Hi. This is Paul Salazar, and welcome to another episode of the AWARE Pro nurse podcast. On this podcast, we explore the dynamics of social entrepreneurship and how change makers can thrive while making a difference. In today's episode, we're diving into a topic that's really overlooked. The significance of taking vacations and breaks for social entrepreneurs. Let's uncover why self care and rejuvenation are essential for the positive impact that you wanna have in a sustainable way. Before we do that, I wanna share with you a wonderful review we got on Apple Podcasts. And it is from a con wound on Apple Podcasts.

It reads finally a podcast for me. As a social impact entrepreneur, I have Been searching for a community who spoke directly to me. Look no further. Great lessons, actionable tips. I love it. Thank you so much for that wonderful review. And if you haven't yet done a review for the podcast, it helps tremendously. So if you could go to whatever you like listening to the show on, hit subscribe, do a rating, and review.

It really helps more people find the show and help us teach more people had had positive impact through a values based business. And lastly, I wanna let you know we're gonna practice what we're preaching here today. And that is we're gonna take a month off the AWAREPriners podcast. This episode's gonna go live on Tuesday, August 8th And then we're not gonna publish another episode until Tuesday, September 12th. That's right. A whole month off. It's never happened in 6 years. I've taken a week I think 2 weeks, but I've never taken a month off.

And I'm excited for a break. I'm excited to come back. gonna go visit family in Columbia. There's a lot happening here, but also it's just time. I've been publishing this for over 300 episodes. This will be episode 303. And, yeah, just wanted to take a vacation, take a break, and not worried about trying to keep the content coming while doing some connection with family and some personal rejuvenation. So let's get into today's episode.

So in today's episode, I'm gonna talk to you about 5 points and I'm gonna tell you what they are and then we're gonna dive deeply into all the various components of each one. Number 1, we're gonna talk about burnout and its impact, and I had a big burnout experience that I'm gonna tell you about. So this is not ethereal, though. Certainly, there's a lot of research. Number 2 is renewed creativity and innovation. There's research that tells us when we take a break, we come back, and we're just much more generative. Number 3, we're gonna talk about enhanced decision making and problem solving. Again, a lot of research when we, like, put things down and go do another activity, take a break, and then come back to that.

We just see things in a whole new light, and we come up with much more creative solutions and much more effective strategies for the things that we're working on. Number 4, we're gonna talk about improved physical and mental well-being. And number 5, we're gonna talk about leading by example and why this is really important, not just for your own well-being, but also for the results of the people that are looking at hiring you. Let's talk a little bit about burnout. Again, I had a very significant burnout experience. My 1st 15 years of my now, about 31. I'm dating myself. 31 years, I've been at this.

working with communities, working towards positive change. The 1st 15 years were in community mental health and community organizing was my role. I have a master's degree in community mental health. So that was the role I was in. And by the last half of that by the last seven and a half years or 7 years or so. I was the executive director of an innovative nonprofit. So suddenly I was trying to oversee the work and do some of the delivery of the work, fund the work, do all the reporting, keep donors happy, work with volunteers. You get a sense.

It was incredible work. I'm incredibly grateful that for that experience, and I burned out really, really bad. That was more in a more traditional nonprofit leader, iteration of my work, but even in the social entrepreneur space, you know, we deal with hard things. You deal with hard things. And the research tells us that we don't take time to restore and rejuvenate and put it down at times the chances that we're gonna have even, you know, mild degree of burnout. Lots of trauma in the work we do. That we're being exposed to in a variety of ways. And the research tells us that, you know, low level chronic exposure to really challenging situations really adds up over time.

And if we're not being skillful with how we manage it, what it can mean is burnout. Reduced capacity to have impact. Just more challenges thinking of creative solutions staying positive, staying engaged. Just that blasse of, like, everything feels like we've heard it before, etcetera. It's really, really common in the social entrepreneur space. And it's more common when we don't take a break. Taking vacations having, you know, many vacations I've heard. You know, I still do my 7 minutes a day of meditation on a daily basis, there's things we do.

I work out most days 5 to 6 days a week. So there are things we can do on a daily basis. but then there's that time of just like putting down the work and going somewhere. In this case, I'm going to another country for 2 weeks of 4 weeks. I'm gonna be off. And there's a lot of research about how important that is. I really wanted to emphasize that When you are dealing with burnout, whether it's more low grade or really intense, like, I had that just crisis. Like, I literally couldn't keep doing what I was doing in that earlier iteration of my career.

that we are less creative. We have trouble making decisions, and our overall effectiveness goes down. So point number 1 is that burnout is real, and it's significant in the social entrepreneur space and taking a break is a good way to get some distance and notice about when you come back, it gives you new eyes. fresh head of eyes is what one of my clients calls it. And you can see where maybe some things have been rubbing you. I've been creating friction. and not really working for you, but being in it day to day, you might not notice that as much. So taking a break allows a very fresh perspective.

So that's number 1, why I wanted to bring this topic. Number 2, is about renewing your creativity and innovation. Again, when you step away and you go to another country where they speak another language and eat food or even a different city. Or going to the mountains, those of you who listen to this podcast know how much nature is a refuge for me in a place of renewal. And, certainly, that's part of the next month for me is getting time in the mountains, getting time in Columbia, eating great food, visiting people I elaborate. So when we step away from the day to day grind, we can recharge and renew our creativity. I also wanted to highlight the concept of restorative mind wandering, I've heard it called. In other words, being able to just follow something that sparks your interest, whether it's a piece of art or a restaurant or a fun activity, or something interesting that's happening in a place in the forest that you're visiting.

So much of, certainly, my experience and what I'm hearing from many clients day to day being a social entrepreneur, there's a lot of outcomes, a lot of metrics, a lot of expectations, and when we can step back into a less outcome focused place, our ability to see things into you and reconnect with our creativity goes way way up. And I'm ready for some of that myself, which is part of the break that I'm gonna be taking. I wanna encourage you to remember to take breaks as wellbeing example for me was about 18 months ago, I took a fabulous trip with a friend to Catalina Island, which is A wonderful island. Cars are mostly not allowed there. There's a few cars there, but there are very few cars. It's a wonderful, mostly kind of wild island. And we did 5 days of backcountry camping some of that right on the beach next to the ocean, we had an incredible experience. And being away from you know, the noise and the traffic, even though I live in Albuquerque and it's quieter and not as much traffic as a lot of big cities, There's still quite a bit of that.

I am in downtown Albuquerque and just the general level of busyness and human influence sounds and experiences and and getting those 5 days of island living, sleeping on the beach, We're sleeping in an incredible environment where there were no other people around. Spending most of the day where, you know, maybe you'd see, like, eight people in a day, a whole day. And when you did see them, the general level of willingness to have a meaningful not rushed conversation. I came back, and I remember the feeling of coming back. I was really restored and renewed and feeling really fresh. That's the second thing I wanted to remind you of when we take a break, That new and fresh and innovative mindset perspective is much more likely to be accessible to us. And I got those benefits for months after that trip that I'm telling you about on Catalina Island. The third point I wanted to explore with you is about how we can enhance our decision making.

Again, taking a break We have an improved ability to make decisions. And sometimes, like, our decision maker gets a little fatigued. It's like, I'm a runner. You know that if you've been listening to this show for a while. And if you just keep training at the same level and you never build in any covery time, your muscles get tired, you're more prone to injury you don't perform at the top level. The same is true with our decision making. skills. When we're constantly on high performance mode, what happens is they just get a little award.

Right? And when we unplug, when we relax, and, again, we can do that in day to day, week to week, take a Saturday morning, do a 7 minute meditation, go for a hike for 2 hours in the mountains. Right? All that is great. And when you're a high performer and you're doing work with a number of different clients and a number of different domains and you wanna do your best year after year. Sometimes you just need the longer unplug to let your decision maker muscles relax. And to give your brain a chance to step out of that performance mode and into recovery mode, just like the physical body, for runner or a weightlifter or any high performance athlete. The 4th point I wanted to explore with you is about how taking a break improves our physical and mental well-being. Again, I've shared with you already that I have a master's degree in community mental health and It was from a very innovative program, Leslie University, in the Boston area, and it had a holistic emphasis. That's why I picked that particular program.

We were twelve miles down the road from John Cabotson. the founder or sometimes called the grandfather, a mindfulness based stress reduction. So if you've talked things about mindfulness and how it can be really helpful to recovery and help us you know, unplug from stress and find neutral again after being in high performance mode. That research, a lot of it, comes from or or at least was sparked from John Cabot's end. And Leslie was twelve miles down the road. many of my professors were John's earliest students. So it was incredibly well informed. A lot of research, a lot of practice, And it's one of the reasons that I went to that particular program.

So, you know, I graduated in 1991, so you get a sense. I've been at this a little while. And what we know is that there is a very strong correlation between being in stress mode for long periods of time and negative physical health outcomes, chronic stress can reduce your mental health and well-being, And some of the aforementioned, negative outcomes on creativity and your sense to Think out of the box. So when you really give yourself chance to unplug, What you're doing is you're reducing the physical stress response in your body, right, to just, again, wander in a market or wander in a mountain or wandering in art museum, whatever your version of the ideal vacation or break looks like, What's happening there is we're stepping out of that high performance outcome mode and into the experiencing life with richness, with wonder, and with awe. The research on awe and the emotion of awe and stepping back into that place is an area of a lot of research in the past 5 years. And it's important for us to consciously build in time where we're stepping back into relationship with things like awe. When you go on vacation, when you take a break, Maybe it's a staycation. You don't have to necessarily go physically somewhere else, but taking the work off your plate and bringing things into your experience that really allow you to be in, remembering the beauty and the mystery of life.

So it's important when you're taking a break for the reasons that we're talking about today, you know, I do these endurance events, you know, to go to another state and do a incredibly challenging run or a big event and whatever, you know, something that has a lot of excitement to it. And that's great too. I'm not putting that down. But this particular episode is about those experiences where we slow down, where we're less goal focused. And where we have more space in our days to connect with other people, to do things we love and enjoy, not to It's great to go to a work related conference for a week, but that's not what I'm talking about here, listeners. This is very different. So I hope you get a sense of that sense of reconnecting with magic, with awe, with serendipity and being a little less or maybe a lot less if you're like me, outcome focused for this particular part of being a holistic human. And lastly, wanna remind you that when you're in this space, when we do the work that we do, those of you who listen in this podcast for a while, of a sense of who you are.

And we're doing hard things. We're working towards goals. that, you know, oftentimes involve communities and individuals that have less access to resource that have been historically underserved. Right? And The tendency can be that there's so much work to do and we're so excited to help communities and that have been marginalized over time that sometimes not just ourselves, but the whole, you know, ecosystem can forget about taking a break and working inhumane and compassionate ways. And part of what I wanted to remind myself to remind you to help you remind the communities you care about that, especially in communities that have been underserved, we need to be more compassionate, not less. We need to be more attentive to the holistic well-being of the humans involved, not less. And yet sometimes These ecosystems are the ones that are sometimes at the hardest time remembering how important it is. When somebody takes a vacation, when somebody says I'm ready for a break, to support that individual, and to support this behavior as something we do so we can be sustainable.

We can be in this work for the long haul because for the most part, The kinds of initiatives that I've seen really move the needle don't happen in 6 months or a year. Many of the initiatives that have had the biggest successes that we've interviewed, over the 300 plus episodes on this podcast. People have been working on for decades. I'm thinking of the good people at Homeboy Industries, which is a incredible social enterprise that works with people coming out of prison. putting work and holistic wraparound services so that people can build a good life after having been in prison. Right? They've been at it for decades. And they built a Homeboy Network, which are 10,000 plus organizations all over the world. that work on helping people coming out of prison, get meaningful work, and build a good life so that the recidivism goes down and people can step back into their families and communities after having been in prison and contribute and be a part of and live a good life.

That work has been going for decades, and there's still a lot of work to do. Most of us are working on issues like that. And, yeah, sometimes we treat it as if it's just a sprint, and we just keep sprinting and sprinting and sprinting. And then our bodies our relationships are well-being breakdown. So it's not just about reminding ourselves and getting that break ourselves But also when leaders in a movement, when leaders in an ecosystem are physically and mentally nourished, and we're showing people. We're modeling to people that this is one of the ways you do it. Those movements can sustain And they tend to have much better results than organizations and ecosystems and coalitions or the norm is you just work and work and work and work until you fall over because your ability to do good work and to do really creative and meaningful work that takes all of the different layers into perspective Just it you can't do it if you're never giving yourself the upper rear, are they giving yourself the opportunity to get a break? And remember, what's it like for you to be fully human? Who are you when you're relaxed? and feeling a sense of engagement and curiosity and maybe even some awe. So Again, let's go through those points that we touched on.

We talked about burnout and its impact. We talked about renewing creativity, and innovation. We talked about your most enhanced decision making and problem solving capacities how taking a break really tends to help you reconnect with that. We talked about your physical and mental wellbeing. And how taking a vacation and taking breaks really helps you step out of chronic patterns around stress and just being in high performance mode. And lastly, we talked about leading by example and how movements can be more sustainable when the leaders in those movements remember to take locations and breaks. So, again, a reminder, we're gonna take a month off but we're per nurse podcast where we're gonna publish our next episode on Tuesday, September 12. In the meantime, We have over 300 episodes.

This should be episode 303 if I'm remembering correctly. So there's lots to go listen to. Doesn't mean you can't listen to an episode. There's a chance to catch up. You will see me periodically on social media, although I'll be doing a little bit less. So I just want to remind you that we love listener suggested topics and guests. And you can find out what we're looking for. If you have an idea for the show, either a topic or a guest, go to the aware printer's website.

And on our contact page, it has our 3 simple guidelines. We try to be very transparent in what we're looking for. So go take a look at that. And if you have an idea, please send it on in. Lastly, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times, and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.