I’m sure you’re like the majority of us, that you have different busy seasons in your life – maybe it’s at work. For me, when I was at my corporate job, November and December were account planning time. So I knew it was going to be really busy during that time. The holidays is one of them, or maybe in the summer your kids participate in summer athletics and you’re traveling, right? You simply have busy periods of your life.
I’m not preaching to live a balanced life of feeling 100% balanced 100% of the time.
No, we all have different times and different areas of our life where we have to kind of power through; we’re going to put a little bit more of our resources into that one thing during that period.
But as you’re powering through, there has to be a stopping point.
If you ignore that stopping point and you just keep powering through, you eventually hit the wall; you’re drowning, you burn out, whatever your expression is. You have got to stop and recognize when that mental and physical fatigue is starting to set in. And that’s the point that you say, okay I’m not going to power through – instead I’m going to stop and start to pull back, and actually recover.
Recovery is so important. If you want to be an elite performer, you have to recover. It’s not about just this hustle and powering through all of the time. Recovery is vital for your success, for your elite performance.
Now, I’m sure you know how to recover, right? It’s sleep, it’s hydration, it’s exercise, and nutrition; it’s not too complicated. But how do we do it?
Simply put, when you recognize fatigue is setting in, just take a few days, maybe a week, to establish a routine. Pull back some of that time, energy, money, and invest it into recovery. That might mean for these few days I’m sleeping X number of hours and I’m going to exercise at these times, I’m scheduling it. I’m doing some meal planning and I make sure my water bottle is with me at all times. And that may sound so simplistic to you, but the routine, the getting back to a little bit of this I’m just going to say normalcy, helps support the need for recovery.
So today I want you to take a look at ahead, maybe you’re in it now or look ahead, what busy season is coming up and where could you schedule a recovery so you’ve got some routine in there to help support you?