Want More Pay? Take a Snowy Day
By Dr. Jayne Gardner

Remember as a child waking up on a school day and seeing the snow that had fallen during the night? That sudden surge of joy, that feeling of freedom when you heard “Due to inclement weather there will be no school today.” Yea! I grew up in Texas and snow was rare! A Snow Day meant rushing around searching closets, looking for warm gloves, scarves, and earmuffs, the things we had not used since the last time it snowed. A Snow Day meant racing outside to touch it, to feel it, and to see how the snow had changed our backyard. A Snow Day meant meeting my friends and exploring the neighborhood and stomping through the white dust.

How would you like to feel that freedom – that joy again? What a relief to know you did not have to meet the responsibilities of a normal workday. All of us long for some down-time, a change of pace, the freedom to just lounge around, piddle through some magazines, build a fire, watch a movie.

Ah, down-time – the white space on your schedule – free time to do whatever your heart desires, go wherever it leads.

Appealing? Well, you may need a “Snow Day” a day to rejuvenate your sprit in order to meet the demands of tomorrow’s “to do” list.

The desire to take a day off may actually be an opportunity to make more money, be more productive at work, and ultimately increase the profitability of your company! When coaching executives, I find most of them are occupied with quality control, time lines, and deadlines – too preoccupied to realize that work harder is not always smarter – the life they are creating is not the life they set out to live.

It is time for a paradigm shift! The ultimate goal of coaching an executive or an entrepreneur is always to raise the bottom line, however, the “bottom line” is just a measurable result of energy and passion you felt on that first day, sitting around the kitchen table with your partner brainstorming. The ideas were flowing freely with the passion, the excitement, the courage to risk something new – that’s why the idea worked! Passion and excitement get lost in the mind focused on work and production 24-7. That same courage and passion are just waiting to break free and run outside! Build that snowman! Throw that snowball! Take a Snow Day!

Schedule a day just for you – a day to do nothing productive or responsible, in order to be more productive and responsible the next day. It may not be as easy as it was in your childhood, when you knew, the minute you saw that snow, exactly what you wanted to do. At first, an adult Snow day may blind you with its whiteness, its sense of emptiness. But, if you just blink a couple of times, your eyes will adjust quickly to the white spaces on your calendar. On your Snow Day, call a friend to play with you – build a fire – read a good book. Paint that picture. Play that piano. Ride your bicycle. Putter in the garden. Please yourself, for a day.

You will find the results to be staggeringly productive.

Bill owns his own franchise and he tells me he “thinks” about his business every hour of every day. He also tells me his doctor has told him to slow down and his wife tells him to simmer down. His emotions are out of control and his sleep is interrupted by nightmares of higher overhead costs and lower profits.

He agreed to take one day off each week for a month as an experiment in his coaching. The first Snow Day, he decided to take two extra sleeping hours! He happily spent the second Snow Day on the golf course. Fishing was the activity of choice on his third Snow Day. When the fourth Snow Day came around, he asked his wife to take the afternoon off and stay at home with him. She did, and they pretended they were snowed in.

Results?  Happier employer. Happier employees. Happier wife. Happier children. The bank balance? Well, the day after he chose to go fishing, he was sitting in a meeting with his CFO when the answer to a quality control problem came to him, which will eventually save the company thousands of dollars. After the third Snow Day, his employee surprised him with a sign over his office door, reading “welcome back. Take more time off, Boss!”

After the last Snow Day of our experiment, realized that instead of his usual attitude of “dreading to see what problems the day will bring, “ he was now eager to get to work each day.

Look out the window tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off. Pretend the ground is covered with white stuff.