Episode 254: The REAL Reason You Don’t Take Vacation

WHY. THE. HELL. DO. YOU. AVOID. VACATIONS?!? 

Here’s the deal—

Vacations are not a LUXURY.

They are a NECESSITY.

Treat yourself because your job is fucking HARD, and for you to be at your best and continue serving your clients, you need to fill your own cup first.

Not to mention— burnout SUCKS, and your prefrontal cortex needs a break, damn it! 

Xo,
Sari

P.S. Don’t forget to download my podcasts to listen to on the plane so you are not bored traveling to your dream vacYAY. 😎

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“Vacation is important, because it's taking that very important time for self-care. You are what matters in trial. First and foremost, you are the person who is going to evoke emotion in jurors, you are the one that is going to set the tone at trial, you are the one that's going to nail the defense to the wall. You are the one that is going to be up crazy ass hours at trial, you are the one that has to deal with the crazy opposing counsel and all the discovery and weird ass clients and all the rest of it. If there was anybody that needed to take a vacation and many vacations, it's y'all, so the self-care aspect is huge and helpful in keeping you at your prime.”

sari de la motte

Episode 254 Transcription

Well, welcome everybody. We're going to start with a review, this time from Trial Guides for my book From Hostage to Hero, which I wouldn't say it's out of date, it's just the method has come so much farther than when I wrote that book in 2019. So if you want the most updated version of my stuff, you got to join the H2H crew. Go to sariswears.com/ ... is it crew? I think it's crew. I'm not sure, you'll find it on there. I probably should have looked that up, had a brain fart.

Okay, but thank you for continuing to review the book. This one's from Pamela J. It says, "Hostage to Hero is a great guide for any trial lawyer. I read it after having practiced for 30 years and I learned a lot. Sari presents a unique approach for voir dire and opening, and I can tell you it really works. After reading her book, I also sought coaching and Sari recommended her colleague, Jody. Jody was fabulous and showed us how to take the principles set forth in the book and apply it to our case. We went to trial shortly after, utilized the principles and got an award of $4.6 million. The H2H techniques really work."

Well, they do and add Coach Jody to that and it is a winning combination. By the way, if you want to get with an H2H consultant, you can go right to our website and book Coach Jody or Coach June, and they will take you through a three and a half hour session on voir dire or opening, and you will be so glad that you spent the time and money to do that. Again, you can do that at sariswears.com.

All right, well, today we are talking about, because it's the end of May, May 31st, and that means we're starting into the summer season. My daughter in 10 days is going to leave with her grandparents to go to Finland for a month before we get there, and I'm trying not to totally freak out. Two years ago, that was three weeks. This time it's a little over four, but then we will go there for another three and a half weeks and bring her home with us.

But it's vacation time, and so today we're talking about the real reason why you don't take vacation.

Now, let's talk about the benefits of vacation, first of all. You've heard me talk before about how taking a break of any kind from just your work during the day, an actual vacation really helps your prefrontal cortex come back online, so to speak. Meaning when we're tired, when we're hungry, when we've been working straight through, we tend to default more to our reptile brain, our amygdala, and it runs the show and we don't get our best work out of that.

As scientists have found that most of the best and greatest scientific discoveries have happened during what they call the gap, which is when you are not, or they are not in the lab working or writing or researching, it's when they're taking a walk or taking a nap, and boom, the idea just comes into play.

So, one of the things that I was noticing too when I was writing the outline for this podcast is we do this with artists too, and I firmly believe that y'all are artists. What you do has to be creative or it doesn't work. In The Artist's Way, which is a book by Julia Cameron, it's a book that she wrote for artists who were stuck and couldn't produce any more work. So she wrote this book of how to get out of that stuck place, and one of the things that she has you do beside morning pages, which I've talked a lot about before on the podcast, and by the way, I suggest highly that y'all go get this book, it's called The Artist's Way by Julie Cameron.

One of the things she talks about is taking yourself on a weekly artist's date. What that means is that you go by yourself to an art museum or to a thrift shop or to a park and have a picnic, whatever it may be. The reason for that is that you cannot continue to produce whatever it is you're producing, art, opening statements, voir dire, when you're not filling the well on the other side, right? So you need to be bringing in fresh looks, fresh takes, have your eyes be on something different than your computer screen or that blank canvas, and that that is going to help you find a way back to your art. Again, this is absolutely true for trial lawyers.

In addition, vacation is important, because it's taking that very important time for self-care. You are what matters in trial. First and foremost, you are the person who is going to evoke the emotion in jurors, you are the one that is going to set the tone at trial, you are the one that's going to nail the defense to the wall. You are the one that is going to be up crazy ass hours at trial, you are the one that has to deal with the crazy opposing counsel and all the discovery and weird ass clients and all the rest of it. If there was anybody that needed to take a vacation and many vacations, it's y'all, so the self-care aspect is huge and helpful in keeping you at your prime.

Can you imagine, and you can imagine, 'cause I think, was it John Belushi in Saturday Night Live and he's supposed to be this great athlete, and he's smoking cigarettes and eating the mini donuts, the chocolate cover donuts, which are my favorite, I love those. So, can you imagine treating yourself like that if you were an athlete? It's the same thing. What you do you have to be in prime condition.

I'm not saying you have to be a certain weight, but you need to be well-rested, well-fed, having good energy around you, all of the things and vacation along with other regular breaks are a big part of that. It's going to help you in your life. Not to mention the third reason, which is there's more ... it's going to help you in your work is what I should have said. Number three, there's more to life than work.

So, I don't want you thinking, well, I should take a vacation, 'cause it'll make me a better trial lawyer. It will, but hello, there's a big world out there to be seen and enjoyed and explored with your loved ones, with your family, and that deserves a place in your life.

If you're not taking vacation 'cause you don't fucking have time, then you need to have a discussion with yourself about your priorities. All right, so these are the reasons why I want you to take vacation.

Now, the reason why you tell me that you don't take vacation is twofold.

The first one is, well, I don't have time, right?

I'm so behind, I have so much work, there's no way that I can actually even take the time to go on vacation, which is closely related to the second one, which is, and if I do, I hear this one all the time, I will be more behind and it'll just create a bigger headache. So I'm just going to avoid the headache altogether, because if I go, I won't be able to relax, 'cause I'll be thinking about all the work that's sitting and waiting for me when I get home. So those of you who do manage to force yourself to go on vacation, you end up taking your work and doing it on vacation, which is pointless and against everything that I want to talk to you about today.

Here's what I want to say is that although those things sound very real and maybe feel very real and maybe are very real, that you're going to have all this work when you get home and it seems like you don't have enough time, I think there's a bigger deeper truth. In fact, I know that there is, because I've uncovered this with many of my clients and that's why I wanted to share it with you today.

The real reason that most of you do not take vacation, even though you're telling me and yourself that it's 'cause you don't have time and you're going to have more work when you get home.

The real reason is that you don't know who you are outside of work and vacation becomes this torturous experience, because you don't have anything to do.

When you don't have anything to do, you don't like how that feels, and the reason you don't like how that feels is because your trauma starts to come up.

Now, Kevin and I have talked about trauma, I've talked about trauma, we both have been through trauma therapy. I talk to my clients about trauma and tell them to go to therapy. We all have trauma. I know when you hear that word trauma, we tend to think of somebody chained in their basement being beaten, but trauma is really any kind of hurt that was so big or happened so often that we couldn't process it, and so then it gets stuck in the body and then it creates a reaction in us that we don't even understand most of the time.

Why do I keep doing these things when I cognitively know that I'm safe or I cognitively know that everything's going to turn out fine, but my heart is racing, craziness is ensuing? Why does that happen? The answer is trauma, right? We want to think, I'm not going to go on vacation, because it's wasting time. I'm going to get behind, I'm going to lose my case if I do this, but what I really think it is, because I hear from you, my clients, you're like, "Fine, I went on vacation, Sari, and this is what happened."

You're telling me these stories about absolutely positively jumping out of your own skin, calling your assistants and saying, "You know what? I'm going to go home tomorrow." I love all your assistants are like, "Okay, let's just calm down and let's think about this." But literally feeling like you're tearing out of your skin when you put yourself in a position where work is off limits and you have nothing to do, but just be with your shit. This is what I think is happening. I know, because it happens to me, it has happened to me and this is something that I want you to look at.

So with that end, I've got seven things on how you can manage this and go and take the vacations, because they are very, very important things to do for you as a trial attorney. As you've heard me say before, I take 10 weeks of vacation, 10 weeks.

All right, so one, the first thing, if you're like, "Oh my God, that is me. I feel like I'm going crazy when I'm on vacation and I don't have my work with me." So the first thing, and I mean this quite honestly, is to get help. So many of you are suffering and you do not need to be suffering, and you probably still have the old thought of, well, only crazy people go to therapy, or it's really not that bad, or y'all following the stoics and it's about, well, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and I'll just need to get over it and charge through. I'm saying that you don't have to and why would you? Your work is hard enough.

Now, I know your saboteur's going to come in and say, "Yeah, but that's more time than I need to ..." Okay, you can manage an hour every other week. You can find that time for your mental health, 'cause I'm telling you that absolutely everything's going to get better. It's probably going to get worse for a while when you start uncovering some of this 'cause it's painful, but eventually it'll get so much better and you'll ask yourself why the hell didn't I do this before?

Now, I know Rick Friedman, those of y'all who love Rick Friedman, I love Rick Friedman, he's huge proponent of therapy. He says it absolutely changed his life. So if Rick Friedman can say that in public, you can go and get some therapy, because I can tell you all the rest of the other things, and none of that's going to matter if you still go on vacation and you're dealing with these demons.

So that's really my number one advice, get help. You can go to psychologytoday.com and you can put in where you live and what you're looking for. My favorite type of trauma therapy, you can put just trauma and that'll come up, is IFS therapy, which is basically like saboteur therapy, like saboteur on drugs therapy, it's on steroids. But it's called IFS, Internal Family Systems, and it's really, really wonderful. Somatic therapy too. Working with the body is very, very good. EMDR, there's all kinds of things.

I particularly have CPTSD, which it means I had chronic trauma over time that never let up. That's very different than PTSD. Maybe you had a scenario where you almost died or you saw someone die, and those two types of trauma take different types of therapy, so make sure to share that with any practitioner that you end up interviewing and asking if this is the right therapy for you.

Two, plan ahead.

I don't mean, okay, my vacation's next week, so now I need to plan ahead. I mean, I do my yearly planning at least six months and ahead, so I know what's happening in my next year starting six months from now. What I mean by that is I've got all my vacations planned and then I put everything else on my calendar that I know I have to do every month, podcast and write my love notes and meet with my masterminds and teach in the membership and all my speaking events. Then I look at what I need to have done to be able to go on vacation and I plot that, so that I know things are being handled while I am gone.

Add to that that we have processes that we're putting in place so that anybody in my staff can do anybody else's job so everything's covered while I'm on vacation, and so I don't come back to this huge pile of work. For example, I go to Finland every other year for a month. This is my Finland year, so I know that I need to do an extra podcast every time I podcast so that I'm covered for August. Not a week before, "Oh my God, I got to do a bunch of podcasts or wait till I get back and shove them all in."

No, I'm going to do that ahead of time so that I don't have that waiting for me. Planning is everything, planning is everything.

Number three, once you take that vacation, I want you to practice being with your discomfort.

You can even do that before you take your vacation, just plan on sitting with discomfort. We tend to avoid it like the plague. That's why some of us are overweight, because we eat. Not because we're hungry, but because we don't want to feel whatever we're feeling, or we work, not because we actually need to. I mean, we always need to, that's never going to go away. You're never going to get caught up, I'm just here to tell you that. It's never going to happen, 'cause I keep telling myself that lie, "I just need some time to get caught up." Never going to happen, so we work so then won't have to feel the thing we want to feel. What I'm trying to tell you is feelings aren't scary.

Now, trauma is in a different bucket and some of those feelings you may need a therapist's help to sit with, but start sitting with some of the uncomfortable feelings. I just got off the phone with opposing counsel and my stomach hurts. Instead of, "Ooh, let me go to lunch, ooh, let me start working." Just sit with that for a minute, bring your attention there. Don't have to do anything, just be with the feeling. What you're teaching yourself is I can be with discomfort, and that's going to start helping with your vacations.

Number four, figure out your vacation style.

So Kevin and I have very different vacation styles, so my vacation style is to lie by a pool and have people bring me drinks while I read a book for 10 days straight. Kevin's like, "I would rather shoot myself in the face than do that." So his style is I want to go and explore and take pictures and come back four hours later, and that is what we both do. So I say goodbye and he says goodbye, and then he comes back and I'm like, "How was your pictures?" "Great. How was your drinks?" "Great." And then we drink some more, right? So, figure out your style.

If you are going on a vacation because you think that you should like hiking with a group of people and you hate it, then of course you're not going to take those vacations, or if you want to go on vacation, but all your wife wants to do is sit by the pool and you're like, "That sounds horrible." Then you need to design with her or him around that, okay? So figure out your vacation style, because if you know that, then you will plan vacations around that and actually look forward to them.

Number five, figure out what you want from your vacation or why you're taking a vacation.

If you're not taking a vacation, don't name it a vacation. Here's what I mean by that. So we just went to New York for a week with my kid, so that was not a vacation, I'm going to say that right there. If we had thought it was a vacation going into it like, "Oh, finally we can stop working and go to New York for a week," we would've had a way worse experience than we did.

We had a great experience, don't get me wrong. There were highs and there was lows, but that's not a vacation. That is we're bringing our kid to see museums and also a Finnish relative that's staying with us, and to see these historical monuments, and we're going to be walking a lot and I'm going to have a cranky kid who's often weird about food and will only eat the things that her dad cooks her. If we called that vacation and then we went and had the time that we had, which again, there was great stuff, we would have been disappointed. That is not a vacation, right?

So, the same thing goes for you. Figure out what you need and you might need different things at different times, right? So we go to Disney and we plan pool days, and so it's part vacation, part Disney, which is not a vacation, right? There's other times where Kevin and I go to Canyon Ranch, 'cause he's totally honed in on that now. I don't get to go by myself, which is fine, it's fun, and that is totally chill out, spiritual zen, refocus, get grounded, right?

They're all different types of things, but figure out what vacation you need. If you're totally burned out, don't be like, "Okay, let's go to Disney for a week." What the hell are you thinking? You're going to come back more burned out. But if you're like, "Oh my God, it's been so just droning on at work, I need something that just ... let's go to Costa Rica and do the zip lining and hiking." Figure out what you need and then plan the vacation for that.

Six, this is going to be hard and you're going to hate me and you're going to disagree, unplug completely.

There is so much research out there that says your brain will reset if you just give it time away from screens and Facebook and email and social media.

I'm going to suggest that if you cannot go on a week vacation and not hear from your staff, you've not trained them well enough, you do not have the right staff in place.

This is essential that you get to go and not be trial lawyer for a week. Again, plan ahead. Don't plan that shit a week before trial, you're going to absolutely have to be needed. Plan it for after trial if you need to, but unplug.

We used to at the cabin in Finland not have internet, which I loved, and then my sister had two boys, and as they started growing up and became teenagers, they of course wanted internet, so we have it now. I really kind of hate that. I would prefer not to have the option and completely go off the grid. Do it, I mean it. I have a very close mastermind client, that you all would know if I said this person's name, who went on vacation this last year and left his cell phone with his assistant. Didn't even take the cell phone. Love it, that's what I'm talking about.

And number seven, which I think is huge, plan transition time.

So often when you do end up taking a vacation, you come back Sunday night at 11:00 PM and then you're in the office at 7:00 the next morning. There's different time zones and you're like, "Oh my God, I hate my life. See, this is why I don't take vacation." Can you stop with that shit, please? So what I would suggest is that you leave on a Friday if you're going to take a week and come back on a Friday, and then you have a whole weekend to reorient, to get your laundry done. I'd stay unplugged, by the way, during that time, at least on that Saturday.

Transition time's huge, so make sure that you build in that buffer before you go back to work.

I could add a bunch of things on here that I've already talked about, like make sure you've got the right staff in place, make sure you have processes and all the things, but my point today is vacation is important. The reason you're not taking it is because you don't know who you are outside of work, and there's probably some trauma there. The answer is not to avoid vacation, it's to get help with that trauma, is to take yourself on vacation and learn how to be with those feelings and to put some processes and things in place so that you can do that and have a life outside of trial lawyering.

So, I want you to email me and let me know if you in fact took my advice. I want to see some vacations on your calendars. You can email me at sari@saridlm.com. All right, love you. Take those vacations, talk soon.

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