68. Master This Strategy for Better Work-Life Balance

In this episode, I'm digging into the concept of 'intentional restraint' as a strategy for reducing stress and finding better work-life balance as an SLP. Tune in to hear how intentional restraint can help you save time and focus on making mindful decisions about where to invest time and energy. I'm breaking down some of the biggest benefits of intentional restraint and five practical opportunities to apply this strategy in your work as a busy SLP. Share your thoughts in the SLP Support Group and explore how you can implement intentional restraint in your practice.

00:00 Introduction to Work-Life Balance for SLPs

00:25 Technical Difficulties and Episode Overview

01:08 Understanding Intentional Restraint

06:14 Benefits of Intentional Restraint

10:00 Five Practical Applications of Intentional Restraint

14:30 Conclusion and Community Engagement

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Transcript

68. Intentional Restraint - 10:7:24, 22.09

[00:00:00] Welcome to work life balance for speech pathologists. I'm Teresa Harp, an SLP and productivity coach. And this podcast is all about how to build a successful career as an SLP and still have time for yourself and the people and things you love. So if you're ready to ditch stress and burnout for a more balanced and fulfilling life, then you are in the right place.

Let's dive in. Hey SLPs, welcome to episode 68. This is actually my second attempt at recording this episode. I had some tech issues earlier today. I tried to go live in the SLP support group, which by the way, if you are not in the SLP support group, what are you waiting for? Click the link. In the show notes, now I'm singing, what are you waiting for in my head?

I'm not going to sing it out loud on this podcast. It would be in everybody's worst interest. Okay, so focus Teresa. [00:01:00] Here we go. This one. is going to be short and sweet, but really, really useful. Okay. I'm going to be walking you through a very simple, not easy, but simple strategy called intentional restraint.

I'm going to talk you through what it is. strategies and how it will help save you time. And if you stay with me till the end, I'm going to give you five opportunities, five examples of opportunities for you to incorporate this strategy as a busy clinician. So that is the plan for today. Okay, here we go.

Intentional restraint. What do I even mean when I'm talking about this? So I don't know if you have heard of this concept before. You may have heard it referred to as different things, different terminology. But essentially for the purposes of this episode, what I [00:02:00] mean by intentional restraint is the inhibition of the In this case, your tendency to spend time and energy on things that don't serve you.

Okay? Now, you could think about intentional restraint in any sort of area of your life. I am talking about it with regards to how you spend your time. And when you think about it, you spend your time on absolutely every single thing you do, literally everything that you do is time consuming. So this can apply to so many different areas.

But I want you to listen to this. And I want you to ask yourself, how is this a strategy that would work for me? How might this work for me? Okay, let me give you some examples of the benefits of intentional restraint. Now, [00:03:00] for those of you who are Can resonate with the sort of tendency to look around, look around your room, you look around your office, you look around wherever and you see a million things that you need to do or want to do and you get overwhelmed and you start to feel guilty that, Oh, I didn't do that yet.

I had, I should have done that by now. This should have been done sooner. I can't believe that's still not done. Okay. If that is something that you can relate to, you would benefit from this. The use of intentional restraint. Stay with me. I'll walk you through why. I also want to address those of you who are listening, who maybe can relate to this scenario where you start doing a task and then you discover, while doing that task, about five or six other tasks that are within that one that quote unquote need to be done.

And so you start going down this quote unquote rabbit hole. [00:04:00] And the next thing you know, hours have passed, and you're no closer to finishing the thing that you had set out to do in the first place. And not only that, but now you've got five or six more unfinished tasks that are on your to do list. Okay?

Ask me how I know. This episode will also benefit those of you who find yourself saying things like, Oh, what am I ever going to learn to say no to this? When am I ever going to learn to stop spending my time on this? When am I ever going to learn to X, Y, Z? So if any of those scenarios resonate with you.

then this strategy is something I want you to consider. It's also a great strategy for those of us, myself included, right, us who have lots of goals and we want to make improvements in different areas all at once. So I don't know [00:05:00] about you, but I tend to set big lofty goals for different areas of my life and my personal life and my professional life.

And for me, I want to tackle all of them at once and I have a very hard time figuring out how to divide my energy and my focus in one or two of those areas because it makes me think that I am falling behind in the other areas. Okay, and what I have learned, what I'm continuing to learn, is that the strategy of intentional restraint actually would help me to meet my goals faster and to meet more of them.

So this strategy can help any of you in any of those situations. All right. Now, as I mentioned, intentional restraint [00:06:00] is essentially the decision not to invest your time or your energy into something, or to invest a very limited amount of time and energy into something. And I talked you through some of the.

scenarios where this could be helpful. I also want to dig in a little bit to the benefits of this strategy. There are many, but I have pulled out three in particular that I think are incredibly useful. And if I haven't sold you on the idea of intentional restraint yet, I want you to consider this. Okay.

Perhaps in my opinion, the biggest benefit of them all when it comes to intentional restraint. Again, the decision not to spend time on something or to spend a limited amount of time on something is that it gives you the sense of having more time. I don't want to tell you that it gives you more time because it just reallocates the way that you're spending your time and so while it's not [00:07:00] necessarily adding more hours to the day, it is freeing up time that would otherwise have been spent on things that are not.

you have decided are no longer serving you. So it can give you the feeling of having more time. It's sort of like for those of you who might have thought about budgeting and you know when it comes to finances and you might have heard people say that well when you set a budget you actually it actually feels like you have more money not less money because you see where all of your money.

is coming in and you see where all of it is going and you make changes to how you're spending it. And so now you have sort of more money left over to spend on different things. Well, it's, it's kind of like that. Okay. So that's one benefit. Another benefit of intentional restraint is that it allows you to feel more fulfilled.

because you're not spending time on things that don't light you up. And instead you're [00:08:00] starting to choose to spend your time on things that align with your core values and needs. And if you're in my SLP support group, if you've listened to the podcast before, or if you are in, if you are one of my, current or former coaching clients, you'll know how strongly I feel about core needs and values.

So when you are exercising intentional restraint, you start to choose to spend your time on the things that really matter to you. And that has a ripple effect. You start to feel really good about what you're spending your time on because you're meeting your needs, you're in alignment with your values, and that just spills over into all different areas of your life.

And a third major benefit of this strategy is that it helps you to prioritize the things that are going to move you closer to your goals because you're no longer spending as much time, or in some cases, you're no longer spending any time on the things that. That aren't purposeful, that aren't productive, that aren't getting you closer [00:09:00] to your goals or that aren't, you know, a decision that you have made.

with intent, okay, even if that means that you're taking time to now rest, right, even if it's taking time to build breaks in, but you're doing that intentionally. And you're doing that in a way that's going to help take care of you so that you can meet your goals. All right. So those are three benefits of this strategy.

Now I want you to think about this, right? Time, as we all know, is finite. There's only so much of it. And if you say yes to something, then you are saying no to something else. And I want you to keep that in mind. So what are the things that you want to say yes to? And what are the things that you have to say no to in order to allow more time and energy for the things that you want to say yes to?

Think about that. [00:10:00] All right. Now, I told you I was going to give you five options. Sort of opportunities for you to implement. intentional restraint. I want you to listen to these. Take what serves you, leave what doesn't. But here are five that come to mind. Number one, using intentional restraint when it comes to documentation.

Maybe you decide to cut out certain elements of a report. Or you don't go into as much depth or detail. You're less thorough. Maybe you're not providing as many examples of different, you know, utterances or language structures. Maybe you just decide to stick to the highlights. But intentional restraint is a, Is an excellent strategy to consider when it comes to report writing, because we need to sort of put some, some [00:11:00] limits, some restrictions on the documentation that we are doing, it is possible, I believe, to meet the The standards and expectations of documentation without burning out, without falling behind, without driving yourself crazy.

So think about this. Ask yourself, where is the opportunity for intentional restraint when it comes to my report writing? The second opportunity is is session planning. It can be so easy to get sucked into planning out these elaborate sessions and you are scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling on Pinterest.

You're looking at all these elaborate, beautiful activities and crafts, but are those really necessary? If you love that and you have, And if you feel like you have all the time you need to do that, then by all means, do it. But if you are finding yourself not meeting deadlines in other areas, you're overworked, you're taking work home with you, you're running out of time, [00:12:00] I would offer that look at your session planning and are there any opportunities there for intentional restraint?

Third, opportunity that I want to offer is to say no to the clients that don't light you up, or the clients that don't fit within your area of expertise and passion. You can refer them somewhere else. It's okay to say no. It's okay to direct them to somebody else who can better serve them. What would it be like if you chose to serve the clients that you love to serve.

What would that look like? I know some of you may not find yourselves in a position where you can do that, but for those of you who can, ask yourself, is there an opportunity for intentional restraint? It doesn't have to be for forever. It could be just for right now. The fourth opportunity is similarly to the last one.

to decide not to travel to certain areas that are [00:13:00] either too far or that feel unsafe. So if you are someone who works on the road, I used to, I used to go all over the place when I was in early intervention. I've been thinking about this one a lot lately. And you do have the opportunity to have a conversation about where you want to go.

Where you don't want to go. Why? How can you still support families or clients that are in an area that are outside your area? How can you do that? How can you be of service? Even if that is just referring them, as simply as referring them somewhere else. Last but not least, social media. That is a huge one.

It's a huge opportunity to exercise, intentional restraint, deciding not to scroll on social media for more than a certain amount of time or before or after a certain time of day, really looking at [00:14:00] how much time and energy are you scrolling? Is it purposeful? Is it serving a purpose? Is it intentional? Or is it to avoid doing something to try and, is it because you're dysregulated or overwhelmed?

Is it because you're in shutdown? What is going on here? How can you choose to exercise intentional restraint as a way to support yourself, to meet your needs, to take care of yourself so that you can take care of the clients that you serve? All right. So that in a nutshell is intentional restraint. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Pop into the SLP support group. Let me know and I will talk with you all next week.