Your Work Is Not Your Life

You can do things differently. You can define success for yourself in a way that accounts for your whole self and wellbeing and not just the work you do for others.

You don’t have to be grinding and hustling every hour of every day. Being burned out is not a badge of honor.

It is possible to work in a way that creates and respects boundaries and gives you the capacity to be present in all the parts of your life, in your career, and at home.

Jordan Gill joins Erica for a conversation about VIP days and how implementing them has supported both their businesses and their lives.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

• How VIP days create natural boundaries for you and your work

• How VIP days allow you to be more present for your clients and in your life

• How VIP days support you in your Imperfect Allyship®

• Why you need to stop apologizing for what you need to be great

Systems for Service Providers

Jordan Gill, operations consultant and founder of Systems Saved Me, helps burned-out service providers replace their monthly retainers to virtual VIP Days. Her program Done In a Day™ has supported over 270 students to create and sell their first VIP Days. She also has a podcast called Systems Saved Me with over 300 episodes all about how business owners navigate success with systems - of course! She currently lives in Dallas, TX, with her cavapoo Vivienne and collection of 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles.

An Intentional Journey

On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Jordan Gill defines how VIP days work for her team as a minimum four-figure offering that lasts three to eight hours and leads a client through a transformative system or process.

“A VIP day is about an intentional journey that you’re taking somebody on…It is. I’m going to lay out the yellow brick road, and we’re going to go…down it together, and we’ll get an end result at the end.”

A VIP day takes a process, like, for example, website design, that could be spread out over several months and distills it down to one day.

Jordan says that while people in some industries think they couldn’t possibly pare down their projects to one day, she has witnessed VIP days work for a broad range of businesses.

One of the key reasons why they can work for anyone is that they eliminate things like rescheduled calls, missing information, and other delays or confusion points. The client has to arrive to the VIP day with a certain amount of pre-work done that might have otherwise been spread out over the course of a contract.

“There is no VIP day unless they do the pre-work.”

A VIP day also creates natural boundaries for you and for your clients.

“With VIP days, I’ve just found that the beauty of boundaries is already set up in your favor, that the items and things that you have to address during long-term offers literally become obsolete with a VIP day, which is really beautiful and wonderful.”

Even for transformations that, by their nature, have to happen over a period of time, as with some kinds of coaching, she says that VIP days can be useful as a qualifying event to ensure that the client is a good long-term fit.

“It allows for that kind of gatekeeping for you to work with those clients that you really love and enjoy and you want to work with long-term, and then with the others, you can bless and release and have them go their own separate way.”

Erica adds that too often, people are afraid that if they set boundaries, they will lose clients and money. “And I think that that’s a lie that we give ourselves to be boundaryless.”

She continues, “Really figuring out how to set things up for what you need and the way that you need them and being clear about that and making sure that everybody’s energy and outcomes are being respected and considered, I think it makes a huge difference.”

Transform Your Relationship to Your Business

Implementing VIP days has the power to be transformative for business owners, not just to their clients.

Erica says, “I found that with VIP days, it allows you and encourages you to remember why in the heck you even started your business in the first place.” 

Jordan agrees that “VIP days are a reflection of one of my most important values, which is presence.”

She says that the VIP day model allows her to be diligent about the energy that she spends and to be able to focus on who or what is in front of her, both at work and in her home life.

“With VIP days, I’m fully focused on my VIP day client. And then when I’m off, I’m fully focused on my own self-care and my family.”

Since she started sharing her method with others, she’s seen her clients’ lives change, from funding their dream wedding or going cross country camping to simply being able to pick up their kids from school every day or being able to act as a caregiver to aging parents.

“It brings you back to what’s important…It’s just as important to be than it is to just be producing.”

The Opportunity to Engage in Imperfect Allyship®

Jordan says that VIP days also offer an opportunity to engage in Imperfect Allyship® because while the offer itself is high ticket and is not financially accessible to everyone, the time that VIP days free up can be used to engage in allyship, whether that’s offering free content or volunteering in your community.

“Your VIP day is not for everyone. However, it allows you the time and the financial freedom to have more space in your days, weeks, months to help those who don’t have the same privileges as you.”

In her business, Jordan says that as a biracial woman, “it’s always been top of mind for myself to really be able to create rooms of people who do not look like each other, who come from different backgrounds, who have different perspectives and lenses.”

And she recalls when she was given an opportunity to do better in that commitment when the speaker roster for a summit she hosted lacked diversity, and she was called in on it in her DMs.

“I say I’m grateful because as somebody who this is extremely important to me, I made a mistake…I apologized publicly to my Instagram and to my email list…and I vowed to do better.”

In the years since that summit, she and her team have worked to make their lineups more diverse at the summits they host, as well as within their communities and their programs. 

“I…want to come to the table with, you know, even as somebody who, again, is a woman of color, I've made mistakes in this area as well, and I’m imperfect as well. And yet I’m still continuing to show up, and I’m continuing to create the environments and the communities that I want to have that are diverse and that showcase different perspectives and experiences and lives.”

She continues that for those, like herself, with perfectionist tendencies, showing up imperfectly can be difficult. “But it’s better for you to try and to show up anyway versus cowering in the fears of ‘I could have been called out.’”

Recognize What You Need to Be Great

In our current moment, there are a lot of factors that lead to burnout in life and at work.

And while life and work stressors often overlap, Jordan says, “in business, I think it’s time for us to stop apologizing for what we need to be.”

As an example, she says that for her, due to chronic fatigue, she finds mornings difficult, and rather than apologizing for needing to work in the afternoon, “instead, it’s like, if you want my best, here are the hours that you can have my best…You’re actually not doing somebody a favor by not honoring what you need.”

She continues, “Instead of apologizing and feeling like your boundaries and what you need to be great is a deterrent for people or makes other people have to compromise or puts them in a bad position, it’s actually the opposite.”

Jordan says that recognizing what you need to be excellent and holding those boundaries helps minimize the risk of experiencing burnout.

“I think that the more business owners get to know themselves and what makes them great, the better overall experience the clients will have as well…It has to be a win-win for both parties, in my opinion; otherwise, it’s a no.”

To honor your limits and boundaries and minimize burnout, Jordan says to “think about something that you need in order to be excellent and ensure that you take steps in order for that to start to come to fruition.”

Ready to Dive Deeper?

Getting clear on your values helps you understand and recognize what you need in order to be the most effective version of yourself in your business and in your life.

To be in alignment with what matters to you and why, so you can chart a course that prioritizes your values and the impact you want to create, you need to be explicit about those values.

If you want support in getting clarity on what you support and how your actions are aligned with that, sign up for the Implicit to Explicit Masterclass.

Learn more about leading through your values at pauseontheplay.com/explicit.

Connect with Jordan Gill:

• Systems Saved Me

• Instagram: @SystemsSavedMe