Why Most Direct Sales Leaders Can't Unplug on Vacation

Episode Summary

Here's the truth: if you've built a business you can't step away from, that's not a scheduling problem — it's a systems problem. And underneath the systems problem, there's usually something more personal going on.

In this episode, Rachael Bodie shares her own evolution from 5am work sessions at Disney World to a fully unplugged week in Mexico — and what made the difference. She breaks down the three vacation types every direct sales leader needs to understand, why the leaders who can't unplug are often the same ones who've quietly built a culture of dependency on their teams, and what it actually looks like to pre-decide your approach instead of showing up and reacting.

Why You Should Listen: What You'll Learn

Understand the Three Vacation Types — and Choose Yours Before You Go When this is missing, it looks like showing up half-in the whole time — stressed when you're working, guilty when you're not. You'll learn the difference between a working trip, a hybrid, and a full unplug — because once you pre-decide which one fits the season you're in, the guilt and overwhelm disappear.

Recognize the Difference Between Healthy Hustle and Avoidance of Rest When you haven't thought this through, it looks like grinding without context — or shutting down without permission to do so. You'll learn how defined seasons and defined reasons change everything about how hustle feels — because the pain of staying the same and the pain of constant output require two completely different responses.

Identify Whether You Have a Vacation Problem or a Duplication Problem When this goes unexamined, it looks like telling yourself you just love the work — when really, nothing moves without you. You'll learn how to tell the difference between a business that runs and a business where you are the system — because one of those is a real business, and one of them is just self-employment with a bigger team.

See the Hidden Cost of Being the Leader Who Always Has the Answer When this isn't on your radar, it looks like dedication, generosity, servant leadership. You'll learn how being indispensable quietly prevents your team from developing — because every time you swoop in, you take away a rep they needed to grow, and over time, you don't build leaders. You build followers.

Learn to Pre-Decide Your Next Trip — and What It Tells You If You Can't When you skip this, it looks like coming home more depleted than when you left. You'll learn exactly how to approach your next vacation with a pre-decision that protects both your rest and your business — because if a full unplug genuinely feels impossible, that's information worth paying attention to.

Resources Mentioned

Apply for a Free Mini-Session Connect 1:1, review your goals, and talk through opportunities for business growth 👉 https://www.rachaelbodie.com/mini-session

Social Selling Leadership Edit (Free Email Series) Weekly insights on leadership skills for network marketers, recruiting systems, duplication, and sustainable growth 👉 https://www.rachaelbodie.com/leadership-edit-email

Instagram Daily leadership insights, social selling strategies, and behind-the-scenes mentoring 👉 https://www.instagram.com/rachaelbodie/

Elevate for Social Sellers — Facebook Community A space for social sellers focused on mindset, systems, and sustainable growth 👉 https://www.facebook.com/groups/elevateforsocialsellers

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Social Selling Leadership Podcast, the show for six-figure network marketers ready to scale with alignment and simple systems. I'm your host, Rachel Bodie, network marketing expert and industry veteran. Each week you'll learn the strategies and systems top leaders use to enroll high-quality recruits, create duplication in their downline, and lead with confidence. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the show. So we are just getting back from a close to a week-long family trip to Mexico. And while I was there, I was getting some steps in and I was reflecting on the beginning of my network marketing journey. So the first four years of my business, I did not take any vacations, no unplug time. And actually, let me even back up. There were trips and vacations I took but I didn't unplug. I never took a break from stories, I never took a break from posting because I had a lot of fear around things crumbling. And so I got this idea for today's episode. This is something that I coach on a lot while a lot of really successful direct sales leaders they can't unplug on vacation. So I want to take you back. About 10 years ago, we took our girls to Disney World. It was their first time there, and I was about a year into my network marketing business. So at the time I was working full-time for uh John Maxwell as well. So I was consulting uh full-time, full-time uh consulting, building my business uh part-time on part-time hours that is, but my goal was to really retire uh from my my job there, and so the very first morning um at Disney World I set my alarm for 5 a.m. So at the time we were we stayed at the Polynesian Resort, um, and my family was still asleep, obviously. Um, so I went to the sister property, the Grand Floridian, I hit the gym, I got my second cup of coffee in front of me, and I sat down for two back-to-back power hours on vacation. So fast forward to last week. So we were at this five-star oh inclusive, um, beautiful the Riviera Maya, the kind of place where the food is actually good. You know, most all inclusives the food is kind of mid. Um, but this was incredible, and I completely and intentionally unplugged. No posts, no stories, no getting up early to work my business, no social media. So, same person, uh, almost a decade later, but completely different approach. And both were exactly right. And here's what uh I want to talk about today. It's all about taking into consideration defined seasons, right, and your reasons behind the type of vacation you want to take. So here's the thing with these two different trips, the the problem is not about whether to work on vacation or not. The problem is that most direct sales leaders they don't decide before they go. They just show up and react. And that's how you end up spending a week, half in, half out, stressed the entire time, and then coming home more depleted than when you left. So today we're gonna talk about how to pre-decide your trips, your vacations, and specifically why the leaders who can't unplug usually have a much bigger problem underneath that has nothing to do with their calendar. Okay? So in my experience, I would categorize vacations into three different types, three categories, and I want to name them clearly because I think a lot of the guilt and the overwhelm disappears once you have a framework to put things into. So the first is the working trip. So this would be your annual convention, it could be a big leadership event, it could be a company incentive trip where you're surrounded by your team and you're expected to show up, right? You're you're gonna post, you're gonna create content, you're gonna be on, you're likely gonna be having, you know, leadership conversations, sidebar conversations. So this type of trip is not a vacation, it's a business trip. And there's nothing wrong with that. As long as you walk in knowing what it is. The second type is a hybrid. So a hybrid means you're working some and then you're protecting some of the time. So you're protecting certain hours. So maybe the mornings are yours to work and then the afternoon is for family, or maybe you draw a hard line at dinner, or you decide in advance that the first four days you're off, and the fifth day you're gonna batch some content. Or you could even pick a leadership event, and maybe you're gonna plan to be present for certain aspects of it, and then you're going to unplug for other aspects. But it this is all about that pre-decision, and here's why that's important. When you have a hybrid vacation or a hybrid trip that happens by accident, where you just kind of see, you go with the flow and see what feels right. What almost always happens is it devolves into you feeling guilty when you're working, because you feel like you should be with family or you should be relaxing or you should be enjoying your time, and then you're stressing about your business when you want to be actually enjoying family time when you're with your family. Okay, so the third time, the or the third type rather is the full unplug. So this is zero work output. The only thing in bounds and the only thing that I would consider okay here are the things that genuinely don't feel like work. So again, for me in Mexico, this was a full unplug, except I still responded to client messages and supporting my one-on-one clients because that feels like relationship, it doesn't feel like work. But that was it. And I pre-decided that before I ever got into the plane. So the issue in terms of these three types, it's not about choosing the wrong type, it's about not choosing at all. So when you take a quote unquote vacation, but the you're you don't really decide, you are half in, half out. And I see this happen again and again with so many network marketers. You're stressed the entire week, your family is complaining, you're on your phone the whole time, and you come home needing a vacation from your vacation. So when we went to Disney, it was 2017, and my goal was to replace my income from the John Maxwell company, and that was a multi-six-figure income. I wanted to be able to leave my job. I was missing out on so many things with my kids' lives. I mean, I missed my daughter's kindergarten graduation because I was required to be at a work trip in Charlotte. So I wanted to be present with them, but I still wanted to work because I'm the type of gal I actually love work. I really enjoy having something that I can be focused and dedicated to outside of motherhood. So our family had this mantra. My husband and I sat down, we made the decision together. It was called Freedom 2018. So we all knew what we were working towards. I wanted to retire from my job in 2018. My kids understood as well as they could at the time. They were still pretty little. So this wasn't about me, you know, sneaking away from the pool to check my phone. We went into the Disney trip with this agreed-upon plan that we were all executing together. So I think that's really important to me is that I communicated the vision. I talked about what the goal was, why it was important, how it was going to impact our family, and I got buy-in. So I got up early, got my workout in, I sat at that cafe, the sister property, um, and I worked for two hours every single morning. And then I put it away and we went to the parks. Okay, and I want to be really clear about the psychology behind that because I think it gets misunderstood. I wasn't grinding because I didn't know how to stop. I was grinding because the pain of staying the same was greater than the pain of showing up. Right? That's a completely different headspace. And I felt like uh looking back, that hustle was about a defined season and a defined reason. So I think that's important to name. And also the structure mattered too. You know, I did my gym first, I worked second, and my family was the rest of the day. It wasn't bleeding into vacation, I was really protecting that. Um, so fast forward to Mexico, we were at the Gran Velas, and I went in with one predecision. I'm not working. No emails going out, no stories. And what I want you to hear in this is unplugging fully is a skill. It definitely does not come automatically to high performers. I think being offline can feel like falling behind. It can even feel like you're being responsible or sorry, irresponsible. Like the business is unraveling somewhere while you're sitting by the pool, and that guilt can be so real. So I don't want to just dismiss that. I actually had to coach myself, you know, after years of uh hustling and that Enneagram 3 energy, I had to coach myself to lean into the restoration and to lean into relaxing as the goal. You know, one of the things that I've worked on a lot over the years is this idea that my overfunctioning is not serving me, and that ultimately restoration, not constantly hustling, is what allows me to lead from true capacity. So restoration is not a reward, it's not something that you um or like or an indulgence, it's it's a strategic decision, it's a way to create sustainable leadership. So the reason I could fully unplug, it wasn't just because I decided to. I think that's important to share too, it's because I've built something that doesn't require me to be in it every day, and a lot of leaders haven't done that yet, and that really changes everything. You know, if your business requires your daily presence to survive, this is a systems problem, okay, not a vacation problem. And most network marketers haven't built a business, and here's what I mean by that so many are just self-employed, right? In other words, they're employing themselves, they're their primary employee. Maybe one of the one true producers, or maybe you have producers on the team, but they only move when you move. And when that's true, stepping away doesn't feel like a vacation, it feels like abandonment, and your body goes into fight or flight because functionally it is. That guys, this is a duplication problem, and underneath that there is this psychological layer that I don't think gets talked about enough, and it's this idea of leaders who need to be needed. You know, a lot of direct sales leaders have built this identity around being the answer, you know, the one who is always there, the one who has all the answers, the one who knows. It feels like leadership, but it actually creates a lid or a ceiling for both them and for their team. And I have coach leaders who are like, well, I'm showing up as a servant leader, and maybe it starts that way, but at some point it shifts, and you're not just showing up for your team, you're showing up for this feeling, the feeling of being the one, the one who holds holds it all together. But the problem with this is that's not leadership, that's codependency with a compensation plan, and it's exhausting, and it makes it so hard to see because it looks like dedication, it looks like you're being a great leader. Your team praises you for it, your company may even recognize you for it. The dopamine hits every single time someone needs you and you deliver, so it's like, why would you question it? But here's the thing: while you become busy being indispensable, what happens is you make sure no one else can rise or level up their leadership. So every time you swoop in to save someone, you steal that opportunity from them to learn. So every answer that you give is um something or a discovery, something that your teammate doesn't have to figure out on their own. So again, this isn't a this isn't building a team of leaders, it's building dependency. And that's why for so many you can't take a vacation. Because you build this machine that only runs when you're in it. Um, so it shows up in small moments that maybe you don't even notice. So, for example, maybe it's jumping right into the group chat. You're the first person to answer a question. Not because no one else could, but because you got there first. Or another example would be I see this all the time, hopping on a three-way call. Maybe someone is two years into their business, so you know the teammate maybe doesn't need backup, but you can't trust that it's gonna go well without you there. So you you hop on just in case. Again, feels like support, feels like showing up. But what this is doing is sending a message to that teammate over and over again. I don't believe you can handle this. So then, you know, two or three years in, maybe you as a leader, you look around and wonder why no one's stepping up, or maybe it's even 10 years in. You know, why you're still carrying everything, or why the culture feels more like followers than leaders, but that's exactly what was built. Right? And the people who stay are the ones who get comfortable because they have never had to develop this reflex because every time they assemble their upline is there. So this is the the result here is you build this team of followers versus team of leaders. Now, on the flip side, I'm gonna tell you a story about a client I had. Um, she was an eight-figure leader over the course of her business. She earned close to 16 million okay, total cumulative revenue. So she had real results. She's been in the business for over a decade, real respect in her company, and we worked together for quite some time. And for several months of our work together, we worked through actual grief that she felt when two of her top team members broke off and formed teams of their own, two independent teams. They went on, both of these ladies went on to create seven figure downlines. So they built something significant independently. So they were in the top ten of the company, both of them were earning over $80,000 a month, so they were again seven figure earners, but my client was in pain around it. That is how deep it goes. You know, she had done such a great job at duplication that her best people didn't need her anymore. And instead of feeling like a win, it felt like a loss, you know. So I think this is important to name. You're probably thinking, well, that's a good problem to have. But again, she had gotten almost used to being needed and being the go-to. So when these people broke off, it made her feel brief. You know, she missed being that go-to leader. But that's the goal, right? That's the point, is we want to raise up leaders who are able to operate independently. And what I'll say is that leader is somewhere in this audience right now, I know. And I want to say to you directly, your team's independence is not a threat, it's the whole point, right? True leadership is about building people who don't need you to swoop in. The goal is never for them to need you forever. The goal is actually to equip them to duplicate, right? This is this is the whole point. So here's what I want you to walk away with before your next trip, whether it's a weekend away, an upcoming convention, or two weeks in Europe, I want you to make the decision. Is this gonna be a working trip? Is it gonna be a hybrid? Is it gonna be a full unplug? And then write it down. Tell someone, share it with your partner or your spouse, and then build your trip around that decision instead of showing up and reacting. And then, of course, you want to plan accordingly, right? So if you are planning to unplug or you're planning to hybrid, you're probably gonna want to have a plan in place in terms of team support content. And if you you want to go the full unplug route, but you feel like that's genuinely impossible, maybe not because of logistics, but because the anxiety of being unavailable is like puts you over the edge. I want you to sit with that. Right? That's information, that's your business telling you something about how it's built, and it's worth paying attention to. Because again, the vacation isn't the problem, it never was. This is about creating systems so you are able to enjoy the freedom that you came into this business wanting to create. This episode hit close to home. I want to hear about it. You know, DM me on Instagram, tell me where you're stuck, and let's talk about what's actually going on in your business. Okay, guys, I'll see you next time. If you're a six figure network marketing leader and you know you're recruiting and duplication system.