Hello.
Welcome To The Own Your Health podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
So tonight it's actually late on a Friday night that
I'm recording this and I'm coming to you from Florida
and off of the beach and the wind and the
sand and my final night of vacation here.
And I wasn't so sure that I
was going to even record tonight.
I had set that intention this morning,
thinking I would have time this afternoon.
And then you know how last days of vacation go.
But I was really excited about
what I wanted to tell you.
And the more I thought about it as I was
walking on the beach, the more I thought, I just
have to come and talk to you this evening.
Now, there's a couple of things that may
come across your mind as you say.
That one is that, oh, my gosh, it's vacation,
why are you thinking about work?
And I'll go into that a little bit
when we talk about the 3 surprising ways that
you can get more out of your vacation.
And a little hint towards that future
is that when you let go of
your expectations, sometimes things just happen.
Sometimes your mind gets creative.
When I sort of let myself off the hook for
having to come up with content and record at regular
intervals, I had done some pre recording for the vacation,
stuff comes, your mind begins to work.
Things began to work on their own to be creative.
But let's dive into these three ways that you can
really make your vacation a little bit more special.
And the first is to know why you're going on vacation.
And that may sound silly, but really,
there's a lot of different reasons.
Knowing your why is important for just
about everything, and vacation is no exception.
So when you're going on vacation, are you trying to
get away, trying to get away from work, get away
from the normal routine of the house, the kids and
the dogs, and time on your own?
Or are you looking to immerse yourself in culture or history,
or a new city or a new type of cuisine?
Or are you really looking forward
to not having scheduled time?
And that's really a big one for a lot of people.
It'll be their stated excuse.
I just need to be off the calendar.
But a lot of people really struggle with that, and
it can be very hard to have unscheduled time.
So let's talk about a little bit about how things
would have looked before. I really got into my, really
came into my health power and really started setting intentions
and, and making decisions ahead of time
about what I wanted my vacations to look like.
So I've been here at this resort for
two weeks, and it's a resort that we've
been coming to for many, many, many years.
And so as I approach this time, I get all kinds
of ideas on how I want to spend this vacation.
And a lot of times it would have
looked like spending more time with my husband
and my son, spending time with my parents,
they often came to the same resort. Thinking
about new business ideas, starting a new yoga
practice, cooking new kinds of food, because I'm
in a different situation, different ingredients available. Starting
a new exercise program.
All of these things would come into my mind,
and I would want to do this on vacation.
It's like, okay, this time I'm going to...
And I would load it with all of these things,
and I would wake up in the morning or the
night before, I think about, okay, what am I going
to do when I get up in the morning?
And I kind of didn't know which way to turn.
And they were all things I wanted to do.
It wasn't anything that I didn't want to do.
The trouble was, is you can't do everything and
still feel rewarded and still feel fulfilled and still
feel as though you had a vacation.
So you can do all of that stuff, but you'll
end up probably more frazzled and less feeling like you're
owning your health than if you set your intention for
what you want this vacation to be.
And so that's the second way.
First way is, know why you're going on this vacation.
And the second way is to really set
your intention.
You set the theme.
You decide what's important.
You decide what you want to do.
So my intention for this two weeks, and this
is a little bit of a unique situation, because
this is our last two weeks in this place
during this time, after many, many years.
And so my intention for this time was
really just to soak it all in.
I wanted to walk on the beach a lot.
I wanted to
spend a lot of time journaling and contemplating.
I didn't want to schedule, you know, I know
the flight coming in, the flight going home.
During the course of the two weeks, I think
we've made dinner reservations with two or three people
where there's been a little plan for the evening,
but otherwise the time has been wide open.
And that was really important for me because this place
actually holds kind of another special, special feeling for me
in that it was my time here in this very
place, very often in this very room,
that I first decided to leave my corporate job
to really focus on my health and my business
and contributing and helping other people do the same.
And so much of that was
birthed right here in this space.
So I really wanted to leave space for all
of the feelings that come up about that.
I'm very excited about the next chapter and where
we're going and what we're going to be doing,
but this one's coming to a close.
So it was important for me to leave time and
space for that and not to fill every minute.
And that would have been easy to do.
I could have filled every minute with,
oh, we really like this restaurant.
We should have gone here again.
I want to see this again.
I want to go to the museum one more time. I want.
But I didn't.
My intention was very clear that I wanted open time.
I wanted relaxation.
Contrast this to the past.
So besides wanting to do a million things in the
past, my intention would have been maybe being a really
good host when we had guests coming and staying with
us or doing extra special things with my folks or
my son when he was younger, and he would come
here with us, and those would be very different ways
to set to spend vacation.
And I found that as long as I intended, I set an
intention and I did what I intended, then I was very satisfied
and I felt very good at the end of the time.
Now, to contrast this, if you've ever been on a
vacation where you had wonderful plans and they somehow got
sidelined, maybe a family member that you hadn't anticipated joined
you, or maybe the time got cut short, or maybe
someone else kind of took over the schedule and you
did not get to have the time you want.
You know, you feel pretty cheated at the end.
You feel like, oh, my gosh, vacations
don't come along all of the time.
You look forward to them.
And if you don't set your own intention and take
control of that time, like so many other aspects of
our life, you can feel really short changed and kind
of disappointed, let down at the end of vacation.
A good clue for me that I am working within my intention
is that I'm excited about my time here and that I'm also
ready to move on to the next thing, ready to go home,
to get on the plane tomorrow and start the next phase of
everything we've got going on in our lives.
When I feel short changed, when something has hijacked
vacation, or when I've picked too many things and
been scattered, I feel very let down.
I want one more day one more week.
This isn't enough time.
Very frustrated with myself, and it's a very different
way to leave and to wrap up vacation.
So I'm going to give you these contrasts between how I
do things now and how I used to do things.
And hopefully you relate to how I do things
now and find a lot of commonality there.
But if not, you may relate to how things used to be.
And this is a good opportunity for you to make changes.
So first, know your why.
Why are you going on vacation?
Second, set that intention.
And it's an important step you don't want to skip because
sometimes we get so busy and there's so much work to
do and everything leading up to vacation that we kind of
think, all right, I just want to get on the plane.
I just want to get in the
car, and then I'll figure it out.
And then you can be halfway
through your week before you do.
So take that time to set the intention.
And then number three, and this is where
it gets really pretty fascinating for me, and
that is check in with yourself.
So you set the intention, you think you know what
you wanted this week or two weeks, or if you're
lucky, three weeks to look like, and maybe it doesn't.
And maybe that's okay, or maybe you've changed your
mind, or maybe a different opportunity has come up.
And that's all right.
Because owning our health, owning these aspects of our
life doesn't mean that we have to be rigid.
It means we have to be intentional.
So if, for example, my intention was like
it was for this trip, just a lot
of wide open space and time without planning.
But another family member would have the opportunity to
join us, and then we would invite them,
that's a key piece here,
my intention may change or it may accommodate both.
But by checking in with myself
and saying, okay, do we want,
okay, this is an opportunity,
do we want company this week or not?
By checking in with myself, I can stay true
to my intention or I can adjust my intention.
And there may be those of you thinking,
okay, well, there just isn't that much control.
People pop in, you know, other
people show up, plans change.
They may.
But if you need to go back and listen to the
episode about boundaries, because when it comes to my vacation, when
it comes to my leisure time or time with my husband
away especially, I have very strong boundaries on who is let
in and who gets to share that time.
And I welcome you to take a listen to that episode.
I'll add a link to it in the show notes.
And you may want to just
adapt some of those practices yourself.
So when you check in with yourself, think
about, is this going how I wanted it?
Is this vacation unfolding?
Is this open time?
And maybe you wanted a lot of open time,
and by day three, you're getting kind of restless,
and you're like, okay, I don't have plans.
I'm used to having something on the calendar.
I'm used to knowing what I'm supposed to
do when I get up in the morning.
Check in with yourself.
Maybe this is an opportunity to just feel
what that feels like for a while.
Or if you decide, yeah, I've done that for three days,
and that sounds fine, but now I want to make plans.
Then by all means, choose something that you'd really
love to do, and go ahead and do that,
but don't automatically fill the whole rest of the
time with one appointment after another just because that's
what you're accustomed to doing at home.
Now, if it's a vacation where you are
touring, if it's a cultural immersion, then, yes,
it may be a very active vacation.
You may have two or three
things scheduled every single day.
Perfectly normal, because that's what you
intended to do with that time.
For me, this vacation, lots of open spaces.
And there were times that I would get a
little restless and think, oh, I really should be.
I really should be recording.
I really should be creating content.
I really should be...
And then I said, no, that's not
what my intention for this was.
Now, I can tell you by probably the middle of
the second week, I started brimming with these ideas.
I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna write this down.
Okay, I'm just gonna write this down.
So I have a notebook full of ideas and things
that I don't necessarily need to work through or work
out during this vacation time, but because I created that
space in my brain, because I created the space in
my calendar and the space in my day and in
my energy, so much creative stuff has come to me.
So many ideas for the future, so many ideas for this
podcast, and other things that I want to share with you.
So I invite you to reclaim your vacations, to own your
vacation time, to get the absolute most out of it, not
by being the busiest, but by doing exactly what you intend
to do and see if you don't come out of it
feeling so much more recharged and so much healthier.
And that's what we're here for.
So, goodbye from Florida, and until next
week, let's go out and own it.
