EP 194 Your Holiday Experience By Design
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Sara Mayer: [00:00:00] Welcome to the bold goal crusher podcast for anyone looking to stop letting life get in the way and start crushing bold goals. I'm your host, Sara Mayer, and I'm thrilled to navigate this journey with you because it's time to start boldly achieving without working double time. So let's dive in.
Sara Mayer: Hello, Bold Gold Crushers. I'm super excited today because the holidays are coming up. It's one of my favorite times of the year. There's so much magic in the season. There's a lot of creativity and we just passed Halloween, which. It's a super fun holiday and I think sometimes what I've learned from my own experience, but also from working with clients is that the holidays come with all the magic and the fun and the excitement, [00:01:00] the gatherings, sometimes.
Sara Mayer: For people missing others or loved ones who aren't there, some loneliness, maybe. And so it's a bag of emotions. And it's easy to get really stressed out as well with all the things that need to be done for the holidays. And I want to encourage you to stop and take a moment and take a breath, pause. and really think about the holidays from a design perspective.
Sara Mayer: What do I mean by that? It's time to design how you want this season to look. Rather than being reactive and trying to do all the things and having cookies for Santa and whatever else you may be doing, it's time to really stop and think about the holidays. [00:02:00] What do you want the holiday season to be about and how can you go about crafting your activities, getting ahead of certain things so that you can truly enjoy the holidays?
Sara Mayer: Now, not saying the holidays will be emotion free or stress free, but when you take that step back and actually design your holiday, It will change the entire perspective of the season. I don't know about you, but there's been many holidays when I did all these great things. And then after the holidays, I needed a holiday.
Sara Mayer: Anyone else? Just me. Okay. So how do you craft your holiday? The first thing is to take some time in a quiet, reflective space to really think about what the holiday experience You desire, what is that? Do you want to connect with friends you haven't seen in a long time? Do you want to [00:03:00] have a getaway?
Sara Mayer: Do you want to ensure that the magic of the season is brought out? Do you want to experience certain things? Do you want to avoid certain activities or feelings or obligations? Are there things that you can simply scratch off? So if you're listening to this and your children are around at this point, might want to turn this off or put your headphones on because I'm going to talk about something really quickly.
Sara Mayer: So that is your fair warning alert plus pause. You don't want your young children to hear this. All right. Spoiler alert. We're going to talk about Elf on the Shelf. So many clients that I have worked with this season and last season have talked about the obligation or the feeling around having to ensure that this elf has a creative activity.
Sara Mayer: And in fact, many of [00:04:00] these elves have a better social life than we do. And so it's time to really think about the requirements and activities and the pressure that you put on yourself if you are a parent, or even if you're not, there's a lot of parallels to Elf on the Shelf. Are you doing things simply because you think society expects you to, you have to, or in order to fit in with the cool crowd, you need to do them?
Sara Mayer: And if you're doing that this holiday season, or you know those activities are going to come up, it's time to hit pause to stop and to find a way to transition those activities out of your life. So one prime example is Elf on the Shelf. I had a client who this was the bane of her existence during the holidays.
Sara Mayer: There was a lot of guilt around it because she kept forgetting to move the elf or her daughter said it wasn't as creative or her elf isn't as fun as her friends. [00:05:00] And so she decided last year when we talked through the holiday plan together as her business consultant, she decided that the elf was going to set sail.
Sara Mayer: And she wrote a beautiful letter to her children about why there were other children that really needed the elf and that they were great kids. And so the elf was going to go live with another family, but the elf would continue to write. And the elf wrote two letters during the holidays about all the experiences they were doing.
Sara Mayer: This actually created more magic for the kids. They got a post. I think they were actually postcards, not letters, but they got postcards from the elf and they really enjoyed having conversations about the love of travel with their children and how this elf was going to. Get to travel. So there are ways where you can really [00:06:00] identify the things that are not bringing you joy, the things that are truly sucking the life out of you, or that you're just doing out of obligation.
Sara Mayer: And there are ways to sunset those to ensure that you are able to enjoy the holidays. Now, if you truly enjoy that activity, doing all these creative things with the elf, do them. It's okay to do them. Just really think about all the obligations you have during the holidays and the experience that you want to have.
Sara Mayer: And many times we spend a lot of time doing things or. Buying things that we think will create these lasting memories when in reality, what most people want from you is quality time. So activities or time hanging out with the family. It's time to really think about the [00:07:00] holidays, the activities. And so once you think about how you want your holidays to go, now it's time to plan backwards.
Sara Mayer: So think about all the things you have on your plate and go actually on your calendar and cross off the days that you are going to take off and not work or the days that you're traveling or the days that you have things that you know you really want to experience. And then you need to start to think about all the things on your to do list and plug them into the rest of the available times.
Sara Mayer: Because what happens around the holidays is we do want to take time off. We do want to relax, but then we let things or tasks or activities build up. And so we end up procrastinating. So the night before the big. Holiday festivities, whatever festivities you may be celebrating. We cram a ton of stuff into that day because we didn't pre [00:08:00] plan all the things that go around that, like grocery shopping, shop, getting our hair done, shopping for, gifts or stuff like that.
Sara Mayer: So this is the time of the year that I truly believe you should be more planned and scheduled in order to have more free time to enjoy the things you want to do, because if not, what will happen in January is you may be stressed out even more and you lost your cool. On a friend or family member, or you ended up not enjoying the season of the holidays.
Sara Mayer: So today's a great day to sit down and really get your journal out, write, jot down some notes in your notebook about how you want to experience the holidays, and then take the time to plan out the next two months. Maybe even to the middle to end of January of how you're going to actually get the work done [00:09:00] and when you're going to do the things.
Sara Mayer: Because I think you'll find when you have that plan and you start to work ahead, you'll be able to enjoy those holidays much more than when you don't. All right, bold goal crushers, it's time to get out there, create your holiday plans because you can crush your goals and everything that gets in the way without working double time.
Sara Mayer: So let's get to it.
Sara Mayer: Thank you for tuning into the bold goal crusher podcast where we crush goals and everything that gets in the way. I always love to support my community.
Sara Mayer: I look forward to seeing you crush your goals this year.
