How I'm Taking Three Months Off From Clients This Summer

As of recording this I am just under four weeks away from signing off from client work for three whole months this summer.

This is the kind of spaciousness I didn’t even let myself really dream of years ago in my business, the kind of spaciousness my body and mind have really been craving in my work these past few years.

Because for many years now I’ve built regular time off in my business - usually somewhere around 18-20 weeks off from client work a year - usually spread out as a week or two here or there and then one month off over the summer too.

But last year I heard this little voice within me that asked, what if I could take an even longer summer sabbatical? If I could have time in the middle of the year to really reset, recharge, and just soak up the summer months with my son too?

Because I love working with my clients, it’s one of the greatest privileges of my life, and also client work is a huge energetic exchange and I really benefit from time off from it throughout the year too.

And three whole months this summer with no calls scheduled in my calendar feels so spacious to me, it means I can really have full autonomy over my time and really be in tune with my own energetic ebbs and flows and I am honestly so excited.

I won’t be completely off for 3 months, I’ll still be running my group program and another program I’m launching over the summer so really this is a summer sabbatical from clients and I’m sure there will be some weeks this summer where I completely sign off for the week and do nothing too.

And this summer sabbatical hasn’t just happened by accident, I had to really intentionally make this possible for me.

And step one to make this possible was doing something that may sound a little crazy as last year I shut down my bread and butter offering in my business, my six month 1:1 coaching program. This in many ways was the biggest stabiliser to my income in my business and I offered it for years, it was the main way I dived deep with my clients. And I loved it, spending six months with my clients diving deep together was beautiful and I cherish those client experiences and also it started to become very clear to me that in this season of my life that offering was no longer sustainable for me.

Because so often a six month container together would expand into 7 months, 8 months, 9 months sometimes even past a year as understandably clients aren’t robots and sometimes needed to reschedule calls and even sometimes would ask to extend the timeframe of the program to have bigger gaps between calls to cover more time together and in many ways that was absolutely fine as it honoured what worked best for them. But over the years what I found myself with was a client schedule that was a little out of control as I’d have new clients starting alongside clients who had carried over and I was just working beyond a capacity that truly felt aligned for me.

I also had been offering some 3 month 1:1 packages too and what I found through those is that we could cover some great ground together over that time and it was way more breathable in my schedule too to not have clients have so many calls together as more calls meant more scope for extension.

So for this year I decided I would only take on 3 month clients, with two start dates: February and September. What that meant was I would naturally be able to take 3 months off over the summer months without it disrupting the client work - inevitably some clients from the first enrolment of this year are carrying over with a session or two but they understand waiting until the other side of the summer as our work has extended beyond the initial scope. I also have some quarterly clients this year but as we only have calls every 3 months that also makes my summer sabbatical from clients possible too.

And talking this through it sounds a little like a no brainer but I think sometimes in our work we can get so stuck in the way we’ve been doing things that we don’t take the time to go back to the drawing board a little and see how we can make it work best for us.

There are so often inconvenient whispers in our business, desires that conflict with what is technically working in our business but is no longer truly working best for us.

And it’s only when we put our desires on the table that we can then start to explore how to make them possible for us.

I’ve actually done this again this year and I’m making even more changes to my client schedule for 2023 as I’m going to move towards only taking on quarterly clients from next year, therefore only having clients calls once every 3 months which honestly as I say this out loud blows my mind as that feels so deeply spacious for me in my work moving forward. Now to make this possible I’m doing a lot of work this year to shift to more 1:many income in my business as if all goes to plan this will be the first year in my business I make more of my income from 1:many offers than I do 1:1 and launching my new group program last month Your Simple & Spacious Business has really played a big part in helping me feel like I can make these changes moving forward too.

And I’m sharing all of this because over the years this is the insight I craved into other people’s businesses, how they shaped things to truly work best for them and my hope is this can encourage you to look at your own schedule and workload and explore if there’s anything you want to reshape to work better for you moving forward.

And my biggest encouragement is that sometimes it takes time to make the changes we want to make, I put this summer sabbatical plan into motion a year ago and I’m putting the changes in my schedule for next year into motion now and I get it when we want a change we want it straight away and sometimes that is possible but often we have to be patient and intentionally build and shift our way there.

So is there any reshaping you want to do in your business right now?

Perhaps you want to take a sabbatical from client work too, or reshape your offerings to feel more simple and spacious moving forward.

Give yourself space to really dig deep into what you want these shifts to be, what they would look like, what would need to happen to make them possible, and then just start to create for yourself a plan to do so.

And remember: it’s all one big experiment. You can try something out, learn from it, see how it feels, and shift and evolve again when your intuition guides you to do so too.

I’m so looking forward to a very spacious summer, to having more energy and time for me and my family and to be able to work on my business at a very slow and gentle and intuitive space with nothing scheduled in my calendar and my work week mine to shape entirely for myself.

And I know come September I’ll be really looking forward to diving deep again with my clients too, refreshed from my time off and ready to be all in with them again for the autumn.

So here’s to really, truly, building our businesses in a way that works best for us, for honouring our energetic desires and giving ourselves permission to do our work in a way that works with us and not against us.

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Jen Carrington18 May 2022