EP # 211 - The High Achiever's Guide to Guilt-Free Time Off

Struggling with productivity guilt every time you try to take a break? You're not alone. In this candid episode, Maggie shares her personal journey from corporate hustle culture to sustainable business success, revealing why high achievers feel guilty about rest and how to break free from this destructive pattern.

What You'll Learn:
• The hidden cost of productivity guilt on your business and life
• Why we're only truly effective 6 hours a day
• The difference between being busy vs. being impactful
• Maggie's personal transformation from workaholic to balanced entrepreneur
• A 5-step process to ditch productivity guilt for good
• Real client success stories of business growth through better work-life balance

Key Takeaways:
✨ Rest and recharge time isn't luxury—it's necessary for peak performance
✨ Not all actions are created equal: focus on high-impact activities
✨ Your business can grow while you're taking time off
✨ It's a process that takes time, and that's completely normal

Featured Success Stories:
• Client who took their first vacation in 7 years while growing business 25%
• How taking Fridays off actually helped Maggie's business growth

Perfect For:
High achievers, ambitious entrepreneurs, small business owners struggling with work-life balance, anyone caught in hustle culture

Ready to Break Free from Productivity Guilt?
Book your complimentary consultation with Maggie to learn how to grow your business while creating the life you love.

Connect with Maggie:
🌐 Website: https://stairwaytoleadership.com
📧 Email: maggie@stairwaytoleadership.com
📅 Free Consultation:https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call

More Episodes: Subscribe to Diamond Effect Podcast for weekly business growth strategies and mindset shifts.

Episode Length: 21 minutes

Transcript

EP 211 - Productivity Guilt

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. Welcome to Diamond Effect podcast, episode 211. This one is for my fellow high achievers and productivity guilt. Very often the hassle culture, the being constantly on and taking pride in not taking time off on vacation is being glorified, but some big names out there.

But this episode is for those of you who are high achievers and have been running in the pattern of, the more I work, the more success I get. And at the same time, deep down, you really would like to be able to take time off and thoroughly enjoy it, rather than whenever you take time off, whether it's a day, a week, or even an hour, you have the guilt running through your brain and everyone saying, oh, you are not working.

You're not [00:01:00] productive. Therefore, something must be wrong. You're not gonna get where you wanna get. I coach a couple of my clients recently about it. I've been myself dealing through it and working through it because this is not how I wanna run my business and my life through constant hassle.

Yes, I am a high achiever. Yes, I'm very ambitious. I have big vision and plans to grow my business, and at the same time. It's important to me to have a very holistic life spent quality personal time with people that are close to me with my family, my friends that I love. Take time off to rest and recharge and not feel guilty about it.

And it's been a journey for me. So I wanna share a little bit of my journey. I wanna normalize the fact that even though you might be feeling [00:02:00] productivity, guilt right now, whenever you try to take time off, that does not have to be that way. And if you do want to lead your life. More sustainably in a more balanced way.

You can get there and I'll show you today how. so let's start with my own story. I definitely was raised in a culture and environment where. Being productive, and I'm not saying effective, but doing something was more welcome than sitting on the couch and doing nothing.

Where that being busy doing something productive or helpful was glorified, was taking time off and enjoying it. Not as much. Even my own grandmother, I remember. When she was visiting us with my grandpa for holidays like Christmas or Easter, so on, she would always keep herself busy, help my mom [00:03:00] with the meals, with cleaning and so on, which was great.

But then when it came to the town to. Enjoy an afternoon on Christmas day or a Sunday after, the meals and the dishes were done my grandpa could not sit longer than five minutes, very often. I remember her sitting for five, many minutes getting all impatient and hurrying my grandpa to start getting ready and get home.

Whereas my grandpa was always, Hey, let's stay. I wanna play with my grandkids. Now is the time to relax, to have a great conversation, to watch a movie. My grandma could not bear that.

Then the second part to, let's say my upbringing as a hustler was corporate culture. I've spent, I don't know, 15 plus years in a corporate, and there was definitely this unsaid rule where you had to look busy, right? To justify you being [00:04:00] paid your salary, whether you had something to.

Most of the time in my roles, I had more to do than hours in the day. So it wasn't like I was pretending to be busy, but sitting in the office eight to six or seven to seven or whatever it was at the time. Put me in that habit of constantly working habit of eating at my desk, never taking a break not having enough time and thinking that I'm always busy, that I'm not in control of my schedule, which then required intentional breaking of that habit when I started my own business and also the way I felt about it.

So then when you layer on my own high achiever personality per me wanting to do well, me wanting to, accomplish a lot of things, having big goals and big vision, when you layer all of that [00:05:00] on, I definitely used to feel weird when I had time off, whether it was weekends going on vacation.

I enjoy to travel but it used to take me days, sometimes even almost the whole week of vacation, to actually feel relaxed and calm and start truly enjoying the time and not have my head spinning like, oh, I should be doing this. I should be doing that. Maybe I should have worked on that.

Usually those habits are founded on beliefs that we developed over time and never questioned. One of mine was that not working meant waste of time, not feeling like I'm productive, like I'm participating, meant waste of time, and I had to break that and I had to change my beliefs and shift them to be able to see.[00:06:00] 

Rest and research and time off as something not only needed in my life to live a well balanced life, but almost like a necessity for me to even accomplish my professional goals.

Let me share with you three aha moments and sort of transformations of beliefs that help me ditch productivity gel as one of my clients called it, and also at the end, a five step process to help you do the same, if that's what you want.

So the first one was understanding the science of effectiveness and productivity, and that came with high performance coaching that I did at some point after I burnt out in my corporate world. And I'm really driven by understanding how we operate as humans, how our brain operates, the science behind it and on.

Ultimately, we are the most effective [00:07:00] probably for the short period of maximum six hours a day, whether they're. First thing in the morning for you, or whether they're afternoon. As human beings, we really can be effective, meaning we can focus well and we can be productive within the time.

It's about six hours a day. After that, we just get tired. Our productivity and effectiveness drops. Therefore, it takes us much longer to complete task. We're not as creative. Our ideas are not as good. So you could be working very effectively in a focused way, six hours and do more and accomplish more than somebody who's working for 12.

That was truly a light bulb moment for me because as I then realized that and started observing the way I was throughout the week, I realized it was true. Even in my case, sometimes when I [00:08:00] was trying to complete a task at the end of the day, it would take me so long because my brain just couldn't focus.

When I started not doing that, finishing the day earlier and then getting to that task first thing in the morning. It would take me three times less time to complete the task. The second thing was realizing that not all actions are created equal. There are actions that create a lot of value and a lot of impact in the results that we want to create.

And there's busy things that we might be busy and productively doing them, but they're not creating the outcomes we want. They're not directly correlated with the results we want, it's not about doing it all, it's about really prioritizing and focusing on the high impact activities that will create everything you wanna create in your business or in [00:09:00] your career.

So that was the second. Huge aha moment because so many people try to do it the other way around. They first try to be more productive and more effective with their time, with their never ending to-do list -without cleaning that list up. Without first taking a look: is what I'm trying to do all of it necessary; does all of it is required or brings me closer to my goals? When I realized that, first you have to be clear, which actions are the most valuable, create most impact, and which actions I need to prioritize and what I need not do that 10 xd my effectiveness. And with that productivity and then the third lesson and aha moment that created even a core belief in what I do right now is that. Rest [00:10:00] and recharge. Time to rest and recharge, and that looks different throughout the year.

Those are the weekends. Those are breaks and lunches. Those are extended time off while the vacation is not a luxury or being selfish or just, being lazy, however your brain talks about it. Those are necessary for me to accomplish the goals. Those are necessary for me to be a high performer, which means to me being a person who operates at their best, because I think at my best, feel at my best, then accomplish actions at my best, and therefore create the best results possible.

That. Taking time off was a necessity to that. It was a non-negotiable thing that my body needs in order to operate at it best.

[00:11:00] Understanding that internalizing that helped me get rid of productivity gud, because I know now that when I'm taking time off. It's for me not only to enjoy my personal life, but to help me accomplish my goals faster in the professional career.

No, I'm not gonna say that. Getting rid of the guilt is easy. Personally, it took me some time and I'm still working on it. I've been in my business full time for three and a half years, so it's like fourth summer that I'm just running my business. I don't have corporate job, anything else, and I can see that only now I feel.

Fully in peace in how I structured my summer, the time that I'm taking off to be with my kids. This summer, I'm taking Fridays off which in the previous year was just one of here and [00:12:00] there.

I'm feeling great about it, and it's not just that I don't have a guilt, but I've actually developed a belief that this, the way I run my summer, the way I take time off, is actually helping me grow my business, not hindering me from growing it

So before I share with you the five step process that's helped me to get here is that. It is a process. It might take time, and that's okay. So only because if you're taking vacation now and somehow you're feeling guilty about it, or you are not enjoying it as much as you would like to, that does not mean it'll never happen.

And I'm talking from experience because. I was just coaching my client recently, who came back from the first vacation in a while, not so long ago, [00:13:00] early summer, late spring, and they took the vacation. But they weren't feeling as good as they wanted to. Better than they used to because we coached on it, but not as good as they wanted to.

However, they're already planning the next vacation in the fall, and even though they feel some resistance to it. They're putting themselves in that situation because they know it will benefit them. Having that relaxation time, research time was very beneficial to them. They also learned that their business can still keep growing and be okay while they're doing it, so it's possible.

Another story I have is one of my clients who had a very established business, brick and mortar, and when I started coaching with them, they did not take. Any extended time off any extended vacation. For seven years, they were working till 2:00 AM in the morning, most of the days of the week really [00:14:00] exhausted.

And after your coaching together, not only did their business grow 25% without even switching the locations, and even though they were established and known and they thought that, they capped their growth potential, not only did the business grow. But my clients stopped working till 2:00 AM and worked more regular hours and took amazing vacation.

First one in seven years. So all of it is possible, you just need to allow yourself to go through the process of getting there.

So the first step is for you to create. Time off, no work opportunities to start experiencing not being in the hassle mode and not working. And depending on where you are, that might mean just the weekend or one day off. Or it might mean taking extended vacation, something you haven't done in a [00:15:00] while

it's okay that it's gonna feel weird for you, that you might not feel at ease with it. But without creating those opportunities and putting yourself in that situation, you'll never get to the point where you are actually enjoying it and truly resting