Week five of the Stay at the Top Summer Reset series is about zooming out.
So far, you have looked at your days, your weeks and the foundations that shape how you feel. This episode takes the next step and looks at the bigger picture: your year.
Your yearly rhythm is about understanding when you operate well, when you tend to hit the wall, and when life outside of work asks more of you. It is about seeing the patterns that repeat, even when you are too busy to notice them in the moment.
In this episode, I walk you through how to map your year with intention so you are not always reacting when you are already exhausted. This is not about locking in every detail. It is about visibility. Because when you can see what is coming, you can plan recovery before you are depleted, not after you have run yourself into the ground.
In this episode I share:
- What a yearly rhythm actually means
- Why zooming out changes how you operate day to day
- How to identify your busiest and quietest periods
- When you typically hit the wall and why
- How life outside of work affects your energy and capacity
- The difference between reactive and proactive recovery
- Why burnout holidays are not a strategy
- How your yearly rhythm fits into your operating system
- A client story that shows how this changes everything
- How I am structuring my own year differently
Key Quotes
“Your yearly rhythm shows you when you operate well and when things tend to fall apart.”
“Being proactive is about getting ahead of the curve.”
“Work and life are not separate. They shape each other.”
“Visibility gives you structure that supports you instead of drains you.”
Episode Resources
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess Spendlove (00:09.515)
Welcome to week five of the summer reset series. Last week we looked at your day to day and the week to week logistics, the basics, the foundations, the fundamentals, the things that you schedule that ultimately shape how you feel and how you show up. But there’s one layer that we cannot overlook and that is your yearly rhythm. This is really about zooming out across the year so it gives you a completely different perspective.
This helps you understand not just how you operate, but when you operate well and when things tend to fall apart. This is a really important piece of the puzzle and you continuing to be able to show up with energy, with presence and how you want in a way that you’ve identified in previous weeks. So what I want you to do is I want you to take a moment and I want you to look at the year ahead. Have a think about when are your busiest periods with work?
When are your quieter stretches? When do you typically feel run down or hit the wall? When does life outside of work demand more of you? So take a minute to go over all of those things, whether you wanna pause the episode here or whether you wanna re-listen to it. So once again, you wanna take a moment to look at the entire year ahead. The questions you wanna answer are when are your busiest periods with work? When are the quieter periods?
When do you typically feel run down or hit the wall? And when does life outside of work with family, with friends, depending on what that looks like for you? But when does life outside of work demand more of you? Maybe it’s the school holidays. Whatever that is, let’s have that all mapped out. So we’ve got visibility. So we’ve zoomed out and we’ve got a 360 degree look at the year. Because when you do this,
This is what being proactive looks like. And this is how we start to build in proactive recovery. Because what this is not about is it’s not about waiting until you’re exhausted. It is about getting ahead of the curve. And so we’re proactively taking breaks and we’ve got different strategies we implement rather than taking the burnout vacation, rather than running ourselves into the ground and then thinking, I need to take some time off.
Jess Spendlove (02:31.682)
And now look, I’m gonna be completely honest with you. A lot of this went out the window for me last year. You I was a new mom, I was running a business and there was a lot of surviving and not much rhythm or not as much rhythm as I would typically like or need. But the truth is it is what it is. But this year, I want to do this better and I know that I can do this better. And this is not comparing it to a previous version of myself before I became a mom.
but this is thinking about, what have I learned in the years gone by? What am I putting into place this year? What do I need? Really importantly to answer that question, what do I need? And then start with taking more time now to map out the year with intention. That is the great thing about this time of the year, whether you’ve gone back to work, even if you have, things will be a little bit slower. And if you’re still on break like I am, I’m currently taking the longest break I’ve ever taken in my entire career.
And part of that is a byproduct of I honestly needed it. am at the end of last year, I was exhausted. And you know, the way that this showed up for me was I was needing to do more things to get myself back to a baseline. And then that battery level was draining a lot quicker than normally it would. And then when I looked back, I was like, okay. Like day to day, I’ve had my brain breaks and week to week, I’ve had my weekly strategies.
but then the rest of the year has just been really a flat line. It’s been working and being a mum and there hasn’t been much intentional break in there. And it’s really important that your yearly rhythm, which is what I’m reflecting on and going to be putting into place, includes both work and life. These things are not in isolation, they are integrated because each of those things affect the other more than most people like to admit.
And again, this is why we’ve got the calendar out, we’ve got the diary out, we’re starting to think about the things we need day to day and week to week, but we need to use our diary and what we know about our year to help plan this. This doesn’t mean every detail needs to be locked in, life moves, we’re being agile, things shift. But having visibility gives you a structure that supports you instead of drains you.
Jess Spendlove (04:54.24)
Again, this is another kind of extension of this building your operating system. Having an annual recovery plan is a really important part of that recovery system, a really important part of that operating system. And the truth is you’re far more likely to follow through when you set it up while you’re fresh, rather than when you’re depleted and you’re coming from this exhausted reactive state. Now I had a client last year who did this exercise and it changed everything.
we started to map out the school holidays and her industry peak periods and the workload of a new course she was studying. And all of a sudden she could see the rhythm of her whole year. And this visibility gave back her control. And what it did was it allowed her to see when she needed to put in some downtime to either prepare for the busy season and or recover. And it also allowed her to see when she could commit to more things outside of potentially those work commitments and family commitments.
and when she had to be really protective of the boundaries and her time. This is the difference between living proactively and living reactively. And I know how both feel. And I much prefer to be living in alignment and with a rhythm. And I know every single person who’s out of move to this way of operating also prefers that as well. It’s just finding a way, finding the time and the space and to do it in a way that is realistic for their life. And so for me,
This year’s plan is simple. Well, simple in theory. I’m going in with the best intentions. But other than the daily and the weekly things, which for me, I’ve got in place pretty good, each month I’m going to take a long weekend. Now, Fridays are my milli days. So that kind of makes that a little bit easier for me. But I have to be honest, most Fridays I find I’m sneaking into the office to do emails or a project work or take a call when she’s sleeping and that needs to stop.
So I’m going to be really strict and more protective with that. And I’m also going to be thinking about, how can I actually put that into place? I live in Sydney, but how can I be a tourist in my own city? Maybe I can do a day trip to Palm beach, or maybe I can do an overnight somewhere close, like an hour or so away. Or how can I be a tourist in my own city? You know, I get the ferry to Manly a lot, but I never get the ferry to Watson’s Bay. Can I do different kinds of activities like that?
Jess Spendlove (07:18.412)
And so I’d encourage you to think about that. What do you need? And then outside of that, long weekend, a month that I’m going to strategically take, I’m going to operate in an eight to nine week cycle where I do an eight week work block. And then I have a down week in that ninth week. Now that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to be completely off work, but it’s going to be a minimum viable week. Hopefully I can go away, but you know, there’s a lot of factors there in terms of
finances in terms of energy, in terms of what my partner’s able to do, so you know, TBC on exactly what I’ll be doing, but I’m definitely looking ahead and I’ve got my dates in my diary on what that eight week work block looks like and then that ninth week of a down week. And the other thing I’m going to be doing, and I feel like this is a byproduct of having worked in professional sport for over a decade, is making the most of the long weekends that we actually have and the public holidays.
I feel like for me personally, everyone, roll around and I’m kind of surprised by it and I haven’t planned anything and then I’m not making the most of it. Whereas I’m using this time in the break to look ahead, to have them in the diary and really make the most of that time. So I can really use that for its full potential from a reset and a recovery perspective. And so maybe for yourself, if that’s similar, if they kind of creep up on you and you don’t make the most of them.
Use this time now while you’re zooming out across your ear to have that in there. It’s really having these small things that help you stay aligned rather than drained. And so your reset this week is about mapping out your rhythm. Your year will feel completely different when you know what’s coming. And this will really help you move in a way that feels more aligned, more energized and
also help you get more out of the time that you have because then you’re taking that rest and that reset to recover. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’ll be back again next week with another reset episode.