You booked the trip. You set the out-of-office. You gave your team a heads-up and told everyone, “I’ll be offline.” So why’s your laptop still tucked into your bag - you know, “just in case”? Why are you sneaking peeks at Slack in the hotel lobby before dinner, right after breakfast, on the beach, even in the bathroom? Why does this still feel... well, [...]
Business owners often ask me what it REALLY means to have your team working in their Zone of Genius. If this is your first introduction to the concept, here’s the quick version: Your Zone of Genius is the intersection of: What you LOVE to do What you’re REALLY good at What moves the business forward The goal is for everyone in the organization to [...]
Ever feel like you’re juggling a hundred things, but barely moving forward? That’s the trap of being a “Chief Everything Officer”. It’s the quickest path to burnout and a surefire way to keep your business stuck in the weeds. I saw this firsthand with a nonprofit CEO I worked with. She was talented, driven, and committed to her mission. But she was also buried [...]
I’ll be honest—sometimes I catch myself firing off a quick “Thanks!” text to a client and convincing myself that counts as staying connected. Just last week, I replied to three client messages with “Sounds good!” while getting in my afternoon walk. That was my big moment of “connection” for the day. Yikes. Over the past few months, I’ve been having a lot of conversations [...]
Is your to-do list growing faster than your business? The constant juggling and the perpetual overwhelm can be frustrating. Your business success should be a source of fulfillment, not a personal sacrifice. One way to reclaim your time and life is to lean into the mantra that just because you are the business owner, it doesn’t mean you need to own everything! However, how [...]
Running a business can be like juggling a thousand priorities. One of the biggest challenges I see business owners face is making changes without fully thinking them through strategically. Not because they don’t want to—but because they're balancing: Strategic thinking. Tactical implementation. … And the daily whirlwind of . . . duh . . . running their business 🙂 Timelines, resources, and urgency [...]
How often do you jump in at the last minute to fix something your team was supposed to handle? It’s frustrating—and exhausting. And it just reinforces that mantra you’ve been mumbling under your breath: “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” But if you don’t step in, you risk missed deadlines, unhappy clients, and rushed work. You can’t keep running your business [...]
All the business owners I work with face the challenge of having “more work than time”. No matter what they do - they just seem to run out of time by the end of the day. For some, this is a new experience brought on by an employee leaving causing five people to now do the work of six. Or a large contract vastly [...]
What would you do if you only had 4,000 weeks to enjoy all that life has to offer? This “number” - 4,000 weeks (or about 80 years) - was not something I thought about until I read “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman. But even as I started reading the book, the full impact of that sentence didn’t hit me [...]
One of my favorite productivity writers is Chris Bailey. In April 2023 the HBR printed an article written by Chris titled, A Two-Minute Burnout Checkup. Here’s a summary: Burnout is the result of chronic stress and, at work, that stress tends accumulate around your experiences of workload, values, reward, control, fairness, and community. If any are lacking or out of sync, you may be [...]
