The Importance of Being Idle: Lessons from my unexpected hiatus

What do you do when life laughs at your best-laid plans and forces you to stop? 

 That's exactly what happened to me in December, with COVID-19 tagging along for an uninvited ravaging of my immune system and house renovations turning my world upside down. 

But here's the thing: this unexpected pause was the secret sauce I needed to spice things up again and be ready to welcome you back to the Triple C Project — with a renewed focus and energy — where we're all about finding clarity, confidence, and courage so you can live life Lit!

If you're new here, I'm Ryan Spence, your Human GPS and guide on this journey, and I've returned with a backpack full of insights from my time off the grid (well, away from the pod). 

Grab your favourite drink, find your cosiest nook, and join me as we explore how embracing intentional breaks can recharge our spirits and realign us with our deepest values.

Don't call this episode 92 a comeback; it's a renaissance of our shared expedition towards a Lit! life. This isn't about simply picking up where we left off; it's about harnessing the power of reflection and idleness that turned my time away into an enlightening experience. 

We'll unravel the importance of stepping back to leap forward, and how a little 'being' instead of constant 'doing' can stoke the embers of creativity and passion. 

No guests, just us, ready to reignite the embers of what makes life truly 'Lit'. 

So, are you strapped in? Because we're embarking on a quest to our most vibrant selves, and the countdown to the 100th episode has already begun!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Triple C Project Podcast Welcome Back
• 4:59 Return With Purpose

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Who build the most hours, who had the least sleep, who canceled the most weekends or vacations? It all has shades of the Michael Douglas movie Wall Street Sleep is for Whips. You're listening to the Triple C Project ["Double C Project"]. Welcome to the Triple C Project, the podcast that helps you gain clarity, lose confidence and will encourage so you can live life. Next, I'm your host, ryan Spence, the big law dropout, life coach, author, speaker, lover of hoodies, hip hop and big, hairy, volatious goals. If you're tired of living the life you think you should want and ready to start living the life you do want, this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be. So now, with friends, I invite you to grab a drink. Take a seat, allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lived. Hey, it's been a while. Welcome to episode 92 of the Triple C Project, first episode of 2024, which is a little bit bad of me, isn't it, I guess. But hey, if you're new here, welcome.

Speaker 1: 1:20

I'm Ryan Spence. Life coach, integrative life coach, yoga teacher, meditation guide. I'm also author of the Triple C Method, the transformational toolkit, the book that will help you get from living a life of lethargy towards living a life lit. It's the book that I wish that I'd had when I was a struggling and happy big law lawyer desperately trying to figure out a way to break out of my box, and this book is going to give you actionable tools as well as an entertaining story to help you figure out where you want to be and how the hell to get there. So if you haven't already checked it out, go ahead and check it out. Anywhere you get your books, you can go to my website I am ronespencecom slash book and grab yourself a copy of the ebook and audiobook. And if you want to get the good old paperback hard copy, you can get that from all your usual bookstores. Head to online and grab it wherever you feel good. If you can get it from a nice indie, do that. Support the indies. Go into your local indie shop and order it direct from them. If you can, too, what about supporting small businesses and keeping out the billionaire penis rocket builders as much as we possibly can? Ok, glad to have you here, my current faithful listeners. What can I say? You know, when you take a nap in the weekend and you say you're going to just lay down and rest your eyes for half an hour or so and then you literally wake up and it's dark outside and you realize you've been asleep for hours. Yeah, that's kind of what happens here, if I'm honest with you.

Speaker 1: 3:09

So let me tell you what happened with my unscheduled hiatus here on the CCC Project Podcast. So I never really planned to have a two-week break at the end of the year just to kind of ease into Christmas and all of those shenanigans and to kind of come back and refresh for the new year. But best-laid plans and all that they were thwarted by, first of all, by health really. So I got hit with my third round of COVID again, can you believe it? I've had all the vaccines. So, yeah, third round hit me and it just knocked me out for a good week and then for a good sort of couple of weeks afterwards I was just in this fog of fatigue and I just couldn't really focus and I just didn't really feel inspired and I didn't, if I'm honest, feel myself. And also around that time I just hit this real big wall in terms of my house renovation, the stress and the pressure and all of the movements and shenanigans around that, which is just kind of overwhelming, really, and, if I'm honest with you, I was just exhausted and so I just made the decision. I just had to cancel whatever I could cancel and stop doing whatever I could stop doing. That wasn't fully necessary. I just try and get myself back to a place where not only did I feel myself again, but also where I could start to just feel inspired. So that's what I did. So I just take a break and I plan to return in January to know Big Bang in the new year talked about my find your spark sessions and setting you up with tools and strategies to kind of get your new year off to a good old start.

Speaker 1: 4:59

But to be perfectly honest with you, I just didn't feel ready and I knew that if I came back because I thought that I should, you know, because I thought that I just had to do this or you would all leave me and desert me, the energy would be all wrong, it would feel forced, it would. You'd get that uninspired feeling that I would have felt giving you the episodes and I didn't think that was right. It wasn't what I wanted to do, it didn't fall into, it didn't align with my value of integrity and my value of fun. So I just kept chilling Okay, not exactly chilling Life still went on, you know, slowly started to reintroduce things, but you know I I clients were still there, still working with clients, had two new clients sign on, which was fantastic.

Speaker 1: 5:51

Kids were still there, so they still needed to be looked after, you know. So it wasn't like I completely disappeared off the face of the earth, but the pod says stayed, stayed dormant. I took a little social media break. Well, kind of I was finding it really hard to just completely stay away, but I took a good while of just not really posting and just been a bit of lurking, a bit of commenting and, yeah, after I did that for a while I mean, and got past that initial urge that I must be doing something, give it a try, it starts to feel pretty good and it removed some of that pressure of feeling that I had to return. In fact, I'm talking about it, it removed all the pressure. I was just like I return when it feels right to return.

Speaker 1: 6:37

There was a shift and what that space did. So having that time and space did is it allowed me to start to think more about what I was doing with the podcast, what I wanted it to be going forward. I mean I'm coming up to almost 100 episodes now and that's a lot. What started as, first of all, something to help promote and talk about the first book and then became an exercise in do I have enough to talk about on my own for a podcast, for a certain number of episodes, without relying on bringing in guests and doing the interview thing, and it's just kind of kept going and kept going and kept going and I love, I've loved doing it.

Speaker 1: 7:27

But I think a break even though it was an enforced break was probably needed at that point and I'm glad that it happened when it did. You know what I mean. I was asking myself questions like do I want to come back? And if I do, what do I want it to look like? Do I want to keep the same title, keep the same branding? Don't want to do a complete revamp, burning it all down and start again. You know I just had time to mull some of those thoughts over in my mind and really think about where I wanted to take this over the course of the next I don't know few months a year, however long I continue doing this thing and allowing myself that time and space.

Speaker 1: 8:10

Just allow me to let the podcast just be without pressure, without agenda, and I've got to tell you, it felt pretty fucking fantastic, if I'm honest with you, especially because, one, there was no pressure on me, but also there can be this idea that if you take a break from doing something that you've always done, that people know you for, that you'll just disappear from the face of the earth. No one will ever find you again, no one will ever be interested. And actually what's happened is that the last episode that I put out certainly just shut up in downloads, as did other episodes before that. So people are still finding the show and listening to the show, or even listening to episodes again. If that was you, thanks for that, let me know, send me a message, tell me what you liked, what you've been listening to. I always want to hear from you, segway there.

Speaker 1: 9:09

But most importantly, the world didn't end. The world just didn't end. Everything continued as normal and everything was fine. So I decided that I would come back when it felt right to do so, when there was a calling and an inkling and urging me to like let's do this. So here I am, that urges now, and I have returned here for episode 92.

Speaker 1: 9:37

So I'm sharing all of this with you, yes, partly to just say hey, I'm back and this is where I've been and this is why I disappeared, but also because I want to invite you to take on some of what I learned in this intervening period, because we're all conditioned to keep pushing forward. Does this need to always be productive, constantly productive, always pushing forward, making more, doing more, being more For an organization that really doesn't give a fuck about us, right? That's kind of what life is about, and this hustle and burnout is worn as a badge of honor, especially in big law. It's kind of like a culture that you have to buy into in order to be successful, or somewhat. Have you think who build the most hours, who had the least sleep, who canceled the most weekends or vacations? It all has shades of the Michael Douglas movie Wall Street. Sleep is for Whips Like. That isn't life, that isn't living and it's a surefire way to burn you out and just make you very, very miserable.

Speaker 1: 10:50

So what I want you to take away from this episode, from my return and my sharing my experience of being away for an unscheduled extended hiatus, is the important thing of being idle. Now that might sound weird, because idleness has this bad rep just someone who's a bit lazy, a bit of a slob who does sweet FA. But there's actually another meaning of idle, which simply means to spend time doing nothing, and, as I've said in previous episodes, particularly when talking about meditation, is that we all should take some time to just be instead of always doing. Because in that being, in that nothingness, not only do you get to reset and recharge, but you also start to gain clarity, clarity that can't be achieved from consistently moving, consistently keeping yourself distracted, keeping yourself busy, and often we're doing that either because we're pushed to, we feel we have to, or because we're trying to stop ourselves from dealing with the thoughts or the feelings that are inside of us. We feel by keeping ourselves busy and distracted we won't have to deal with that stuff, but we will. And if we don't intentionally allow ourselves space to deal with it now, it will come out when we least expect it, in ways that we don't want it to.

Speaker 1: 12:21

So giving yourself that time to just be, that time to be idle, is actually going to help you move forward a lot quicker than that consistent pushing. It's going to help you get clearer on where you want to be and how to get there than just constantly running around in circles without taking a break. So take a break. And when you do take that break, question what you're doing and why you're doing it. Why are you where you are? Why are you doing what you're doing? Do you want to be there? Have you chosen to be there? Maybe you did intentionally choose to be there a year ago, two years, five years ago, but as we grow, we change.

Speaker 1: 13:08

So having those that time to just check in and see if we're still good, whether we need to make any tweaks, any pivots, any shifts, is going to get you closer to living that life that's lit. The answers are going to come in that nothingness, in that stillness. It's going to give you ideas about where to go and what to do, ideas that won't necessarily come when you're consistently busy, when you're keeping yourself distracted. So I invite you to be true to yourself. Ask yourself how about? Where I want to be? And if the answer is no, then take time in that stillness to think about where you would want to be instead, what you would want to do instead. Don't feel that you have to keep doing the same thing you've always done, or being the same person you've always been. Stop giving in to the shoulds and check in with the wants, with the wants. What do you want, what do you need, what do you desire? And when it's ready, when it's time for you to come back or it's time for you to shift, then make that shift, make that return, but do it on your own terms. Do it because it feels good, do it because it feels fun, do it because it's taking you closer to where it is that you want to be.

Speaker 1: 14:49

Thanks for joining me for my return episode. It's very, very good to be back, so happy to be back here. I hope that you get what you need from this episode and if you do, drop me a line, let me know. And if you're interested in getting to know me, please leave a review. Let everyone else know what you take away from the show, what you like about the show. You listened for a reason and I'd love to know the reason why. And it also helps others to think, hey, that show could probably help me. Let me check it out. So you're not just doing that for me to let me know what to share with you, but you're helping people around you who could hear some of the things that I'm sharing on the show here from my journey and my experience and the experiences that my clients have had too. That's it for this week, episode 92. Again, thank you for being here. Until next time, stop living a life of lethargy. Start living life.

Speaker 1: 15:56

Yet Thanks for tuning in to the Triple C project. In the spirit of the Triple C, there's three things that you can do to support the show. Head to ratethispodcastcom. Slash triple C or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a review. Reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how this show can help them. Second thing you can do share this episode, share a previous episode with a friend, someone who you feel could benefit from what I'm throwing down on this show. And number three, head to imryanspencecom. Get on the main list. I'll be sharing news about the show, news about what I'm up to my new book. Start writing soon. So to be the first to be in the know, you need to get yourself on the list. Really appreciate you being here and, until next week, stop living a life of lethargy. Living life lit.