Sometimes you need a change break. There are periods in your life or parts of the year when it makes sense to tell yourself, “I’m not going to try to improve. I’ll still be effective, but I’m going to take a break from trying to be better, better, better.”
How do you know when?
Maybe when you seem to lack resilience, or you feel like you are running on fumes. Maybe when you need to devote more attention to your personal life. Or maybe when you sense that your team could use a change break, and you know that they take their cues from you.
This is fresh in my mind because not long ago, a client told me, “You know I really appreciate you. You always push me. But this one week, I just want to take a break from being pushed.”
If—for a week or two—you are a good version of yourself, even if not the best version, that’s okay. You’re human. Take some time to breathe.
Of course, the force that opposes what I’m saying is that all of my clients are high achievers. They’re competitive. They like to win.
But even the best athletes, the ones who win consistently, know how to build recovery time into their training program. You need to develop and utilize the same skill.
I’ve worked with clients in the retail industry, which has a specific rhythm. You push change through the summer because pretty much after that, it’s the holiday season, which is really just a referendum on the quality of all the work you did earlier in the year. So, in the fall you lead, inspire, support, motivate, and remove obstacles… but you don’t do anything to make the business better at that point. It’s a vital skill to know when to suspend your improvement efforts and your change initiatives.
I often use the tachometer analogy to make this point. If you are always running your engine in the red, it’s going to fail just when you need it the most. You can run it in the yellow—and occasionally in the orange—but the racers who don’t know when to back off the accelerator or take a well timed pit stop seldom win the race.