[00:00:00] Before you sit down to map out your Q2 goals, I want you to stop and ask yourself one question, not what do I need to do more of? Not what new things should I try? Here it is, what do I actually have the capacity to sustain this quarter? Because I have watched so many small business owners build the most beautiful Q2 plans on a version of themselves that doesn't exist currently.

And it's the best case scenario, version of yourself, the version of yourself where you have unlimited energy and zero curve balls in your business or in your life. And then we wonder why we're behind while we're overwhelmed just a few months into a new quarter. This episode is about approaching this differently by really examining what your actual capacity is and aligning your plan to it.

Are you ready to grow? From solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host Rachel Cook, and I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems and support in place to make it happen.

Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way. And practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEO, Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. And if you have been listening the last few episodes with me, then you've done a lot of deeper work here. We've been. Talking about some pretty big topics. We started this series by talking about staying focused when the world is loud, and remembering that your political resistance is, your business is creating.

The better version of business and capitalism that we are all hoping for. And then the last episode, we talked about how to break that starting over cycle with a real planning rhythm and how important that is if you're ever gonna get out of the startup stage in your business. And especially if you are in this.

Range, kind of the messy middle of the low six figures, you know, a hundred to $200,000 in annual revenue, and you're wanting to grow your business, you're wanting to scale it up. You have to find a real planning rhythm, and you have to focus on the systems that will get you where you want to go. And some of you just came out of the CEO retreats that I've been hosting.

Some of you are heading into Q2 with this type of plan in hand for the very first time, and that's exciting. I'm excited for you if that's the case, if this is opening up something new, a new way to look at how you're operating your business and how you're planning rhythm, and how your operations and how these systems all start to come together.

I'm so excited for you because you're laying really strong foundation. This episode today is an important bridge though into Q2. This is a thing I want you to carry into April into quarter 2, 20 26, uh, as a new lens for everything. And it's really starting with questions that most business owners are skipping entirely.

So at the start of every CEO retreat that I host, before we touch on a single goal or look at a single number, I ask everyone to sit with two questions. The first question is, how would CEOU show up in this season of life and business? You might notice I didn't say, how would you show up in Q2? Because it's not just a calendar, right?

The season could be longer than a quarter, could be a year, could be longer. I don't know. I want you to really think about what is the actual season you're living through right now? Are you raising little babies and toddlers or teenagers? Or maybe you're an empty nester. Are you a caregiver for elderly parents or someone else who relies on you?

Is your business brand new or have you been running it for over a decade? All of this really shapes what your personal CEO leadership is gonna look like for you right now. The second big question is, what do you need to show up as this version of CEOU? And really what I'm asking is how are you resourcing yourself?

Because the version of you that shows up fully resourced is going to lead your [00:05:00] business, lead your community, lead your clients, lead your team very differently than the version of you who is depleted and running on empty. Now these questions aren't soft. This is not an optional warmup. This is not a, oh, this is touchy feeling nice to have.

These are some of the most strategic questions you can ask yourself before you plan, because if you skip them, if you skip these questions, you are likely building a plan for a version of yourself that may not be available to you this quarter. Some of us are going through major transitions in our lives.

Some of us have a lot of responsibilities on our plates. Some of us are raising families. Some of us are empty nesters, some of us are caregivers. Understanding the season you're in is going to make such a huge difference because it's really helping you frame the real capacity that you have. So the question of what does CEOU need right now is all about making sure that you are building and protecting the capacity that you truly need to get to where you want to go.

So what does this all mean? How does this all look in real life? This is where I'm gonna share a little inside baseball of. What's been going on in my own world, in my own life, and I'm gonna model this for you by sharing my own answers to these questions. Because of course, as I ask questions like this in the retreat, I'm being very, you know, honest and transparent with folks about what this looks like For me, the person who came up with all of this framework, I think the most useful thing I can do is show you what this looks like in real life, not just as a concept.

So. I was thinking about this before I hosted the most recent CEO retreats in March because I was looking back at the December retreat. You know, we host this retreat every single quarter, March, June, September, December. So in December, when I ran the CEO retreat, I was deep in the middle of caregiving, and I've shared this on the podcast before, but I was deep in the middle of a year of intensive caregiving.

My. Mom was now in hospice. She was in memory care. I had just spent the previous year moving her into memory care and hospice, um, selling her house, moving my dad into senior living, and the decline was very intense. Watching someone with dementia decline is incredibly hard. It's heartbreaking. Um, the person you love is no longer really there.

And. After Thanksgiving, I knew that I didn't have much time left with her. I knew she was, she was no longer talking or speaking, she wasn't eating. She was just having a lot of what was very clearly the last stages of cognitive decline in dementia. So that was the season of life I was in in December. Um, it was taking up the majority of my time and my energy and my emotional capacity.

And anyone who has ever navigated this. I think it's hard maybe to understand how emotionally exhausting it is to navigate, um, even if it wasn't technically taking a ton of your time. It's just the emotional weight of it is very depleting, right? And I'm sharing this because that season of my business had to match that reality, which meant.

My business was not in a scaling it up mode. My business was basically put on cruise control and all of last year it was keep it steady, keep it stable, not going after growth, not doing anything new. We are just following the systems, following the process, keeping things going, taking care of everyone, but not adding more to my plate.

In fact, I had to lean on those systems so that I could prioritize being there with my mom in the last days. So fast forward three months now. My mom has passed. Um, my dad has moved. He decided to move closer to my sister because that's closer to where all of his friends and support system is, and that means the direct, you know, daily, daily caregiving responsibilities are no longer on me.

That's a significant lift. That is huge. Like all of that is off of me. I'm still managing a few things, right? But I went from caregiving to elderly parents and seeing them almost every day to now all of that is off my plate at the same time. I am [00:10:00] navigating grief, and that has taken months for me to even start to feel like myself.

Like I'm just now starting to feel like, and I keep telling friends and family. I'm just now starting to feel like my brain is coming back online, like my creativity is showing up again. I'm getting starting to get excited again, but January. I was not doing much of anything February, I was barely tiptoeing into things.

So it's taken me months to even start to feel like myself. And I remember having a conversation with my therapist about this, um, because I think one of the things I was aware of is that. My personality can very quickly shift to, well, now I have all this bandwidth back. I should just rush right back into growing the business and going after ambition and blah, blah, blah.

Um, but in a therapy conversation with her, we talked about the importance of taking this first six months of the year intentionally about recovery and processing, and not just trying to flip the switch into work mode. Instead easing in. And that's really important because that's not how the nervous system works, right?

That's not how grief works. Trying to treat it like a light switch is I think how a lot of people end up breaking down later. So I'm really grateful that my therapist and I had this conversation. I had kind of already planned that the first quarter, or even first two quarters of this year, I thought I would still be in caregiving mode.

So I hadn't. Planned to have any big changes from the stay steady and stabilize, but I'm very aware of my patterns and of my, you know, desire to achieve things, right? I'm very ambitious, just like a lot of you are, and at the same time, I sometimes have to protect myself from my own ambition and make sure I'm taking care of myself.

It's really easy to, um, kind of bypass the taking care of yourself and giving yourself a chance to be human and have human experiences when you have all these other things that you want to do. And for me, this is more than just grief. This is a big piece of my identity as well. And this was another part of the conversation was, you know, I have never not taken care of my mom.

My mom was in a car accident when I was four years old in 1987. She was in a coma for three months. She was in the hospital for two years, and caregiving has been woven into my entire identity for my entire life. The oldest daughter. So of course I was caregiving mom, always thinking of taking care of my younger sisters that wait has been there so long that.

I kind of stopped noticing it, right? When it's just part of your life and then it's suddenly gone. That's not just a, a schedule change, right? It's not just I can take the 30 hours a week I was spending, taking care of my parents to now just shift that into work mode. This is a massive identity shift for me.

I'm rumbling with it. I'm processing it, right? It's gonna require that time and space to come to grips with again. So how does this relate to my business? It means, yes, I'm in the keep things steady and stable, but this is a recalibration for me. I didn't want to treat. This, like it was a, a light switch, right?

I'm not just switching back over into growth mode, even though that pull is real. My ambitious side, my type A side, my Enneagram three side is very much wanting to, you know, take the reins. So it'd be really easy for me to do that, especially with the vision for what I have and. Like the ideas are starting to come in, which is so exciting.

I can't even tell you after you know how much I had just been through in my life. Your creativity kind of slows down a bit. Your ideas and things you wanna work on slow down a little bit, but now it's all coming back and it's kind of flooding back. So I really have to protect myself from myself a little bit and make sure that I'm not ramping up as fast as possible.

I have to be very intentional. And that means recalibration, keeping the business steady, taking time for myself to reconfigure my vision, because the vision has changed a bit. I thought that my business was gonna have to navigate me [00:15:00] caregiving for the next few years, but that's changed. That changes a lot of things.

It changes the conditions of my life that impact my business. So I'm giving myself some space to figure out what it all is gonna mean and what it looks like before I go full speed. So how does this change how I wanna show up in this season? I wanna show up grounded, rested, patient, present, resilient, relaxed, and resourced.

Nothing is an emergency. There is no rush on anything. I do not have to white knuckle through anything. I can ease into it. So what do I need to resource myself with right now? How am I resourcing myself? Slow, quiet mornings. I am sleeping a lot and sleep has been challenging for me, um, especially with grief, but I'm really allowing myself to sleep as much as I need to.

I am giving myself daily movement, even if it's just walking the dog around the block. I am nesting at home. Meaning I am puttering around my house, making it look cute, making it feel cozy and nice for myself. I am prioritizing time with my friends by making sure it's in the calendar every single month.

My therapist is on standby. Our sessions are scheduled, so right now I'm seeing her at least once a month. My team is handling what my team can handle. I am allowing myself to do things that are just nourishing for me. Even if they have nothing to do with anything else. So my little crafty projects, I am making baby blankets for new babies that are coming into my life and my family.

I'm learning how to play Mahjong. I'm binging some TV shows. Why is this important? None of this is separate from how I lead my business. This is how I lead my business. This is what I need personally, so that I can show up as a CEO who can see clearly. Make clear decisions. So what does this have to do with you and your capacity?

This is the seed I'm trying to plant for what we're gonna talk about even more in April. So just consider this conversation a little bit of a preview. When most people hear the word capacity, I think they, they think about time, they think about their calendar, like, how many hours do I actually have on my calendar?

How many clients can I fit into X number of spots? But I think that is a very limiting view of your capacity. Capacity isn't just time. It is your physical energy. It is what your, your body can actually handle, right. And as someone with chronic illness, I'm hyper aware of the, it's also the cognitive load, how much your brain can handle making decisions before you have literally depleted your ability to make more decisions.

Right? Decision fatigue is real, and a lot of that comes from a cognitive load that is just too much and. When you're just struggling with decision fatigue, you get to a point where you can't make good choices anymore, where you start making poor choices or it's just, I can't make another decision at all.

Right? And it's very easy to find ourselves with that decision fatigue, especially if you're having to make a lot of decisions on the personal front. I remember after my mom passed. I, when I put her in hospice, I looked at my two younger sisters. I had taken on the brunt of navigating all of this, and as soon as we put 'em on hosp, put mom on hospice, I said to them, you all are gonna plan everything that happens after she leaves because I cannot make another decision.

And they did. They handled everything. They're wonderful. But I literally was tapped out. I was not gonna answer a single other question. I said, go talk to my sister. And it's important that you're aware of that, right? Like that limits your capacity if you are having that level of decision fatigue, and you can have exhaustion on decision fatigue on the personal front and just not have any more capacity for the business front, and there's your emotional.

Bandwidth. Right? How much do you have left over after you have shown up for everything else and everyone else that life is asking from you? If you are tapped on the emotional capacity in your personal life, how are you gonna show up as a CEO of your business when you're now having to. Navigate the relationships with other real humans related to your business, your clients, your [00:20:00] community, your team.

Every single relationship that you are interfacing with takes capacity. They're, even if you have, I don't care how they're working with you, even if they're buying something that you are never going to have like a one-to-one conversation with them. If you have to offer any support in any way, like it's gonna take capacity and all three of those are gonna fluctuate.

Your physical energy, your cognitive load, your emotional bandwidth, all of those things fluctuate day to day, week to week, month to month. None of them show up on your calendar, but all three are so profoundly shaped by the season that you're in. So building a Q2 plan, building a plan for your business without accounting for your humanity, for your capacity.

Is not ambitious. It is magical thinking, and I'm being so honest right now. It is magical thinking for you to plan without considering your actual physical energy, your actual cognitive load and your actual emotional bandwidth. And this isn't to be pessimistic and it's not about lowering a bar. And giving you an excuse to not show up.

This is about mature leadership. This is a difference between a business that only runs when you're at your best, when you're performing at a hundred across the board, and a business that keeps running when your life is life. When you are having to make hard decisions for loved ones when you're having to step away and handle another crisis for someone else or for yourself or for a loved one.

And the one thing I know is life is gonna life, and sometimes we can see it on the horizon and sometimes it comes outta nowhere. So being able to navigate your own needs and your own capacity. Alongside of how you're strategically thinking about and strategically planning for your business, that is when you stop getting in your own way.

So here's some questions for you to sit with before you finalize your Q2 plan before we turn the page into April. And I want you to really sit with these, what season of my life am I in right now? What is present for me personally that will shape how much time, energy, attention, physical capacity, mental capacity, emotional capacity.

What is gonna shape what I have available for my business? Then what season of business am I in? Am I in a growth stage? Is this, you know. All signs point towards grow, grow, grow, or are we in a keep it steady and stable stage? We're just trying to keep things going. Rinse and repeat. Is it a recalibration or a recovery stage?

Like there's no wrong answer and you can use a different word, but I think it's important for us to all give ourselves permission that you don't always have to be in growth mode. That is not realistic. When you are an owner operated business, when you are the one driving the bus, you have to be willing to give yourself space to be a real human.

Then once you answer those questions, I want you to ask yourself, what does CEO me look like in this specific season? And this is not CEO me, at my best on a perfect day where it's 70 degrees and sunny outside and there are no inconveniences, there's nobody needing me to drop what I'm doing and take care of something from them, right?

Like we have to be, be realistic here. What does CEO me look like right now in this actual season of my life and my business? And. What do I need to show up as that version of me? How do I need to resource myself? How am I making sure that I am as supported as possible, that I'm taking care of my own needs so that I can navigate this season the best I can?

From there, you can start thinking about what does your business need to keep running this quarter? What needs to stay in motion? Next month, I wanna really go deeper into what it means to lead a capacity aware business and not as a concept, right, but as a real operating framework. [00:25:00] I've realized in the conversations I've had with so many people over the last few years, and especially last year, that the experience I just went through would've put a lot of people out of business.

And I'm not special or unique in having these types of life experiences. A lot of people go through this kind of stuff, but I think what is different is the way that I have set my business up so that it doesn't have to constantly depend on my constant emotional, physical. In cognitive energy, I've set it up so that it leans on the systems instead of all on me, and that is such a relief.

It is such a relief knowing that this staying high I've built can stand on its own without depending on me to keep it going. So as you go into Q2, ask yourself those questions. It's not about lowering the bar. This is how you actually honor yourself, how you honor your humanity, how you honor the season of life and business that you're in, and start making everything truly more sustainable.

More sustainable, not from a, I can handle a few inconveniences in my life, like my kid being sick for a few days, but how you can handle the true crisises that'll show up in life. Okay, that was kind of a big one. I can't wait to share with you next month what I have been thinking about. I think it is gonna change how you think about so much in your business, and I'm looking forward to it.

I'll see you in the next episode.