EP # 218 - Some Loose Thoughts After Two Weeks Away

I'm back from vacation and feeling... different. You know that feeling when you step away from your routine and suddenly realize what you didn't even know you were missing?

In this episode, I'm sharing some honest reflections about what two weeks with extended family across Europe reminded me about balance, relationships, and why we high-achieving women sometimes forget we're whole human beings with needs beyond our businesses.

What we talk about:

• Why I look at balance on a yearly basis (not daily)
• The family time, I didn't realize I was craving
• My COVID commute revelation and what it taught me about hidden stress
• How one client went from 60-hour weeks to weekends off without losing income
• Why planning your life first, then your business around it, actually works
• The friendship factor most entrepreneurs ignore

This isn't a structured episode with frameworks or action steps. It's just me, still in vacation mode, sharing what's on my mind. Sometimes the most important insights come from these unplanned conversations.

Next week we're diving deep into time management strategies, but today? Just some thoughts from a coach who remembered she's human too.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello. Hello my dear listeners. Welcome to Diamond Effect Podcast, episode 218. I feel like I haven't talked to you in a while, even though podcast episodes have been coming out. Every week, Maggie's moment on Monday and a longer episode on Friday, but it's because I just came back from a couple weeks vacation and the episodes you've been listening to for a while have been prerecorded so that I can enjoy.

My vacation. So now we're back into me recording episodes a little bit less in advance because that makes me feel more connected to you when I'm talking and the episode comes out soon. And today I'm still in vacation mode. So I decided that it's gonna be more of a conversation and some loose thoughts that I have after coming back from vacation.

And then next week we'll get [00:01:00] back to business. So as an ambitious and highly achieving woman myself, and I know that a lot of you are like me, we can sometimes get so focused on our goals and professional pursuits that if we don't. Set certain boundaries in form of habits and proper time management and so on.

We can get very narrow minded in a way where we just focus on work, right? And we forget to take care of ourselves, or we forget to fill in other pie parts of us as human beings. For me personally, habits are so important and having certain routines and practices because it allows me to set boundaries around my work, it allows me to make sure that [00:02:00] I also pay attention to other things that are important in my life, like my family, my health, my husband and our relationship, and me as a person, as a woman.

Now, I know that for me as a mom having kids, there's also that natural. Push that forces me to stop because they need my attention, they need my help. And with my husband, we share that responsibility really well. But that's a natural way to pause and stop. And for example, I have clients who either have adult kids that don't live with them anymore, or clients without kids.

Those women, they were so high achieving, they have a harder time to stop working. At certain times, we need to really weave in certain habits and boundaries for them to stop just because they don't have that natural, Hey mom, I need you. Or [00:03:00] they need to feed somebody, or whatever the case might be.

Anyhow, the point I'm making here is that I truly believe that we can achieve. Balance or harmony, however you wanna call it, in life. Now, this is not me saying that on every single moment or every single day, you will spend equal amount of time of work and self-care and family, whatever else is important to you.

I look at creating balance and harmony in my life more on a yearly basis. So if I zoom out and I look at my year. I can assess whether the areas that are important in my life, I've taken care of them well, and I feel that I've had enough of that attention. In each of those areas. And let's keep it simple, [00:04:00] like when you think about your life, there's a tool in a coaching call Wheel of Life, and there's different version of it.

Some of them have many different areas of your life. But for this episode, I would keep it simple. So let's say if you think about one area of your life, it's your family, right? The other area could be, and relationships. So not only family, but also friends and people close to you. The other area is your professional life, then your health, and then finances, right?

So when I look at those areas on a yearly basis. I think about, okay, have I spent enough time, have I put enough attention to each of those areas in a span of the year? Not in a span of a day or an hour, but in a span of the year?

And if I did, that makes me feel whole as a holistic human being. And [00:05:00] if I didn't, then I make. Intentional plans for the following year, especially to make sure that the areas that I may be neglected completely or no, maybe not completely, because that's why I have habits and practices, not the neglecting important areas completely, but that I neglected a little bit more.

That I restore that balance. And again, of course, that balance in harmony will look different for every single one of us because every single one of us not only has a different life, but also different values and different priorities, why am I telling you that? Because of the vacation we just had.

So this vacation was amazing in many different aspects, but one of them was the fact that we've spent the two weeks with extended family, so not just the four of us, my husband and our two kids. But we've also spent that time with my side of the family, that it's spread between Poland and Germany and France, and also my husband's side of family, that it's spread between mostly France, a little bit in Germany.[00:06:00] 

And it doesn't happen for us to often because as immigrants being pretty much across the ocean from most of our family, when we spend quality family time, it's usually. Either the four of us, so my husband and our kids, or the six of us, because I have two step boys from my husband's first marriage. So then sometimes, there's six of us spending that time.

So most of the family time happens in the nuclear family, and we don't have the luxury to go over to grandma's house for Sunday dinner or celebrate every single little celebration in person with the family because. Our families are so far apart and it's very costly if we wanted to do it. Coming back from this vacation makes me really feel whole, and it's almost like I forgot how much I needed that in-person [00:07:00] connection with my parents and my aunt and my sister, and especially my nephew and my niece.

Yes, we, talk on a regular basis on the internet and so on, and usually my parents or my mom, I see her once a year. But with my sister, like my dad or even my aunt, we don't see each other that often. And especially with my nephew who, the last I saw him was six months old, and now he's three and a half years old.

Having that possibility of building actual relationship with this little human that is just adorable and spending some time was so precious and it filled me up in a way that, I don't have it on a regular basis. So it reminded me how important it is to make time and figure things out, to spend time with the extended family.

Another kind of bucket that this [00:08:00] vacation allowed me to fill is traveling, changing environment, reminding yourself that there's so many different cultures. Travel is a big part of my life. It's my value where I love to explore other countries and so on.

And we went to France and although I have been in France a few times, but it's every country, right? You could spend months and months in every country visiting different areas and you wouldn't be bored. It was the same this time where we still visited areas I've never been to, and south of France is so different from Toronto that not only in landscape, but also in architecture, in history.

There is medieval towns in there that are, have beautiful castles and little buildings and very narrow streets and things that you don't see on a regular basis. In North America. So as I'm saying that, it's [00:09:00] because we sometimes don't feel the lack of something on our daily basis. When we have busy lives and we run our businesses, we have our habits

but until you do those things, you don't realize, oh, it's such a different part of me that it gets filled. That I need to remember to do it on a regular basis, right? We always wanna do it more often, but realistically, trying to pull 16 people together for vacation, I don't think it's that easy to do, especially when they're spread so much around the world in our case.

And to just bring that example home. I also remember when. COVID happened and I was still in my corporate career and I was commuting about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic. One way. Pretty much most of the week I had the ability to work from [00:10:00] home, but because my team was in the office, never all of them, because they work from home more than me before COVID, but there was always something.

So even though I had that ability, I rarely used it. And, commuting. It was what it was. I made the best out of it. I was usually listening to some podcasts or some audiobooks while I was doing it. So it was just used to commute and I didn't think that was, a stressor for me or something crazy other than sometimes, rushing back from office to make sure I could pick up my kids from daycare,

when COVID started and we all went home, and that commute ended literally within a week or two I felt so much calmer. Even though it was stressful, the whole situation with COVID, even though it was stressful to try to help my kids go through that change and adapt to school online, and in the [00:11:00] beginning, nobody knew and everybody was figuring things out.

I felt calmer and I realized that calm was created because of me not commuting. So I didn't even realize how much stress the commute was creating until it stopped. So sometimes we don't realize how much we need something or how much we don't need something until we experience that thing that we need or we stop doing things that are stressing us out that we don't even realize.

So this is all to say that as we're coming to the end of 2025, and you might start thinking about 2026 and how you wanna grow your business and the things that I wanna do new and so on. I always coach my clients to look at how they want their life to look in the new year as a whole, right?

And with my one-on-one clients who have more established businesses, [00:12:00] sometimes we do like a balanced vision plan. And we look out three years from now, and I just did one with one of my amazing clients, Jennifer. And we were looking at, yeah, what do you want your life to be like? You don't lose that side or those other parts of you as a human while you're trying to grow the business because you're of course ambitious and highly performing entrepreneur and it is different for everybody.

In my. Client's case. She said, my kids are older, they're out of home now. I don't mind keep working. Let's say five days a week. I might wanna reduce the amount of time I work every day or in a span of the week, but five days is great for me. But what I do want is have vacation three times a year.

Couple in the winter and in the spring, and. In the summer and kind of thinking about it, and then on [00:13:00] the yearly basis, planning it along with your business activities and strategies you're gonna do, ensures that you make time for those important things. We usually. Plan our vacation and time off and so on.

In the very beginning of the year with my husband, I block my time out, not only for the longer vacation, like a week or two weeks at a time, but also for smaller things like maybe PE days for my kids or other me times that I want, and I book them ahead of time and I always tell my clients to do that. So then that's locked in.

And then when I'm planning my business activities and strategies, those are non-negotiable times when I don't plan anything business. And if you right now are in a position when you're like, maybe that's not possible. I'm working all the time, that's gonna cost me money and so on. I [00:14:00] wanna tell you this is not true.

Another client of mine. Dr. Louise, we've been working for the past few months to really reducing her workload. She's been working crazy hours, 60 hours a week or something like that. Crazy. And we strategically have been not only helping her implement. Time management practices that I teach and habits, but also certain boundaries into one where now she stopped working weekends.

She was working weekends, she stopped working weekends, and she's realizing that her income hasn't suffered, that she made surprisingly, sometimes even more money in certain months than she used to when she was working like crazy. And not only now she feels better. And she has time for herself. And overall the life quality improved for [00:15:00] her, but also she has time to think about her business more strategically and focus on the things that, where she wants to take her business in the next two, three years, since she has time for that.

So it's all possible when you do it right, step by step. Usually with help of a coach like me. I guess the last thing I wanna talk about, the thoughts that are coming to me is about relationships and more of a friends or business relationship. I'm definitely not a marriage coach, although sometimes with my clients, we do talk about personal relationships as it relates to their business because that usually, your business as a whole human being. Sometimes your business affects your personal relationship or the other way around. Your personal relationship affects your business. So there's no clear cut, wall between each part of your [00:16:00] life, right? One area affects the other. So of course, when needed, I help my clients navigate that and coach them through, partner not understanding what they do or not being supportive or making sure that they do allocate time for their family or friends and so on. And for me this year, I really wanted to make sure that I nurture my friendships. And I think I talked about it before on this podcast, but I nurture my friendship and I make time for my friends. And it's been working. Booking monthly or even quarterly coffee chats, whether it's online with friends that are, far from me or whether it's in person, made a whole difference.

And coming back from vacation just reinforced the fact that I wanna do more of that and be even better and more intentional because. [00:17:00] Relationships are so important for us as humans, right? We are tribal animal, if you wanna call it that way, and it's very easy to get lonely in your entrepreneurial journey, even if you have a team and you are a su and a boss, right?

It's a different relationship with your team. You don't. Get to be best friends. So nurturing certain friendship and relationships outside of that and making time for that, I think it fills us up and I really believe that when our other areas of our life outside of business are whole and you feel full and you really feel like you, you perform better in your business.

You enjoy your life more, and therefore you enjoy what you're doing better. You have better ideas, again, better decisions. So it's important that we do that. And then the only way you [00:18:00] can intentionally fill up each cup or each area of your life is that when you are in charge of your time, it can create time for everything that's important, and that doesn't mean everything under the sun.

I underline everything that it's important, so having skillset of organizing yourself or managing time, taking charge of your days. And feeling like you decide right and you are able to prioritize is the key to success here, to living fully, to living well, to feeling in control, but also, joyful and happy.

Not a hundred percent of the time, that's not possible, but [00:19:00] majority of time. Rather than feeling busy, overwhelmed, out of control of your life, and then therefore really anxious and not happy at all. So we, I will do next week an episode about that, about really getting in charge of your time. And I've done many episodes in this podcast before, but.

Every time I do one, I have new thoughts about it. I've coached more and more clients on it, so my take might be a little bit different. So watch out for the episodes next, next week. I hope you enjoy my loose thoughts after vacation. Talk to you soon. Bye.