bonniecristine.com careers again, that's bonniechristine.com careers. We can't wait to get to know you. I heard something over the weekend that had me grabbing my phone and opening a notes app and writing it down and so I thought I would share it with you. I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things cruise. Creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. It was just a simple statement. We don't rest from work, we work from rest. That was really impactful for me to hear. I'll say it again, we don't rest from work, we work from rest. Meaning we can only work if we're working from a place of rest. That's the complete opposite from needing to rest because we've been working so much. Doesn't that feel so much better to be able to work from a place of rest? And so I've been thinking about resting and what that looks like for me and how I prioritize it. And so I thought I would share with you today a couple of ways that I prioritize rest so that I'm working from a place of rest and never feeling like I need to rest from work. So the first way that I do this is that I prioritize sleep. You likely know this if you've been around for a little while. But I always say I'm not an early bird or a night owl. I just like to go to bed early and sleep in a little bit late. So for me that means getting about nine hours of sleep sleep a night. And I'm very protective of it. If I'm going into a day not feeling fully rested, it really shows I lack focus, I lack the ability to be creative. I just kind of feel completely zapped now. Nine hours, it may not be that much for you. It might be less, it might be more. But I think it's really important to prioritize your sleep. Sleep makes everything else better. It makes you bright, it makes you focused, it makes you, you know, refueled and re energized. And I can't speak highly enough about it. The next thing that I do is prioritize my evenings and my weekends. So I try my very best not to work outside of work hours. And I set work hours for myself. Even though I'm typically working for myself. I have pretty standard work hours for me. That's from 10:30 in the morning to around 5:00 clock in the afternoon. I also really try to protect my weekends. And so that's time used to spend with my family. Same thing goes for the evenings. So very much prioritizing time away from work. I think because we are creative entrepreneurs and oftentimes we are working from home or we're doing a side hustle, the boundary between life and work become really blurry. It's especially true for me because I love what I do so much and so it can actually feel like I'm doing an enjoyable hobby, even though technically it's work. So sometimes you'll find me like painting on the weekend, which technically is work, but it's relaxing and something my family can do with me and I love it. So, you know. But you can't find me being really strategic or spending alone time with my work in the evening or on the weekend. Another way that I really try to prioritize rest is by taking vacation time. So sometimes this looks like a big family trip, sometimes this looks like a staycation. So just a couple of days unplugged to stay at home. Sometimes this looks like a quick overnight trip, sometimes this looks like just a little bit of a away time. For me and David, my husband. But it is so often that we get so busy that we feel like we can't step away from work. And my goal is to always feel like I do have enough wiggle room in order to step away if I want to. I know that if I feel like I can't step away for an evening or a couple of days, then things have gotten too busy and I need rest from work. I'm not working from a place of rest. And the last way that I prioritize rest is by making sure that I have things that I'm doing that are just for fun. You know, things that I'm not trying to monetize, things that stretch me outside of my comfort zone. A great example of this for me is pottery. I'm not good at pottery. It has nothing to do with my business. I don't think I'll ever be able to monetize it. And this. That is why I do it, because it's this creative outlet that's completely different from what I ordinarily do. And it's fun, and I find it difficult, and I can really play with it. So a way for you to play, a way for you to have a hobby that is completely unrelated to your business. A lot of times this is maybe reading fiction. For some other people, it's, you know, a different hobby, like something that's way outside of your everyday work life. So that's just a short episode for you on something I've been thinking about. How can we better work from a place of rest and avoid having to rest because we've been working so much? I hope this has resonated with you. I hope you can think about how you can prioritize rest in your own life and always work from a place of rest. My friends, create the beauty that you want to see Come alive in the world and remember, there's room for you.