The Importance of Being Idle: Lessons from my unexpected hiatus

Who billed the most hours, who had the least sleep, who cancelled the most weekends or vacations. It all has shades of the Michael Douglas movie Wall Street. Sleep is for wimps. You're listening to the Circle C Project. Welcome to the Triple CE Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, boost confidence, build courage so you can live lifeless. I'm your host, Ryan Spen, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop and big, hairy, audacious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want and ready to start living the life you do want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now with friends, I invite you to grab a drink, take a seat, and allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lit. Hey, it's been a while. Welcome to episode 92 of the Triple C Project, first episode of 2024, which is a little bit bad of me, isn't it? I guess. But hey, if you're new here, welcome. I'm Ryan Spence, life coach, integrative life coach, yoga teacher, meditation guide. I'm also author of the the Triple C Method, the transformational toolkit, the book that will help you get from living a life of lethargy towards living a life lit. It's the book that I wish that I'd had when I was a struggling, unhappy, big law lawyer desperately trying to figure out a way to break out of my box. And this book is going to give you actionable tools as well as an entertaining story to help you figure out where you want to be and how the hell to get there. So if you haven't already checked it out, go ahead and check it out. Anywhere you get your books, you can go to my website iamrinespence.com book and grab yourself a copy of the ebook and audiobook. And if you want to get the good old hardback, sorry, paperback hard copy, you can get that from all your usual bookstores. Just head to online and grab it wherever you feel good. If you can get it from a nice indie, do that. Support the indies, go into your local indie shop and order it direct from them if you can too. All about supporting small businesses and keeping out the billionaire penis rocket builders as much as we possibly can. Okay, glad to have you here, my current faithful listeners. What can I say? You know when you take a nap in the, in the weekend and you, you know when you say you're going to just lay down and rest your eyes and for half an hour or so and Then you literally wake up and it's dark outside and you realize you've been asleep for hours. Yeah, that's kind of what happened here, if I'm honest with you. So let me tell you what happened with my unscheduled hiatus here on the Triple C Project podcast. So I'd already planned to have a two week break at the end of the year just to kind of ease into sort of Christmas and all of those shenanigans and to kind of come back refresh for the new year. But best laid plans and all that, they were thwarted by, first of all, by health, really. So I got hit with my third round of COVID again. Can you believe it? I've had all the vaccines. So, yeah, third round hit me and it just knocked me out for a good week. And then for a good sort of couple of weeks afterwards, I was just in this fog of fatigue and I just couldn't really focus and I just didn't really feel inspired and I didn't, if I'm honest, feel myself. And also around that time, I just hit this real big wall in terms of my house renovation. Just the stress and the pressure and all of the movements and shenanigans around that, which is just getting overwhelming, really. And if I'm honest with you, I was just exhausted. And so I just made the decision. I just had to cancel whatever I could cancel, stop doing whatever I could stop doing that that wasn't fully necessary, and just try and get myself back to a place where not only did I feel myself again, but also where I could start to just feel inspired, you know. So that's what I did. Decided to just take a break and I plan to return in January, you know, big bang in the new year. Talking about my find your spark sessions and setting you up with tools and strategies to kind of get your new year off to a good old start. But to be perfectly honest with you, I just. I just didn't feel ready. And I knew that if I came back because I thought that I should, you know, because I thought that I just had to do this or you would all leave me and desert me, the energy would be all wrong. It would feel forced. It would. You get that uninspired feeling that I would have felt giving you the episodes. And I didn't think that was right. It wasn't what I wanted to do. It didn't fall into. It didn't align with my value of integrity and my value of fun. So I just kept chilling. Again, not exactly chilling. Life still went on you know, slowly started to reintroduce things. But, you know, I. Clients were still there, still working with clients, had two new clients sign on, which is fantastic. Kids were still there, so they still needed to be looked after, you know, so it wasn't like I completely disappeared off the face of the earth. But the podcast stayed dormant. I took a little social media break. Well, kind of. I always find it really hard to just completely stay away, but I. I took a good while, just not really posting and just doing a bit of lurking, a bit of commenting. And, you know, after I did that for a while, I mean, and got past that initial urge that I must be doing something, it starts to feel pretty good. And it removed some of that pressure of feeling that I had to return. In fact, I'm talking about. It removed all the pressure. I was just like, I return when it feels right to return. There was a. There was a shift. And what that space did and having that time and space did is it allowed me to start to think more about what I was doing with the podcast, what I wanted it to be going forward. I mean, I'm coming up to almost 100 episodes now, and that's a lot. What started as, first of all, something to help promote and talk about the first book, and then became an exercise in do I have enough to talk about on my own for a podcast for a certain number of episodes without relying on bringing in guests and doing the interview thing. And it's just kind of kept going and kept going and kept going. And I've loved doing it, but I think. I think a break, even though it was an enforced break, was probably needed at that point. And I'm glad that it happened when it did. You know me, I was asking myself questions like, do I want to come back? And if I do, what do I want it to look like? Do I want to keep the same title, keep the same branding? Do I want to do a complete revamp, burn it all down and start again? You know, so I just had time to mull some of those thoughts over in my mind and really think about where I wanted to take this over the course of the next, I don't know, few months, year, however long I continue doing this thing and allowing myself that time and space just allow me to let the podcast just be without pressure, without agenda. And I've got to tell you, it felt pretty fucking fantastic, if I'm honest with you, especially because, one, there was no pressure on me. But also, there can be this idea that if you take a break from doing something that you've always done, that people know you for, that you'll just disappear from the face of the earth. No one will ever find you again. No one would ever be interested. And actually what's happened is that the last episode that I put out suddenly just shot up in downloads, as did other episodes before that. So people are still finding the show and listening to the show or even listening to episodes again. If that was you, thanks for that. Let me know. Send me a message. Tell me what you liked, what you've been listening to. I always want to hear from you. Segue there. But most importantly, the world didn't end. You know, the world just didn't end. Everything continued as normal and everything was fine. So I decided that I would come back when it felt right to do so, when there was a calling, an inkling, an urge in me to, like, let's do this. So here I am. That urge is now. And I have returned here for episode 92. So I'm sharing all of this with you. Yes. Partly to just sort of say, hey, I'm back and this is where I've been and this is why I disappeared, but also because I. I want to invite you to take on some of what I learned in this intervening period. Because we're all conditioned to keep pushing forward. There's this need to always be productive, constantly productive, always pushing forward, making more, doing more, being more for an organization that really doesn't give a about us. Right. That's kind of what life is about. And this hustle and burnout is worn as a badge of honor, especially in big law. It's. It's kind of like a culture that you have to buy into in order to be successful, or some would have you think, who billed the most hours, who had the least sleep, who canceled the most weekends or vacations. It all has shades of the Michael Douglas movie Wall Street. Sleep is for whips the like. That isn't life. That isn't living. And it's a surefire way to burn you out and just make you very, very miserable. So what I want you to take away from this episode, from my return, and me sharing my experience of being away for an unscheduled extended hiatus, is the importance of being idle. Now, that might sound weird, because idleness has this bad rep of just someone who's a bit lazy, a bit of a slob, who does sweet fa. But there's actually another meaning of Idol, which simply means to spend time doing nothing. And as I've said in previous episodes, Particularly when talking about meditation, is that we all should take some time to just be instead of always doing. Because in that being, in that nothingness, not only do you get to reset, recharge, but you also start to gain clarity, clarity that can't be achieved from consistently moving, consistently keeping yourself distracted, keeping yourself busy. And often we're doing that either because we push to, we feel we have to, or because we're trying to stop ourselves from dealing with the thoughts and the feelings that are inside of us. We feel by keeping ourselves busy and distracted, we won't have to deal with that stuff, but we will. And if we don't intentionally allow ourselves space to deal with it now, it will come out when we least expect it, in ways that we don't want it to. So giving yourself that time to just be, that time to be idle, is actually going to help you move forward a lot quicker than that consistent pushing. It's going to help you get clearer on where you want to be and how to get there than just constantly running around in circles without taking a break. So take a break. And when you do take that break, question what you're doing and why you're doing it. Why are you where you are? Why are you doing what you're doing? Do you want to be there? Have you chosen to be there? Maybe you did intentionally choose to be there a year ago, two years, five years ago. But as we grow, we change. So having those that time to just check in and see if we're still good, whether we need to make any tweaks, any pivots, any shifts, is going to get you closer to living that, that life that's lit. The answers are going to come in that nothingness, in that stillness. It's going to give you ideas about where to go and what to do, ideas that won't necessarily come when you're consistently busy, when you're keeping yourself distracted. So I invite you to be true to yourself. Ask yourself, am I where I want to be? And if the answer is no, then take time in that stillness to think about where you would want to be instead, what you would want to do instead. Don't feel that you have to keep doing the same thing you've always done or being the same person you've always been. Stop giving in to, to the shirts and check in with the wants. With the wants. What do you want? What do you need? What do you desire? And when it's ready, when it's time for you to come back or it's time for you to shift. Then make that shift. Make that return. But do it on your own terms. Do it because it feels good. Do it because it feels fun. Do it because it's taking you closer to where it is that you want to be. Thanks for joining me for my return episode. It's very, very good to be back. So happy to be back here. I hope that you get what you need from this episode and if you do, drop me a line, let me know. Send me an email to hey amroy spence.com or find me on LinkedIn or over on Instagram am underscoreion Spence and please leave a review. Let everyone else know what you take away from the show, what you like about the show. You listen for a reason and I'd love to know the reason why. And also helps others to think, hey, that show could probably help me. Let me check it out. So you're not just doing that for me to let me know what to share with you, but you're helping people around you who could hear some of the things that I'm sharing on the show here from my journey and my experience and the experiences that my clients have had too. That's it for this week. Episode 92. Again, thank you for being here. Until next time, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life. Thanks for tuning in to the Triple C project. In the spirit of the Triple C, there's three things that you can do to support the show. Head to ratethispodcast.com cccc or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a review. Reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how this show can help them. Second thing you can do Share Share this episode Share previous episode with a friend. Someone who you feel could benefit from what I'm throwing down on this here show. And number three, head to iamryspence.com get on the mailing list. I'll be sharing news about the show, news about what I'm up to. My new book start writing soon. So to be the first to be in the know, you need to get yourself on the list. Really appreciate you being here. And until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life Net.