Mental Health System
"I need a vacation." That is one of the most common phrases you'll hear from a working class business owner. Even if they doubt the vacation will actually come, they'll still say it. Most barbers design their lives with work as the cornerstone. They make their professional responsibilities the priority, even while telling everyone that their family and their hobbies matter most.
The brain needs a default. When you train it to treat work as the default, it forgets how to play. That is why in the SelfSync System, we design the personal parts of life first. What time do you like to wake up? How many hours of work make you feel productive? When do you prefer to eat dinner or wind down for bed? What is the best day for you to pursue your hobbies? Once you have answered questions like these, you build your income-generating schedule around them, not the other way around.
When you are living in your flow and getting to experience the things that fuel you, you bring more to your work. You are more engaged, more creative, and more productive. When professional demands come first and personal pleasures come from whatever is left over, burnout follows. And recovering from burnout takes far longer than the rest you skipped to get ahead.
In the SelfSync System, we work with clients at three levels: recovery, maintenance, and prevention. Once you reach prevention, you should be able to stay there. Think of it like a broken arm. You wear the cast in recovery, the sling during maintenance, and once you are healed your focus shifts to staying healthy. Prevention is the goal because that is where prosperity lives.
When you wake up when you want, go to bed when you are ready, and build your schedule around what fuels you, that is a designed life. As long as you are earning what your lifestyle requires, you will feel prosperous, healthy, and at peace.
Answer these four questions today to see how close or far you are from your ideal lifestyle.
- What time would I prefer to wake up feeling refreshed?
- What time would I prefer to go to bed so I am at my best in the morning?
- When I am not working, what would I like to do more of?
- Where would I like to go on my next vacation?
Money System
Earlier I said, "as long as you are earning what your lifestyle requires, you will feel prosperous." We need to talk more about this.
Designing your lifestyle the way you want means you don't need to say "I need a vacation," mainly because your vacations are already planned and baked into your life. You decide whether you go annually, semi-annually, quarterly, or monthly. You have one life with two parts; personal and professional. They both require a certain amount of time, energy and money.
With planning and discipline in each of those areas, this formula becomes your standard way of operating. Vacations become part of your life. Phase one of the SelfSync System, the Vision Phase, is where we determine what your version of prosperity actually looks like and what it will cost to live it.
You'll discover things you may have forgotten were important to you. The Vision Phase pushes you to look at what the life you want actually costs, and cost is not the same as price. Your lifestyle has dollar amounts attached to it, but it also has timeframes and monetary gaps. If you want four weeks of vacation each year, you are not earning for 52 weeks. You are earning for 48. That gap has to be planned for.
Here is what that looks like in practice. If your Vision Session reveals that your lifestyle costs $150,000 a year, that breaks down to roughly $12,500 per month. If you take four weeks off, you still owe yourself that $12,500 for the month you are away. That means you need to earn roughly $1,000 more each month, about $13,500, during the 48 weeks you are working so that you can save it. This way you fill the gap that your brain will feel while you are off.
The Money Cycle is Earn, Grow, Protect, Gift, and Enjoy your money. That $13,500 has to stretch across all five parts. It needs to account for taxes, retirement savings, the right coverage to protect what you build, and if you give to people or causes you care about, that is in there too. Household bills and vacations fall under Enjoy, and Enjoy comes last in the cycle, not right after you earn it.
To reach $13,500 a month without burning out, you need to be earning roughly $85 an hour in a 40 hour week. We will go deeper on the Money Cycle and planning this system in the coming weeks. For now, hold that number and let it start working on you.
Think about your number. Is it higher or lower than $150,000 a year?
Business System
If $85 an hour sounds out of reach, it is probably because you are picturing it all coming from your chair. That's limited thinking. And even if you are already charging that rate or already bringing in $13,500 a month, you may still feel like a vacation is impossible.
That usually comes down to one of three things.
You are so programmed to the idea of hard work that you don't even consider the idea of a vacation. You are not planning your finances in advance, so you are always running behind your money. Or you are overworking and afraid to stop because you believe the money stops when you do. Your business depends entirely on your cutting hours and you have hit the income ceiling for the amount of hours you're able to work.
I wrote about this in a previous issue. It was about having what I call "All Day Money," it means you build revenue streams that do not all require your hands on a client's head. I bring this up because, as it relates to your vacation, you can assign one revenue stream the specific job of funding your time off. Products, subscriptions, digital content, and affiliate offers can all run with minimal effort and deposit into your vacation account or expense account no matter what time of day it is.
One example worth considering is a massage chair add-on. This one happens during your working hours but it adds revenue without you doing anything else. A $500 automatic massager gives clients the option of a 15-minute session after their cut or even during their cut or shampoo. It is an upgrade other shops aren't offering, it costs you nothing beyond the initial purchase, and the profit goes straight to your vacation fund.
I have other ideas and I'll share them with you in future issues. But one thing I have to address now is that three things need to be in place before you can step away. You'll need a client communication system, a coverage or appointment buffer plan, and a financial cushion equal to the time you plan to take off.
If you want help designing your plan, I meet with barbers on Mondays for Vision Sessions. By the end of one session, you will know the fastest path to at least one new revenue stream you can start right away. You will also know exactly what your desired lifestyle costs and how close you already are to it.
Take Action This Monday
- Answer the four questions from the Mental Health section above.
- Start identifying the revenue streams you have been sitting on.
- When you are ready to build a real actionable plan, schedule your Vision Session here: everyexpert.com/kine
Did You Know?
In Yoruba tradition in West Africa, the head, called "ori," was not just a vanity thing. It was considered the seat of a man's spiritual intuition, his destiny, and his divine essence. The Yoruba understood ori as the reflective spark of human consciousness, so sacred that it was honored as a deity in its own right. When things went wrong in a man's life, he consulted his ori. When he sought alignment with his purpose, he returned to his ori. Whatever he became and wherever his life led, the Yoruba believed it was destined through his ori.
The barber who groomed the ori (head) was entering sacred space. He was handling the vessel of a man's destiny, his purpose, and his direct connection to the divine. That trust carried real weight in the community. Barbers held elevated status because of this delicate work. They were trusted with something no one else touched, and they were compensated and respected accordingly.
That is the profession you are in. That authority predates your first pair of clippers. Embody it!
From the Chair
If you have any downtime this week, sit in your chair and do some selfcare. Visualize Your Prosperous Life every time you have a break. Visualization is the mind's way of connecting reality with possibility.
Share the Prosperous Barber Journal with a barber you respect. Send them here to subscribe: https://www.prosperousbarber.com/journal
If you are not already subscribed yourself, do it now.
Watch the latest YouTube video and subscribe to the channel while you are there. Your subscription helps keep the journal and every YouTube video I share free. Be sure to check out other "What Keeps You Up At Night" podcast episodes while you're there. This week's video is good, it's a debate about whether barbers should get paid for listening to other people's problems all day. Click below to watch it.
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See you sooner. Love you muchly.
Kiné
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