19 | Even Lactation Consultants Need a Vacation

Leah: Well, hello Annie.

Annie: Leah, you're still at my kitchen table.

Leah: Isn't this amazing? We're getting to do two episodes together - face to face. It seems so odd to be sitting here at your kitchen table, but so amazing because we're getting to have a whole different feel to our podcasting.

Annie: And then when we're done, we're totally going to go just hang out and look at New York City.

Leah: I can't wait. I've never been and I'm so excited to see something iconic. That's all I ask. Annie keeps asking me where do you want to go? Where do you want to go? And I'm like, just take me somewhere so I can say when I was in New York, I went to blah, blah blah and people will be like, wow, that's awesome.

Annie: Because she was telling me that when she was telling people that I'm coming to New York City, everybody had like the thing that she has to see. Her husband even did it just this morning. Oh, you have to go see this and I mean that's why people come for a long time to do one thing. But you know, really what we have to do is make sure we don't spend this trip just entirely talking about work, because it would be really sad if Leah came all the way to New York City just to sit inside my apartment in Queens and then sit in traffic driving to New Jersey.

Leah: Right.

Annie: Because this is the subject of our episode today - Even lactation consultants need a vacation.

Leah: Absolutely, and it's so, so hard. I think for a lot of us when you are running a business and you feel solely responsible for all the things and you're like, but the moms don't just stop coming and needing help and I feel responsible to take care of them. Sometimes it's hard to say, I can't take care of you. I'm going to be gone for a week or a month.

Annie: Or even saying not, I can't take care of you but I'm not going to take care of you because I'm going on vacation because I need a vacation.

Leah: Absolutely.

Annie: That's where our sponsor for this episode comes in, cause our sponsor can actually help you be on vacation. Yes. Our episode sponsor is Acuity, and with Acuity all you need to do is show up at the right time. Whether you're planning to work or on vacation, Acuity scheduling is your online assistant working 24/7 to fill your schedule or keep it open. If you're on vacation, never ask what time works for you again. Your clients can quickly view your real time availability and self-book their own appointments and they can even pay online. When you go on vacation, you can block it off and they won't see any availability and then they'll able to see your first availability when you return. You don't have to tell anybody during your vacation - I'm on vacation - because they will see it when they log in and look at your online availability through Acuity. Acuity wants to give you a 45-day free trial as thanks for listening to this podcast. So you can visit www.acuityscheduling.com/ref/lbc which stands for lactation business coaching, and we'll put that link in the show notes. So thank you to Acuity for sponsoring our episode about how to go on vacations. So Leah, I think you have a marketing tip that has to do with going on vacation.

Leah: Right. You want to keep your brand going. You want to keep social media going even when you're away because if you have just a long pause and everything, people might begin to wonder like, Hey, did they fall off the face of the earth? But as social media makes it really easy for you to keep posting even when you're away, because you can schedule all your posts ahead of time. So you can gather some of the articles or memes or things that you want to post. You can get them all scheduled in Facebook and there you go. You're not going to have to think about any social media while you're away. You're going to be able to put that phone down and focus on where you're at and who you're with.

Annie: That's great. I mean, that's what it's all about. And just be careful when you're posting the social media stuff that's going to go up on your vacation and make it really light and happy.

Leah: Yes, absolutely.

Annie: All you want when you're on vacation is you want likes. You don't actually want comments.

Leah: Cause then you can't manage the comments and you don't want to feel like you need to stop and deal with any comments while you're away. You want to keep it as self-paced and taking care of itself as you possibly can. So that's a great additional tip there for sure.

Annie: So first, why do we need a vacation? Why do lactation consultants need a vacation?

Leah: I think the biggest reason is the work that we do is hard. It's hard, it's emotionally draining, and burnout is so, so common in our field. And burnout not only affects you and affects your family, but it also affects the families that you're caring for. When you're in that burnout mode, you're not at your best. You're not going to be helping the best way that you can help. So you really do everyone - yourself and everyone around you - a disservice if you don't take time to really give yourself some space to refresh and rejuvenate, and a vacation for a lot of people is a time to do that, to just step away, put everything away. Don't think about any babies or any families for just a little bit of time, and sometimes that can give you a real boost coming back to it and you feel re-energized. Your energy levels for helping are there.

Annie: I think that is so important and I think, cause it's also easy for our families and people around us or our friends don't really get how hard it is. Just the other day, I had a client give me permission to post a picture of her baby on my Instagram, her tiny five-day old baby, and my husband was like, I really forget how little the babies are that you work with. I'm like, yeah, sometimes they're not even six pounds, and it's a lot. The families are crying and everybody's in pain and then you go home and then you think about did I do everything? And then the next day you're like, I want to make sure they're okay. Just all of that. They're always in the back of your mind, those active clients that you have, cause either they're reaching out and then that's taking up your time or they haven't and you're like, are you okay? Are you okay? Should I check in? Do you hate me?

Leah: Even though you're going to try really hard to have good boundaries and set this aside, I think every time you get a little ding in your mind about a family that you've helped or a family you're a little concerned about, it just takes a little bit more energy away from you and a little bit more energy away from you. And then it seems like it always comes in waves. You'll get this wave of just complicated case after complicated case after complicated case, or this wave of everybody has low milk supply, and I feel like when it's feels like a big wave like that, that's even more draining, cause you're just feeling like you're dealing with repeat of the same story over and over and over again. I feel like that really drains you a lot as well. So I just think there's so many times that our energy is getting drained so we need a vacation.

Annie: Yeah, and we talked about it in our episode on compassion fatigue about just all the reasons why this work is so draining, and I think the other piece of it though is as small business owners where we feel like it's on us, we have to run this thing we're the captain of the ship and if we're not around, if we're not constantly maintaining it, it could just die. I think that's always a fear that any self-employed person has, is that any minute that I'm not thinking about my business, that could be when the thing happens that makes me fail. Every time I've gone away, and I did it recently, we went on a trip just me and my husband and my kids went somewhere where I just left my phone in my room. I did not have my Apple watch on. We were at an indoor water park. There were no clocks and I actually went for six hours where I just didn't even know what time it was.

Leah: Oh my gosh.

Annie: And I just sat there and my mind went to places and I would think of something about my business and then it just had to go. I didn't have any paper to write it down. I had nothing, no ability to act on it, but it took that prolonged period of time before I could actually be in that place where I could have the thoughts and let them go and not feel the urgency to act on them. That's why we - my husband is also a business owner - we really like those kinds of trips. We like to go camping. We like to go and leave the phone in the car. We like to go in the woods, so that we can actually...

Leah: Really disconnect from everything. Yeah. Because if you keep your phone next to you and you're really just "on vacation", but you're really still working just from a different location, that's not actually vacation. You just moved your business to be run in Disney World versus being run in your living room. So it really is. It really is. I think there's a lot of steps that you can take when you're prepping for a vacation to make it work better for you. So whether you're going to take a short vacation, you're just going to be gone for maybe a couple of days or if you're like, no, I think for me this time I need to really take a whole month off. The three days isn't going to cut it, and that's okay to do that. I think there's some ways that we can prep our businesses to sustain that. And just in the very short term, you want to think about, even if you're gone for three days, I'm going to need to make sure that anybody who contacts me would know that I'm not available right now and then have somewhere to go to get help. So how have you done that, say when you went on your short vacation just recently. What did you do?

Annie: I've definitely done the auto responder for text. So I'm unavailable and by unavailable, meaning not just unavailable for a consult, but I'm not even going to text you back. And sometimes if it's for a long time, I'll say, well I know these people are generally around and so please contact this person instead if you're in Queens, and this person if you're in Brooklyn. Then I can trust in that referral network that I talked about in the last episode that even if my backup isn't available, they're at least around to get ...

Leah: Right. They're going to get them to someone that can help.

Annie: They will get them to someone. So that's a big thing I do, and setting up auto reply on my email just so that I'm not even responding to those texts. And for longer vacations, I've even deleted my Spruce app from my phone.

Leah: Oh wow!

Annie: So that I just don't even get the notifications. And then when I get back, I check and sometimes I have to tell my current clients, I'm not going to be checking texts. With the current clients, that is always a little bit of a... like I'm never going to totally go dark.

Leah: Right, because there could be something more urgent that you might need to ...

Annie: Would you mind checking once a day?

Leah: Right, right. You're still not going to be able to maybe help them one-on-one, but if it's urgent, I have these backup people that I can get you in with quickly that I know will totally cover ...

Annie: And I'll tell them in advance. I'll say, if you need to see somebody in person while I'm gone, there's this person, do that. Don't wait for me. I will try and get back to you, but I'm only going to be checking my email once a day. I'm not checking my texts at all. So just prepping the clients. Another strategy I have to kind of limit that involvement is - this is before I'm going on a long vacation. I actually will not take any new clients in the couple of days, maybe even a week before.

Leah: That's really smart.

Annie: And that's always a tricky thing because that assumes that I've got follow up clients to do, but I will push. So I have a vacation coming up and I had some people that I saw yesterday and one of them was on the fence of do they need a follow-up? And I was like, you should have a follow-up with me next week because then I won't be able to see you again for another couple of weeks. I really am a little more ...

Leah: Strategic about where you are going to put them in and how...

Annie: And just telling them if you want to see me again, it should be next week, and then I can get that week filled up and feel like, okay, I'm not ...

Leah: Okay before I go out of town, and I do that too. When I was prepping for this trip, I actually at the end of last week had some clients. You never know what's going to walk through the door sometimes. Even if they fill out their intake form, it seems like their perception of how things are going and what's really happening are really different. And I did have a couple where I was like, okay, we're going to need to make sure that you come in for a weight check with my partner or as soon as I get back, I need to make sure that we have contact and I am going to make an exception and maybe contact you while I'm away to make sure things are going okay, or I'm checking to see if they're going to have contact with their healthcare provider, like their paediatrician or something like that. So there are some situations and you want to be really thoughtful about prepping them. The other thing that you can do is to prep whoever you might be referring to and maybe even coordinate, find out. If you don't have a group practice, you have a referral network, you'd want to communicate with those people, hey, just giving everybody a heads up. I will be out of town on this day to this day. I put an auto responder to send to you, or can I put an auto responder? You probably should ask them before you do that. But can I automatically send people over your way? Something like that can be really helpful as well.

Annie: And here's a great tip for when you're just starting in your practice. A really good reason to connect with the other lactation consultants is find out when they're going on vacation. Don't go on vacation when they're on vacation. Take your vacation another time because then you can pick up, and that was something I did very strategically. My first few summers, I was like, oh yeah, everybody goes away the last two weeks of August because there's no camp. If you have school age children, it is really hard to find a summer camp and friends are around cause their kids are not in camp. So they're looking for somebody to do. I have something to do. Take my children while I go to work, and then I was really reaping the benefits of being around when other people weren't around. So that's where building that trust and that referral network is going to make it easy, and also in the long view, you want to make sure you enjoy your vacation and nothing can make you not enjoy your vacation, like worrying about money. So when you're planning for your vacation times, one of the most important things you can do is recognize that it's never about that one consult. It's about the big picture. So by this time in the year we're recording this - in June - I've been tracking all of my consults for the year. I have a monthly target, I have a low target and a high target and I'm always aiming for the high target. But if I get the low, I'm now trying to not have two low months in a row because I have this average that I want. And so by the time I'm going to go on vacation, I want to feel like I'm on track, that I've met my goals and that maybe I'm even a little ahead. That way I can say, yes, I'm going on a one-week vacation, but I'm taking two weeks off so that I don't have to take new clients right before I go on vacation, and that's all factored into my big picture plan. So it means that maybe earlier in the year, maybe in January, often I'm like, I'm going to see everybody so that I can bank for June if because I want to take off when I want to take off.

Leah: Right. That's a great strategy and it's so thoughtful to have that bigger vision of your whole practice and what are your goals and where are you going, and what do you need to make and what do you need to cover/ make up for when you're not going to have income for two weeks. How are you going to strategize around that and make sure that your business stays going well and has good future ahead of it? So I think that's really, really important. I think we've already spoke to some of the other ways that you can make sure you enjoy your vacation is to also really try to find out for you what your boundaries are with your tech, and are you going to really like you do, delete a whole app to make sure that you're not distracted by that or do you need to delete Facebook? What do you need to do to really center yourself and not feel like you're still being pulled back into business life? I know for me, like when I go on vacation, I have an admin and we do try to always coordinate it where she's not out when I'm out and she's really good at fielding everything and making sure nothing comes past this boundary, and she knows these are the things you can contact me about because that's super serious and I need to know, and then everything else, I kind of give her the reins. Like, here I'm going to let you this decision or this decision needs to come up, it's on you. You can take care of it and then I'll jump back in when I get back. And that really helps me have the confidence to, to just take a deep breath and set it all aside because I know somebody is out there kind of driving the show while I'm out. So that's always helped me.

Annie: I think that's really good too, saying there's only a certain level of thing that you want to actually be contacted about, and even when I've gone away, it does remind me like I'm not supposed to be doing this for them. The whole point is I'm supposed to be giving them a care plan that they can implement themselves, and resources for themselves. And so yeah, I mean of course we have those urgent situations where I really need you to get a weight check, but sometimes they just want to talk to you.

Leah: Right, right. Or check if I'm doing okay, that kind of thing. And if it's not something urgent, then sometimes those conversations can wait until you get back

Annie: And preparing that and even putting that in the care plan. Here's what to do if you are worried that you have mastitis, don't ask me.

Leah: Right. You need to contact your physician, yeah.

Annie: If you're scared about your baby's diapers, you should be asking a paediatrician, so you can jump past me so that big picture of breastfeeding is in their hands. Really if it's an emergency, we're not the people that should be dealing with it.

Leah: Really there are no lactation emergencies that the lactation consultant is going to be able to address, if it's mastitis or your baby possibly is not getting enough. We really want to make sure that the paediatrician, the OBs are involved for sure. So I think that's really helpful to have that in the care plan as well. And then prepping your clients when you know you're going to be away. So I think those are some great ways that we can kind of take a deep breath and relax and really sit back and enjoy your vacation. And everybody's so different on what fuels you. I think when you're going on a vacation, oftentimes we're going for our kids, or taking their kids here, taking our kids there, but just so take a moment to think about as you go away what really fuels me, and if I have these seven days that I'm going to be away from work and I'm trying to make sure that I come back energized and ready to jump back in full force, be mindful of what fills you up. And that might be like, I love eating at really fun restaurants. So even though we're going to such and such place for the kids, I'm going to make sure two, three days, we go to some fun restaurants. Or I really just love just sitting somewhere quiet and reading a book and facilitating that for yourself. But sometimes I think we get so caught up in the act of "on a vacation'. We've got to coordinate all these things and the packing and the production of it that we forget to take the real benefit of it. And don't forget to take time for yourself, to do what fills you up so you really get the most out of the vacation.

Annie: And one thing that I've heard recently from someone, a lactation consultant who does not have children, was saying that how she finds it hard to take a vacation because she doesn't necessarily have an excuse to take a vacation. She's also seen in the hospital where her vacation needs don't get the priority.

Leah: That is so true.

Annie: I'm telling you, you do not need your kids to go on a vacation. Go on a vacation.

Leah: No, absolutely not!

Annie: If you want to go on a vacation over July 4th, you don't need kids to say vacation over July 4th is important to me.

Leah: Right. A hundred percent.

Annie: So, I think when you have kids, it's just so easy to be like it's just like coordinating the schedules and we're only available at this time, but doesn't mean that our vacation needs are any more important or stressful than somebody else's. So to all of you who don't have kids, just take that vacation where you take care of yourself.

Leah: Take care of yourself. You have as much burnout as somebody who has kids or somebody who has an aging family member that they're taking care of, or anybody else that's in your care or just yourself that is in your care. You are so important and so valuable too, and you're going to burn out just like the next of us. So make sure you take good care of yourself and recognizing the importance and value of taking these breaks throughout the year really not just you, but also the work that you do. I really think it helps fuel us to do good work.

Annie: Absolutely. And when I have told my clients that I'm going on vacation and I'm not going to be available, you know what they say? They're not like, what? I need you 12:30 today. They’re like, Oh, that's so great. Where are you going? Oh, I'm so happy for you. They're glad to hear that we're going on vacation.

Leah: Mine have always been super excited and they sometimes will even email me and be like, I hope you're having fun on your trip. I got an email today from one of my clients. I told them I was going to New York and he's like, Oh, I lived in New York for 30 years. Let me tell you ... and he had all these things he needed to tell me how to... How to get the cab, how to do this, where I needed to go, and they literally emailed me and they were like, we hope you're having so much fun in New York City. It was really great to have that connection with them too. And then they were really respecting. They didn't ask any questions. They just said, I hope you're having fun in New York City.

Annie: That's very sweet.

Leah: And that was really nice because they respected that we weren't doing any clinical stuff right now, but they wanted to let me know that they are very supporting me and my vacation, so absolutely. So as we wrap up today about vacations, do you have a text tip related to vacation?

Annie: I do have a tech tip and it's a pretty simple one, but really the main reason that you want online scheduling is so you can block off that vacation time, and in Acuity you just go in and you say from this day to this day I'm blocking all of my appointments. But you can even get specific though and say I'm blocking all new consults but I'm leaving open my follow-ups, or maybe I'll still do prenatals that week before I go if you do prenatals, or I'll do a back to work consult. What I'm not going to do is come and see you with your three-day old baby who hasn't pooped yet the day before I go to vacation.

Leah: Not going to make for a nice start to the vacation.

Annie: Refer that one out. You are not the person for that job. And speaking of going on vacation, Leah and I are going on a little podcast vacation, so you're going to be listening to this in July and then you're not going to hear our voices again until September because we are practicing what we preach. We're taking a little break.

Leah: Yeah. Which is going to be a great time for us to come up with new ideas for you guys and re-energize ourselves to have great, invigorated content and we'd love to also hear when we come back, what do you guys want to hear us talking about. So you can always leave a message for us on Facebook or in the Messenger or in the comments of the podcast. You can always give us what topics are really speaking to you, what you want us to talk about, and we're going to be working together to get some really great new content out for you guys in September, and we're going to enjoy our little podcast vacation.

Annie: We will but we can't wait to come back. So we're probably going to hang up this recording and then plan when we're going to record our September episodes because we really can't wait, but it's going to be great. And we also hope to have some other ideas sparkling on the horizon, so you'll have to wait until September to hear about those. It was so fun talking to you and having you in my kitchen and in my tiny apartment.

Leah: It's awesome. I love it. I'm so New York.

Annie: All right. See you later.