Most of us find ourselves in the typical entrepreneurial Catch-22. If business is on the upswing, you’re working long hours to meet deadlines and keep customers happy. If business is shaky, you spend as many or more hours just trying to find new solutions to bring business up. Yet, whether you are struggling to revive a sluggish bottom line or trying to keep up with an unplanned surge of customer demands, you need to take a step back, reassess your challenges and make room for the solutions to come to you instead of you trying to find them.

What the heck does THAT mean?

It means that your mind, your business day and your life have become so crammed with day-to-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute worries about NOT finding the “glue” to hold things together that there’s no room to allow your creative, natural instinct for resolve to get through.

You’ve buried your can-do attitude under a pile of can’t-do excuses.

Let me ask you this …

Have you ever wrestled with trying to remember the name of a person or a place and the harder you think about it, you just can’t come up with the name? You get all around it … you can name that person’s spouse and kids, recall how you first met, where you were at the time and, perhaps, be able to give a perfect recitation of your first conversation. But you can’t remember that person’s name!

Then, suddenly later that day as you’re watching the news or reading a book, or in the middle of the night … voila! The name comes to you out of nowhere.

Now think about how this same of concept of distraction applies in your own business …. You solve your clients’ problems every day, yet, your own seem to be building a barrier between you and your next step forward. That’s because you are detached from your client’s biggest problems but you are engulfed by your own. You bring new perspective to your clients’ problems; you bring only your own emotional perspective to your own.

It’s time to create a PURPOSEFUL distraction (a.k.a. take a vacation) to challenge your business perspective. I like to call this “positive vacationing” because a vacation from business-as-usual usually results in new and positive revelations on how to conquer the challenges that previously seemed monumental.

Here’s an example of how the power of positive vacationing has worked for me.

The last vacation my husband and I took was to the coast of Maine. I came back with two new book ideas and a marketing strategy for one of my clients that brought in phenomenal business for her grand opening.

The book ideas were sparked by a casual conversation I had with the owner of a small restaurant we visited for a late afternoon lunch. The marketing strategy was the result of putting a new twist on a tactic I noticed being used in a newspaper ad by a small coastal retail shop.

My husband came home with a new idea on how to expand his business. Yup, you guessed it — another inspiration from “purposeful distraction”. While taking a foot tour of a quaint coastal town, he noticed the signage on one of the Main Street storefronts and an add-on service idea for his own business just popped into his head.

Just as importantly, we both came back with gorgeous photographs taken while driving from Bar Harbor to Kennibunkport and the taste of fresh Maine lobster still in our mouths. Other benefits?

• We spent valuable time together away from home and business.
• We’re more interesting to our friends and family because we have more than just business to talk about when we get together.
• We’re more energized and interested in our clients and our businesses.
• We both found solutions to some challenging aspects of our individual businesses without even looking for them.

Set the stage to reenergize your business using purposeful distraction — take a vacation. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, expensive or even very far away. And it can even be a working vacation if you set some ground rules.

Your reenergized spirit will show in the way you feel about yourself, relate to your family, and treat your clients, employees, associates and vendors.