The Bleisure Break: Making Travel Work for You

(Edited)The Bleisure Break

Thu, Nov 21, 2024 11:17AM • 21:35

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

freedom and adventure, business travel, self care, guest journeys, pleasure breaks, staycation mindset, mini breaks, travel mindset, long weekends, travel with purpose, skill trading, remote working, micro travel, corporate travel perks, holiday at home

SPEAKERS

Emma Lovell

Emma Lovell 00:00

Emma, do you want to live a life of freedom and adventure? Are you wanting more than the daily grind? Me too. Welcome to the Emma Lovell, show a place where we talk about living a life you love. Now I'm your host, Emma Lovell, and my number one value is freedom. I've spent the last 14 years running a business and traveling the world, and now I take my husband and toddler along for the adventure too. It's possible, and I know you can create a life doing what you truly love as well. This podcast will inspire, motivate and encourage you to go after your dreams, to create a life you love and to live it now, not wait for a time and or someday in the future, I'll be sharing episodes weekly about how I harmonize business travel and self care. I'll also bring on incredible guests to share their journeys, the wins, the challenges, and how they're creating a life they love. Let's jump in and get dreaming. This is a space for you to manifest a life you love. I would like to acknowledge and recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of this place, now known as Australia. I am grateful for the continuing care of the land, waterways and skies where I work, live, listen, learn and play from here on you, Emma country and from wherever you are listening, I pay my respects to the elders past and present. Hello and welcome to today's episode about pleasure breaks and making travel work for you. I wanted to talk today about some of the many ways there are to travel. And I think that what happens is when we talk about having holidays or we talk about traveling, we sort of have one way in our imagination, and that's the only way that we ever think that it's possible. I certainly think that there's a subscribing to The Work, work, work, and then take a break. So the four weeks a year, kind of holidays that you get for people who have children in schools, it's just, we can only travel in the school holidays. And if it's not a week, 10 days, two weeks holiday, it's not a holiday, or it's not traveling. I think the other thing is, when I talk about travel, people often think, or they talk about, they're like, oh, or your jet setting, and they're thinking about the way that I travel, in terms of international travel, or they say, Oh, I'm not really traveling, not like you. But you know, travel, quite simply, means going from A to B, but travel is also a mindset, and that's something that I really shared in my book, The Art of pleasure, that we can be traveling even when we're at home. I really embrace the staycation. I really embrace exploring your local area. This was something that we got to really, we were forced to do, but we I think we also got to do during COVID and to understand what what beauty is around us. And we chose to live in an area for a reason, and then we don't even get to enjoy that area, because we're always just going away from the area. I know that certainly happened for me a few times. The other thing is, there's long weekends, and I really want to discuss embracing the mini break, mini breaks, whether it's as a break and an escape and a getaway, because there are times where you need to switch off, and I don't. I certainly want to talk about the pleasure break, and about how you can take a little break and incorporate your work, or take one off the back of work, but also how little top ups and little travel, little trips, having a travel mindset can actually is part of a pleasure life. It's a part of having a life that is harmonized and to keep you refreshed throughout so, you know, sometimes we're so busy going out and doing stuff that actually a holiday at home is easel that we need. I know for the last few weeks, I've just got back from a big, amazing retreat in Sri Lanka, and all I wanted to do was to be at home. I'm loving being in my lounge room. I'm liking just going for walks in the local area, going to the local coffee shop, spending time with my son, playing board games, doing little dance room concerts in the lounge room, you know, just, yeah, getting to enjoy my house and having days off in my house. I think that's like a holiday too, going down to the pool that I sometimes don't get to go to. You know, we can see it's, it's how we choose to view that. And someone would would love to come and have a holiday at my house. People often telling me, I live in a resort. I live in an apartment complex with a pool and palm trees. So yeah, I can see that. But you know, we don't treat it like that sometimes. So I've really been embracing that these last few weeks. But what can when travel look like for you? I think sometimes as well, we're like, Oh, I've got it. I'm going on a holiday, so I've got to get on a plane, I've got to go to a hotel, got to eat buffets and do trips out and about, and that's what a holiday looks like, or that's what traveling looks like. There's just so many ways to travel, and there's so many different experiences you can have. So I want to talk about a few today that might help you to reimagine what a pleasure break or what a travel could look like for you over this holiday season, but also in 2025 so pleasure travel. So pleasure travel, and it's something that's come up around the book I talk about the art of pleasure, and my definition of pleasure is blending business leisure and self care. Travel is leisure for me, or travel business leisure and self care, but pleasure travel typically, is where you combine business trips with leisure by extending your stay or arriving early. So for example, staying an extra night at the end of a work trip to relax and recharge. So even with a retreat I just went on, we came in a couple days early, and I stayed on a day after, because that was my time to relax after I was doing the work, and doing the work in a fabulous, beautiful location is still work, so it took a lot of energy for me being the host, and so I need to also recharge myself. I didn't realize I did quite so much time to recharge so that hence having the holiday at home when I got back, so or taking the week off work when I got back. But you know, we learn, and that's something that I'll be building in next year a lot more a week of no deliverables the week after I get back, so that I can either enjoy the creative time or just embrace some rest. So long weekends. That's another way that you could look at travel. So adding a single day or to a regular weekend, creates a fabulous mini break throughout the year, and this approach means that you get to have a lot more frequent short escapes without needing to use up your vacation time. This is something that I really embrace with my husband. He works at Sea World. He works a nine day fortnight. So what we do is, you, we've got a trip coming up where we're going to leave on the Wednesday night, because his days off, Friday, Saturday, but every second week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then we're going to have the Sunday off. So we'll be away for four days, and he's only taking one day off. So four days is a really great amount of time we'll be away for away for four nights. So Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, come back Sunday. This is a great way to really maximize your leave and to keep feeling refreshed instead of just doing one big four week trip. And I think especially if you're in employment, but even when you run your own business, I think that's a lot more beneficial than, you know, having this big block of time where you're away, and even when you go away and you have a great time, you still need to kind of have that re entry feeling. You might feel tired, especially if you've done, like a big trip in Europe and you're traipsing about, or you've gone, and, I don't know, gone in safari in Africa, like it's still energy. And so you sort of want to build in a little bit of time for rest as well, or to get yourself reorganized. So having little top ups that refresh you. And I just, you know, three days away. Oh, it's so incredible. Like it feels like three weeks. So don't think it's too short a time. Just think about them. Maybe, if you're going for three days, maybe don't go too far like our that four day trip. I'm talking about, we're going up the Sunshine Coast. We did another trip where we went to Melbourne, but because Matt flew down after work and it was a late night, it actually they ended up getting in late. We didn't get to bed late. Finn was then disrupted, then he woke up early, so it actually kind of made us more tired. So we kind of needed a little bit more time to settle in on that one. We had five days. But just thinking about where you take those mini breaks, and I think sort of a short driving trip is probably the best one for those little times. So traveling with purpose, I really have got a lot of benefit out of trips that I've taken where there's a reason, and some of those included doing charity challenges. So it's lovely to just go on a trip and relax and enjoy yourself or see a place, but sometimes you need a little bit more meaning and reason. And so these trips are where we raised money for charities, and then we went and took on an adventure. So that was trekking Machu Picchu, cycling through Cambodia and Vietnam. Cycled through Vietnam three times. Oh, sorry, twice. And then I did a trek one time, trekking in cocoa. Are trekking to the top of Kilimanjaro in Africa and then raising a lot of money for charity. And it was very, very rewarding. You might also travel, yeah, to attend an event that you're really keen on. I've also traveled to host the retreats that I so it's, it is very much a business trip, but also very rewarding, and they're transformative. So potentially traveling for something, to learn, to participate, for sport, for a conference, for a charity, having a purpose to your travel, as opposed to I just need a break and I want to go and learn a beach somewhere. Can be a really give a different energy to that trip, and it might also you might be able to get some sort of subsidies and things like that if you are or get some support. If you're doing it for a cause or doing it through work. You can also do freelancing and skill trading. So this is where you use your skills to reduce your travel expenses, expenses. So that might be that you do some freelance writing, you might do some social media or content creation, you might do some influencing. You might do some you know, even trade some services for accommodation. So there's things where you need to do a little bit of work while you're there, but in exchange, you get a holiday. So I know even my uncle went and stayed in America and helping do some renovations. And he the got paid for to go over and helped do that. And then he got to have, you know, hang out in America for a few months, so that's kind of a cool way to look at it. So do you have a skill that you could trade? And I'm not talking about volunteerism, by the way. I'm not talking about going and working in orphanages or building houses in developing countries, because that actually could take away from the community. That is a different thing. I tend to support more witnessing programs and witnessing work, and then raising money here to contribute so that the locals are employed. But if there is a skill shortage where they actually, I know someone who went as an engineer and architect because that skill was lacking. So partnered with the local community, that's a different thing. So I also had a client who told me that she was going on pleasure recently. I was so that she felt inspired to seek that out. And I was so honored. She went and attended a food retreat, a food tour in Italy, if you don't mind, in exchange for creating content about it. So she did all the social media for them, captured content whilst was there, wrote about it in exchange for her place on the trip. So that could be a great way to travel as well. And of course, it reduces your travel expenses, but it's a really nice way to do something different, you could also mix work and personal connections. So for me, staying with friends, colleagues during work, during my work trips, or merging networking into my leisure, has really been one of the ways that I've made the pleasure work so much by staying with people, you reduce costs, but also it's such a nicer way to experience a city. If I feel like just going there, doing the job, coming home, that gets really boring really quickly. Like it's a bit fun to go and do a speaking gig or present a workshop or host a retreat, but if I just feel like I'm doing in exchange for money, I start to lose the spark for travel. Whereas, if I go down to Melbourne, stay with a beautiful friend, have dinner with with some other friends, do my book launch, host a retreat day, that's such a great trip. I feel fulfilled. I feel connected. I feel remunerated. It's cost effective, it's profitable. There's all different ways to do it, but even if you don't want to mix the work and mix in the work, it might be that you're just going to stay with a colleague. So we have gone and stayed with my colleague and client, Liz, my husband, my son, and I go and stay with her in Melbourne. And it's just such a nice way to get to have a bit of a trip. We stayed with a friend in Adelaide after I went to a conference. Oh, actually, sorry, she was in rural South Australia, and we went and stayed on their sheep farm after attending a conference. So that's just an idea of a way that you could have an experience that would otherwise that trip would have cost us a lot more, but we also got to share some really special moments and times with some lovely friends. So that was really nice. And so just that's probably one of the biggest top tips on how to save money and to do more travel, is to go stay with friends, even just as. Weekend, I went down to beautiful allstonville, and allstonville, where my friend's grandmother lives, and now another friend lives, and we've gone to stay there before, and she's got a little boy, and we just went for the day this time. But we we stay there overnight sometimes, and we get to stay in this beautiful area. Get a renewed sense of energy. We all get to recharge because, you know, my son gets to play, and we get to chat, and, yeah, you just get to look at a different window. And it's such a beautiful thing. So if anyone ever offers you that I offer people all the time, take the opportunity to see from a different view. You know, there's, of course, as well you could do just simply do remote working, so going and staying somewhere else to do your work. So you're still working, you're still earning money. Is doing it in different place, and we work off our laptops and phones. So I really encourage you to look at how you could do this, and you might be able to use a combination of the ideas that I've explained to do that. The other thing is micro travel, like I just said, which is taking really short trips, so just a few hours to a nearby destination, whether that's you stay overnight or you just spend the day that that I call those, almost like staycations or staycation really means you stay like in your city or in your town, but I think staying in anywhere within a few hours is kind of like a staycation. And gosh, it just feels like it feels like a holiday to see new things. Like travel is about experiencing new things, trying new restaurants, seeing new views, meeting new people. That's having a traveler mindset and little short trips, day trips, and being like, okay, how can we explore our local area? Let's plan an activity. We even went and flew kites the other day, which we've never done with our son. And we all we had to do was walk 300 meters to the park across the road, and we enjoyed flying kites. So we did a new activity, something that you might you would totally do overseas, but you wouldn't do at home. And so I just really encourage you to if, if money is tight, if you know there's kind of a lot going on, and maybe you're even at a point with like me, and you've been going here, there and everywhere, you can still kind of get that feeling of awe and wonder and newness from doing something locally. And then, of course, there's corporate travel perks. So if you do work for a company, or even if through your business, you might be able to get some travel out of that. So some of these companies actually do offer chances for you to do some travel, either as a reward for the work that you've done, or they might have a program or like partnership where you can go and do some travel. So have a chat with your workplace about that as well. I really hope that more organizations will start to encourage this, to encourage a better work life harmony. And you know, if you don't ask, you don't get so there might be something totally available that you're not even looking into yet. I hope I've given you today some ideas of different ways to travel. The other thing is, you know, in terms of different breaks, one of the things that we're doing soon is going on a three day cruise. We're driving up an hour up to Brisbane, where there's a port. We're getting a three day cruise. It's out to sea and back, and be like, I don't like cruising, or I don't like this type of dinner, but I don't like tours, or I don't like package holidays, and I'm like, Have you tried it? Because I can tell you going on a trip where everything is organized and all you have to do is be told when to turn up and what to do, is sometimes lovely, if that's the only way you're traveling. Yeah, sure, that would get old. I don't want to do every single holiday as a cruise, but my goodness, we are going to be doing at least one a year, probably two. We did two this year, one international and one local, because it's an easy trip we get and we didn't want to fly, we didn't want to fly. We just wanted to get there and go on a holiday straight away. So we're very lucky to live coastally. We live an hour, as I say, from I live an hour from the Brisbane port. So even our last cruise in Australia, we had to fly to Sydney to get it. This was Summit. This can be so much easier. And we are going, I know we're going to feel so much more energized and excited and refreshed from three nights away on this big, beautiful ship, and we can do as little or as much as we want. So maybe just having a think in 2025 about if you're always doing the same type of holiday or the doing the same type of travel, that same 10 day trip, that same camping holiday, that same four weeks, big, massive trip overseas and coming back feeling exhausted, maybe think about how you can incorporate some pleasure breaks. Some mini breaks, some long weekends, some short day trips, micro travel, or even how you could have a holiday at home and really view your beautiful local area with a traveler mindset. I hope they've inspired you today to to plan some wonderful little things. And I'd always love to hear from you about what you get up to so please come and join me over on Instagram. Emma lovell.au at Emma level.au And yeah, I will see you next time and let me know what you want to hear more about. If you want to hear more about some of the things I've talked about today, how I make pleasure work for me. Of course, there's always the book you can get. It's the art of pleasure, and it's available at Emma lovell.au forward slash book. But I can't wait to to hear what you get up to, and I will be back next time with some more insights on how you can harmonize business travel and self care. Thanks, lovely one. Thank you for listening, lovely one. I hope this has inspired you to dream big and start creating a life you love today. If you love what you're hearing, don't forget to follow and rate on Spotify and rate review and subscribe on iTunes. It helps other awesome people to find this podcast and get motivated and inspired as well. Want to stay connected, come and join the live a life you love, group on Facebook or connect with me on Instagram. Emma lovell.au the same as my website, but all the details are in the show notes. Lovely. I'll see you next episode for more inspiration, motivation and freedom, seeking. Now go out there and live a life you love. You.