Episode 245: End-of-Day Rituals
How do you end your day? In today's episode, Fiona talks about a simple practice but something we don't do enough, the end-of-day ritual. She also shares how her rituals allow her to separate working from home, being a mom, and being a wife. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Fiona's End of Day rituals
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Maggie and Josh
Welcome to episode 245 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today you're listening to a quick tip episode. This is a quick tip in 10 minutes or less that you can implement immediately in your business. It could be a tip, but it could also be a tool or a tactic. Today it is definitely a tactic. It's one that has incredibly helped me in my business. I don't even know if that's a sentence, but has helped me immensely in my own business. I know that it's helped many of my clients as well. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
I also welcome and pay my respects to any other indigenous peoples who might be joining us today from all over the world. I love looking at the analytics for this podcast and seeing it in a map, but it comes up in yellow splotches, wherever it's been listened to, and it is listened literally all over the world. It's incredible. People in Alaska, people in India, people in Dubai, people in Mexico, people in South Africa, people in West Africa, like, it's just incredible. It is absolutely incredible. Thank you. Welcome to everyone who's listening. Let's get stuck into today's quick tip episode.
If you have listened to this podcast for a while, thank you. If you have worked with me or you've been on my Sunday email, I send it email out every single Sunday. If you're not on it, you can get on it over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/subscribe. But one of the things that you may have noticed about me is that I'm someone who likes order. I say that and I can be messy as well. I'm looking around this desk and I'm like, “It definitely needs a bit of a cleanup.” But I do like my rituals. I like my whiteboard ritual. At the start of every month, plan out what needs to be done. Most of the people that I work with have a one-minute meditation before we start working together so we can get into the right energy and the right head space to communicate with each other as best we can for the next hour.
I have rituals around music that I listen to at certain times. I have music, particularly a playlist that I listen to if I'm nervous about going on stage anywhere to speak. I have all rituals in my life, and I grew up in a family, I would say my parents had a lot of rituals. Part of that was being Irish Catholic, and I had various rituals, but I think part of it was about what they prioritized and putting their family first and other things. We had a lot of habits that I would say that my dad particularly instilled, in me and my siblings. Many of them were great. Most of them were really good. I have definitely found rituals very much helped me, particularly when things aren't going well or when things have been challenging.
I very much remember one of the hardest parts of my whole life when my mother passed away, and it was very sudden we were in the emergency room of a hospital and I was grateful that I had a ritual at that kind of end-of-life stage with my mom that we had a ritual to complete. It just gave us something to focus on. I know that's kind of a very dark thing to think about, particularly if you've not lost a parent. But I do think that rituals can really help us. I'm not saying all these rituals have to be like setting concrete and you can't change things, but one thing that I wanted to talk about today is the ritual of the end of day. What do you do in your business to signify that you have finished for the day?
I did do a full coaching episode on things that have helped me in my business and what I'm going to talk about is one of those things. If you wanted to dive into that, we will link to that in the show notes. I think it was Episode 192. It came out in April this year. We'll link to that in the show notes. But today I just wanted to talk about the end-of-day rituals. That is how you define the end of your work day. A lot of us, particularly people who work from home, I have always worked from home. That has been my choice since I started this business seven years ago. I know a lot of people now work from home because of the pandemic and things have changed. It can be harder sometimes to switch off from your work if you are taking that work home, or I know like some of my beautiful clients, Maggie and Josh from Think Thornbury at one stage lived in not in their shop, but their shop was within their home.
I think they lived upstairs or they lived somewhere else within that same sort of building. That can be very hard if you are within the workspace that you work in. I know a lot of other people that I work with, Ceramicists and others, such people have their studio in their garage or they have their studio within reach of you just walking out and working again. How do we set that line in the sand and how do we say, “This is it,” I have finished for the day, especially when we can just flick open and laptop or we can walk into the shop, or we can walk into our studio and keep going. Today I just wanted to go through a couple of things that have worked for me and that I think could be really helpful to think about in your own business.
The first is, how do you end your day? I have often prior to putting rituals in place, I would end my day like my last call would go right up until I have to go and pick up the children. For instance, if it's a long day, that might be I finish at five o'clock and then I go into the house, get my car keys, go in the car and go and get my kids. It was giving me no time to close down and distance myself and detach from everything that I experience that day. It's thinking about firstly, how do I finish? Am I finishing and rushing straight to something else? Or am I finishing and giving myself a bit of time and breathing space between going from your work into your home, even if they're the same thing, or into going out for friends or whatever else it is that you do?
That's the first thing, how am I finishing my day, and am I leaving myself enough space to have an end-of-day ritual? The second is to think about how you want to feel when you enter that second space. Whether it's still your home. Me, I have an office out the back in our garden, and then I walk into the house. Now that hasn't always been the case. I also used to work in our house, I used to work in one of the bedrooms, then we had a second child and he took the bedroom. I needed to have an office out the back. For me, it's easier to physically distance myself now. Previously, I would finish my work and I would literally enter the kitchen. I was still in the house.
It's thinking about how I want to feel, even if I was just entering from that room into the kitchen, How do I want to feel when I go into that second part of my evening or if your day, whatever time you finish work? The first is when and how you finish work, but then what do you want to feel when you go into that second place? I know that one of my clients comes from a corporate background, and the thing that they do is come into the house and instantly change their clothes to feel more relaxed. Also, do a couple of yoga stretches. This person has children, they have a family, but they come in and their partner knows that they need that 10 minutes to go into their bedroom, get changed, do some yoga stretches, and they feel more relaxed, calmer, and more able to be a parent, be a partner, relax, and get into family life for the second part of the day.
Thinking about how I wanted to feel and what could my rituals be to help me get into that zone. For that person that's getting changed and doing some yoga. For myself, I often have a kind of shutdown. I actually shut down my computer. I don't just turn it into sleep mode. I like to turn it right off so that I have to wait for it to all load back up. The other thing I do is I often have a candle. If I haven't already burned a candle, I will put a candle on and I will sit in a chair in my office, which is only for relaxing stuff. I don't sit there when I'm coaching. I only sit there. I mean, not that that's not relaxing, but I sit there at the end of the day and I will sometimes do a meditation.
Sometimes I'll just listen, I've got a chill playlist on Spotify, and we'll link to it in the show notes. Sometimes I just listen to some music. Sometimes I'll do some stretches on the floor. I have to say that's more of a new thing because of my back, which is nice to do those stretches on the floor in the office. Sometimes I'll write, sometimes I'll journal quite often I will also look at what I was supposed to do that day on my whiteboard. I will remove the things that I've done. And if I've done everything, then I will write down the three things that I need to get done for the next day or the next time that I'm in the office. But there's a definite end of the day. I shut everything down, I lock this office up, I turn the lights off, I turn the heating off the air conditioning, whatever it is, turn it all off, lock it, and then I come into the house.
It allows me to separate myself from work mode into mom, and partner mode. It's thinking about what is your end-of-day ritual. When do you finish and how do you finish? And are you rushing to something or are you giving yourself a little bit of space? And then how do you want to feel? What are the things you're going to do in order to help yourself feel that? I know it's kind of simple, but it's something we don't do enough. I know that when I do it and I stick to it, that ritual really helps me with my mindset with everything else. I know that this episode is actually coming out the day after World Mental Health Day. I think these small things can actually add up to really helping us long term. That is it for today's quick tip episode. If you want a link to any of the things that we mentioned, check out the show notes, which are over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/245. If you found this useful, I would love it if you could share it with a friend who might need to work on their own end-of-day rituals. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
