The Power of Rest| Jun 4, 2024 001

Tucker Martin (00:01)
Y 'all ever heard that rest can be productive? That was something I struggled with actually understanding for a very long time and that's what we're going to cover today on the podcast. Welcome to the Ranch Ramblin podcast. I'm your host, Tucker. I am the cowboy gal behind Ranch Ramblin and I'm just super excited that you're here. This podcast is intended to be a place where rural

women, ranch women, cowboy gals, ranch mamas, whatever hat you wear. It's a place where we can get together, encourage and inspire each other, educate each other, share our stories and, you know, find that thing that makes us who we are and gives us, you know, joy. Find that thing for you. So, with that, I just want to...

preface with a little bit of housekeeping.

I am so excited for this launch that's coming up. It has been, if I'm being entirely honest, pretty intense for me to sit down and focus and, you know, identify my goals and what my objectives and what I want to do with this.

thing that's coming up and that's taken, it's kind of stretched me a little bit which I love. That's part of the reason I feel like I was pulled to do that. But anyways, I'm so excited. Again, I'm not quite ready to release details yet but I'm super super pumped. Be sure that you send me your email so you can hear about this and

Anyways, with that, I want to cover this topic of productive rest. So as I have been putting together this stuff,

been kind of intense as far as identifying the direction I want to go and then how I want to get there and what I want to provide and the services that I can offer.

What I found was I was pushing myself. like, and I, I find this a pattern in my own life. And so I'm sure a lot of you that are listening can relate to this, but I find myself going so hard because I want to, I want to make the progress, right? So I push myself a little too hard. And then what ends up happening is there's burnout. You lose the creative, spark.

It's a lot harder to sit down and focus and brainstorm and put quality into your work. Whatever it is that you're doing. I felt this with my mohair business. That's why I'm not building for the public right now. There's value in rest, you guys. And rest does not equate to laziness. It doesn't equate to being unproductive. What it means is that you understand your limits and you...

push your limits enough for that growth, but too much of that ends in burnout. And when you're burnt out, again, you lack the quality. It's not enjoyable. The thing that you started doing because you absolutely loved it and, and enjoyed doing the thing becomes very unenjoyable. And I think there's a way to.

Push yourself still and, and you know, there are certain times in life you just have to power through and I'm not saying to not do that. You've got to be tough. You've got to be disciplined and persist and be consistent. But that does not mean to push yourself beyond your breaking point. That means push yourself beyond your bending point because otherwise you never grow. You never progress.

without that stretch. You've got to stretch into that discomfort in order to gain the strength and the flexibility and you know all these things. If you just want to compare it to exercising or you know anything like that just with like your physical health. If you're wanting to strength train you only build muscle by

you know, fatiguing some of your muscle fibers where they have to repair themselves and then they... you become stronger and you do that teeny bits at a time. You don't... you can't, you know, rupture your muscle and be like, yeah, but when it heals I'm gonna be so strong. It's not... it's not like that. They're teeny tiny. You push yourself beyond what you thought you could do repeatedly and after a period of time, all of a sudden, you're...

Fatigue point is a lot stronger than your fatigue point was four weeks ago, six weeks ago, eight weeks ago. Your mind's the same way. And, you know, I like to think about, about this comparison too, cause I, I work with a lot of young horses and whether they're young horses or not, the same principle applies, but it's, it's a little more stark to observe with a young horse and.

And so you've got this, you know, maybe a yearling that you're halter breaking, or a two year old that you're starting under the saddle or a three year old that you're starting under the saddle. Their mind is, what we're doing is completely new to them. You know, it's a new concept. They are naturally prey animals and we are predators. And so what we're asking them to do is trust the species that would.

essentially take them down, right? And so as you go through this process of training your horse, starting your horse, whether your halter breaking or starting under saddle, or just teaching something new, you know, advancing the training, you've got to, you know, you watch this horse and you see, and you realize that he's starting to slip into that.

you know, maybe overwhelm or he's like trying to process everything to where anything you teach from this point on is going to be actually help you go backwards instead of help you go forwards. Right. And I think any of you that have, I'm not explaining that very good. I'm not a clinician. but I think you all know this, this principle. You've probably all seen it at some point where you can be gaining, gaining, gaining. And then if you push that horse a little bit too far, you all of a sudden just undid the last.

you know, handful of sessions that you worked to make so much good progress on. And so you've got to learn to read that horse and find where that stopping point is, right? You always want to end where, where they're, it's cliche, but end on a good note, you know, and you want to end where they're processing and they're thinking, and they're like, man, this is cool. And I like this and I want more. And.

There are times when you can push them a little bit past that, but there's times when you shouldn't as well. And learning to read that is what enables you as the trainer or as the horse winner, as the rider to either continue to add value to your horse or you then begin to drag your horse down to your level. And we're the same way as that little two -year -old colt, right?

If you're working on yourself continually, you're always stepping into things or experiences or feelings that you've never had to undertake before. You're stretching into that discomfort. And so if you push yourself beyond that point of benefit and learning and progress, you can sometimes throw yourself into a negative spiral. And that's what we, you need to, you know, look at.

look at your personality and know your strengths, know your weaknesses and find in the middle of that that sweet spot of stretching and growing and then know when to give yourself a break and back off the pressure, give yourself some grace and then start again tomorrow. So this has been on my mind as I've been putting together this

new thing that I'm launching and, that's been so valuable. And so I felt like I wanted to mention it here on the podcast. And then again, it's going to show up, you know, later, I feel because I think that sometimes we wear the. Busyness, the exhaustion, the, you know, I'm going hard.

as a badge of honor. And I remember a couple of years ago, Amy and I were driving somewhere and we got talking about this where I was like, I was kind of having a personal breakthrough around, you know, mindset and how the way you think about things kind of, it affects the outcome of the stuff. And I was like, this is such an interesting concept for me because...

all growing up and even now it's like, you know, I, I like, I'm tough. I'm tough. And that's like a matter of pride. I'm like, my family is a tough family. Like, you know, we can, we can hang until the very last thing is done and outlast a lot of other people with a lot of things.

And that's always been a matter of pride growing up through a number of generations, actually. And so that's been something that's like, no, like, you know, we're this, we're mentally strong. Like, I can mind over matter a lot of stuff. And just because you can doesn't mean you should. And just because you are tough doesn't mean you have to be tough all the time. And...

So as we were telling ourselves, like this was a particular example for me, that it's like, no, I'm tough, I'm tough, I'm tough. Then you like, kinda end up putting yourself in these situations where you have to be tough all the time. Which, you know, I'm not diminishing, I'm not diminishing that trait because I think you've gotta have some tenacity to survive and to be successful and...

part of that aspect of tenacity is being tough. But I think along with that, that doesn't mean you have to be tough every second of every day of everything you undertake. It's okay to rest. That doesn't make you any less able to handle the difficulties. And I think that's where that clarity came for me was like, yes, our family is tough because we have handled XYZ over the years. And you can think of this situation and that situation and times in

In my particular life, growing up cowboying with my dad and following him behind the hounds and physically hiking my butt off and freezing and it's so cold or else vice versa, you're following the cows. You probably shouldn't be working the cows at this time of the day and you end up on some goose chase and you and your horse are absolutely spent and it's hot and you've got to dig deep and find that.

that toughness. And so that don't ever diminish your ability to handle those types of circumstances. But you don't have to put yourself in circumstances to prove that to everybody. And, and I think that that's a cool thing to remember is that,

as we're perceiving things, as we go through life, just because somebody doesn't observe what you're doing, or maybe...

Taking that step back and that break doesn't mean that you couldn't have continued on. You could have pushed through.

but you're choosing not to because you are then more valuable, more effective, more present. There's more quality in your work. If you can take a break for a day, two days, couple weeks, couple months, whatever the situation is, you know, you got to adapt that way. But whatever that looks like for your particular situation, do it and then come back and go hard and dig deep and find that tenacity and, you know, utilize.

that that strength and that toughness and that you know those things that are your that are your strong points and push through the ones that are your weak spots but amid all that there's power in an intentional rest and the other thing that i want to point out is i've got dogs and children and whatnot right here anyways the other thing i want to point out is that

Just because you're taking a rest or you're taking a break to regroup, you know, kind of let some fresh air around the idea or the concept or whatever that you're doing doesn't mean that progress is halted. Sometimes that break allows you to have fresh eyes, you know, and kind of a clean slate when you come back to work and maybe stepping back.

and taking that break in somewhere where you feel like you've hit a wall. Sometimes that can help break that wall down because when you take the pressure off of that particular objective and kind of let go of the, not the expectation, but let go of the unrealistic pressure that you feel around this particular thing. And...

Put your energy somewhere else. A lot of times, you'll find the answers to that wall. You'll find the tools to break that down while you're working on something else because you let go of the timeline on that expectation. You're like, and so I find that a lot if I'm working on a written piece or...

you know, trying to figure out some organization behind something or, you know, find a solution and I hit a wall. If I just shelf it for a second and purposely tell myself like, look, it's okay. Like, this isn't meant to be on my timeline. There's a bigger timeline at work right here. Everything happens for a reason. You know, like I say, I'm a praying person. Say a little prayer about it and then walk away. And...

And then when you begin focusing on that other thing, so a lot of times for me that happens to go through that process. And I'm like, you know what? And I've got to work my horses today. I work my horses every day anyways. But when I come back and I'm working on my horses and I solely focus on this little filly that I'm halter breaking or solely focus on, you know, my, my roping or my riding my own horse and making him better or.

whatever this is, all of a sudden it's like boom, the dam breaks and you've got all the inspiration and it fell into place on how it was supposed to. And I whip out my phone and write down everything that comes to me. And then again, shelf it and continue with what I'm doing. And then when you go back, then it's like, wow, look, all this came to me, blah, blah, blah. And it's just, like I said, basically like the dam broke.

and you can just sit down and hammer whatever that was that had just dumped, just hammer it out. And so that works on a small scale and a big scale. And I just think that's a really cool thing to keep in mind as we go about our lives, is rest doesn't mean you're lazy, and rest doesn't look like doing nothing. Sometimes it just means shelving the project, putting the idea to the back of your mind.

Quit hammering on it so hard and go focus on something else. Let go of your timeline for what you anticipate happening because the timeline doesn't matter. My favorite phrase is throw away the clock. If you're working with horses, if you're trying to, you know, build something or create something, the clock, all the clock does, all that timeline does is jam things up. So throw away the clock, you guys.

Give yourself some grace, allow yourself to rest and understand that that rest is actually so much more productive than you could anticipate. And once you start trying to employ that and practice it here and there on smaller scales, you're going to realize the effect it has long -term, large scale with everything that you're doing. And so.

That's my ramblin for today. Just to summarize some of the housekeeping, please leave me your emails. Send me your emails to tmranchramblin at gmail .com. So I can put you on the list to be the first to hear about the launch. This is going to be really cool geared specifically for the rural women, ranch women.

and ranch moms. And...

You know, I'm just so excited to be able to offer this. And again, I'm not quite ready to, to announce all the stuff yet, but, this is going to be really valuable, super cool. And, and if you're listening here, it's for you. So, send me your emails so I can be sure that you hear about that.

And then be sure that you're following me on social media. It's just my personal Facebook page, Tucker Martens. And then my Instagram is tm .ranch .ramblin. And that is where a lot of my announcements and whatnot happen, except for my email list. My email list always hears everything first. So shoot me that email. I'll get you added and that way you don't get left out of anything.

I'm super stoked for what's to come. You guys.

So thank you so much for hanging with me You guys are awesome. I have found things through this podcast in myself that I didn't know were there. I have found passions I didn't know were there.

I have made friends I never would have had and I just, I appreciate you guys so much because the friends that I'm making through this endeavor are lifelong and that will never change. So hang out and be sure that you're subscribed So thank you guys and catch you later.