Looking for a Business Coach in 2010

It was summer of 2010 and my twins were about six months old. I was starting to plan how I was going to get back into my business after taking at least a six-month maternity leave. And specifically, I was looking for a business coach.

I remember I was searching online, trying to find someone who was going to help me run up that learning curve so that I could figure out how I was going to take my business, which was primarily more of a boots on the ground consulting approach, and transition it to what at the time was revolutionary: the ability to take your business online and work with people through technology like GoToMeeting, which at the time was the early version of Zoom, or Skype, another video calling service. These were things that were truly making business accessible in a way that it never was before.

And for me, it meant that I was going to be able to focus on my personal priorities, being a mom with these two new babies while also running a business. What I got frustrated by was, as I was searching for a business coach, I kept running into the same wall. All of the advice that was being shared didn't apply to me. And it wasn't going to work in this particular stage of my life.

They were telling me I needed to focus on grinding it out 12, 14, 16 hour days. I have a chronic illness. That is not even possible. Not to mention, who's taking care of the kids? What about if I'm breastfeeding, and that is a big part of my daily schedule? These were things I kept running into, and I kept getting so incredibly frustrated that the majority of business advice out there didn't consider me, didn't consider the context I was coming from.

And to be honest, most of the business advice, most of the people who had been writing all the business books, leading all the business trainings, speaking at all the conferences, at all the podcasts, they were men. And they were men who specifically had someone else at home handling their life, taking care of their family, making sure everyone's needs were met, including the business owner's.

Well, that is a completely different context than most of the women entrepreneurs that I know. When you are not the default person, then you have tons of time and energy to dedicate to growing your business, right? But what if you are? What if you are the one who holds everything together in your family? This means that all of the strategy and all of the systems and all of the frameworks that they teach don't always work for us.

And they often fall apart the minute that there's any normal daily challenge that comes on for anyone who is in charge of raising a family, caregiving people, trying to make time for yourself. That is where it all starts to fall apart. They never had to consider how to handle those challenges in their planning, in their strategy, because their needs were already being met.

So when you try to apply their methodology, their frameworks, their systems into your business, and you're the one who's holding all of it, and it doesn't work, it's really easy to conclude that the problem is you. That you don't want it enough, that you're not working hard enough, that you're not focused enough. When in reality, it's that that wasn't designed for you. That was designed with the underlying invisible assumption that someone else was handling it.

We are kicking off a brand new series here called The Matriarchy Would Never. Let's get into it.

Kicking Off The Matriarchy Would Never

Hey there, CEO. Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective® and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO® podcast. And yes, we are kicking off a brand new series here on the podcast called The Matriarchy Would Never.

This is inspired by a series that I saw as I was scrolling social media a few weeks ago. I found a creator, [NAME TO CONFIRM], who was creating a series called Fuck Patriarchy, Build Matriarchy. And as I was going down the rabbit hole watching all of her series, I loved it so much, because she was using a whiteboard to explain these systems and these structures of patriarchy and how matriarchy would do them differently in all these different aspects of how the world works.

And it really got me thinking about the business context. Because over nearly 20 years working as a small business owner and with small business owners, and being someone who has been investing a lot of my own personal time and energy in deconstructing patriarchy, deconstructing racism, deconstructing Christianity, deconstructing capitalism, I started to see all the intersections of these things and the fact that all of these systems right now are crumbling. They aren't working for us anymore.

And it's not just that they aren't working for women either. It's that they aren't working for the majority of people. It's just that women were holding up these systems for a really long time because we were the default. We were the unpaid labor. We were the ones who, when the kids got sick, we had to go pick them up. We were the ones who, if our partner's career took off, we were expected to take a back seat.

And now we're starting to see that that doesn't work for anybody anymore, right? These systems don't just not work for women. They also don't work for men.

Women in Business Are Not a Cute Niche

And as I started thinking through this more and more, I realized I really wanted to do a deep dive into the things that a lot of us have been told are just the way that business works. There is so much advice out there that is given as if it is just a blanket best practice, as if this is just the one way to do things. And it's never really challenged. The assumptions underneath are never really challenged. And that's where we keep running into these structural issues, especially as a woman small business owner.

And I want to be clear here. For years and years and years, women in business has been treated as this really cute little small niche. And we have these cute little businesses, aren't we adorable as cute little ladies?

Nothing could be further from the truth. In the US, women make up over 44% of small businesses. We are the biggest creators of small businesses right now. And we are the ones generating so much back into this economy. We aren't just running cute little businesses. We're running real, legit businesses.

But we're over and over and over again getting frustrated because the way that business has been done, business as usual, doesn't really work for us. And we're being told that we just have to accept it as it is. Well, I call bullshit. I'm not accepting anything.

So over the next five weeks, we are going to go through this series together. And it's not just a Rach rant, I promise you. Yes, Spicy Rach is here, and we're gonna go deep into this. But my goal is that by the end of this series, you will no longer be asking yourself if you're doing enough, if you're working hard enough, if you want it bad enough, if you're willing to hustle harder and grind harder.

Instead, you're going to be questioning everything and asking yourself, is this business really designed for me? Is this business system really designed to fully support me? Is it here to make sure that not only am I achieving my goals, that my needs are met, but also the needs of all the stakeholders in my business, my clients, my community, my team? Is this a win-win all around?

Because that's what matriarchy truly is about. It's about making sure that everyone's needs are met and that no one is having to pick up the slack and be the default unpaid person behind the scenes who continues to catch things that slip through the cracks. That doesn't work, but that's what patriarchy assumes. And that's what all the intersection of these different systems assume: that when things fall through the cracks, when there's an emergency, there is a woman on the other side who's going to handle it for you.

Well, let's flip the script. Let's actually look at what we need to do as small business owners to build businesses that are more aligned, that actually work for us, and that aren't here to just extract resources and money and power so that we hoard it at the top. And instead what it looks like when we take a completely different model that's built on making sure everyone is taken care of. So this isn't a feeling series, a touchy feely series. This is going to be an operational series, because we're going to get into the practical side of how we actually flip these things so that it actually works for us.

The Invisible Assumption Underneath the Advice

So, as I shared at the very opening of this episode, this is something that I have been toiling on for decades now. And I started to realize super early on that the business world was designed by men for men. And I saw that as early as when I was in college getting my undergraduate and my MBA in entrepreneurship and small business. The majority of my professors were all men. The books we were reading were all by men. The majority of the case studies we were looking at were all about men in business. And never did we actually talk about intersectionality. Never did we talk about how things could be different. It was all just this is how it's done.

So when I started looking for a business coach, and I started looking for people to help me accelerate my business and get up the learning curve that is learning how to run a business online, which was the direction I was going, what was that, 16, 17 years ago? I kept getting frustrated because so much of the advice I kept running into just didn't fit me and my life.

This was when things were circulating like the miracle morning, where you were supposed to have this super complicated early morning routine. And I remember just thinking, how am I supposed to get up at five in the morning and do this 10 step or whatever routine, and have like two or three hours completely to myself with no interruptions? I have infants over here. I have a husband who's got to get up and go to work. Who's handling things? What is this?

I just was so frustrated because it only made sense if someone else was handling everything else in your life. And that just wasn't the dynamic for me. So I continued to get frustrated, and I realized that I was always gonna have to run every piece of advice through this lens. It was always going to be: does this actually work for me and the constraints that I actually have in my life?

Because it's not that all this advice is wrong. I love me a morning routine. Now that my kids are older, I can have one. It depends on so many things, right? It depends on what's going on in this stage of your life, in this stage of your business. Context matters, right? But we all have different constraints. We're all going to have different things happening behind the scenes.

The problem with a lot of this advice is that it is given as if it's a one size fits all. And there is an invisible assumption underneath all of it, that there is someone else who is handling things. There is someone else who's gonna pick up the slack. That if you are in grow mode with your business, that someone else is gonna keep everything going while you put in 12, 14, 16 hour days.

So this has been the go-to lens that this advice has been coming from, right? This has been their perspective. And if you think about it, that makes sense. Because when people started writing books about how to run a business, when they started giving business advice, they were all white, cis, straight men who had someone at home who was handling everything day to day in their life. Who was making sure that the kids got up and got out to school. Who was making sure that every season the kids got the new clothes that they needed. Who was planning the family vacations, who was making the holidays happen, who was picking up the kids if someone got sick at school, who was there to hold down the fort when they flew off to a conference or when they just didn't show up because they had to work late.

The default assumption of patriarchy isn't just that there's always a woman available to run your life. It's also that there is someone you don't have to pay.

Why Patriarchy Always Builds a Pyramid

And this has also led to, if you're looking at the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism, the fact that there's always an assumption that unpaid labor is worth a whole lot less than paid labor. I could go off into a whole nother rabbit hole with that.

But the fact is here that when it comes to patriarchy and when it comes to capitalism, it's always a pyramid. There's somebody at the very top whose needs are prioritized, who is the best resourced, because power flows up, resources flow up, money flows up. And the person or persons at the bottom are usually the least resourced, the least paid, or not paid, in order to sustain that infrastructure.

Well, fast forward now, and we see that we have gone from having an entire culture where people thought of having a stay-at-home mom as the default setting, to now most families have two working parents. And we don't have the infrastructure, especially in the United States, where there's a ton of extra support for families, right? If we look at all the expenses that go into raising a family, the expenses of childcare, all of the logistics behind that, it is super complicated for us at this particular stage.

And that is where this system, the hierarchical system, is crumbling right now. Because now finally it no longer works for men either. It no longer works for men either, because women are starting to say, hey, I'm not giving up my career just because my kid got sick today. They're asking for more equity in that partnership.

What Matriarchy Actually Looks Like

And that's truly what matriarchy looks like. It is more equitable. It is where more people's needs are being met. And that's because it's not a hierarchy. And it's not about the person at the top getting all the resources and money and power. It is about making sure it's a win-win for everyone.

So I always think of matriarchy as more of like a circle with multiple layers of circle, like the rings of a tree. And in the very, very center of it are the people who need the most protection, who are the most vulnerable. These are children, these are mothers, these are the elderly, these are the disabled, these are the sick. These are all the people who society is supposed to care for, right?

And in a more matriarchal system, it's more about recirculating resources, where everybody's contributing to take care of everyone, where resources and money and power are shared so that everyone's needs are taken care of. And that lens is completely different, right? I think a lot of people assume that matriarchy means that you're just putting a woman in charge. And that is not it. Okay. We already have that.

I call it patriarchy in pink. This is one of the other challenges I have in the women's entrepreneurship space and small business space. We have plenty of women who are using the language of feminism and empowerment to try to seem as if they're for women, but truly they are just pinkwashing patriarchy. They're not actually talking about rebuilding the infrastructure, rebuilding the core systems, rebuilding the way that things are done.

So the reason that this impacts small business owners so much is that when the default assumption, the invisible assumption, is that there's always going to be someone who can pick up the slack, and more specifically, someone you don't have to pay who's going to pick up the slack, then they don't have to actually build that into a plan. The assumption is something goes wrong, someone else is going to handle it. You don't have to stop what you're doing.

That's not how it works for women in small business. So we are seeing, again, women have been the default safety setting. We have been the default safety net. It became so incredibly clear during COVID, and it's becoming more and more clear now. As again, we are starting to see these systems are crumbling, these systems are struggling, because they're no longer working for anyone. And unfortunately, it will only change when we start changing the infrastructure of the systems that we live and work in.

So the consequence, and this is what the whole series here is going to hinge on, is that if you're creating a business plan, if you're creating a strategy for your business, if you're creating your 90-day plan for your business, and it assumes that there is someone else there to pick up the slack when things go wrong in your life, your family, your health, your business, it assumes there's someone else who's gonna handle it for you, but you're that someone, then it means your plan was gonna fail from the get-go.

We have to think about it differently. And we have to build plans that are actually built with those accommodations for us. What happens when things go wrong? What happens when you can't give it a hundred percent? What happens when you've got to stop everything in the middle of the week to go pick up a kid? What happens when your parents have an emergency?

If you are the safety net, then we have to build in additional layers into your plan, into your business, to make sure that it is going to be able to support you through it instead of collapse the minute that things go sideways. You don't have to hustle harder to deserve success. And if you're building a plan for your business that assumes that you are a hundred percent available, that you're at a hundred percent energy, you have a hundred percent focus, that you can grind a hundred percent of the time without slowing down or stopping, and that someone else is gonna pick up the slack in your life, then guess what? It will fail the moment it's pressure tested by something more than a cold in your family.

That's not a discipline problem. That is a design flaw, and it's the design flaw of patriarchy in small business.

The Therapy Conversation About the Mental Load

So I wanna make this really clear by giving you an example of a conversation that my husband and I actually had about 12 years ago. My husband, Jameson, was a full-time teacher. He taught seventh grade English for nearly a decade. And after our youngest son was born, he decided to quit his job and come be at home with me as like full-time dad and part-time help behind the scenes in my business.

And this was one of the most challenging times we ever had navigating in our marriage. It was trying to figure out that new division of labor, because now everything had shifted. It went from him also having a job, to him working inside of my business, him learning that whole new skill set, and also us renegotiating what it was gonna look like in our household.

And at the time, I remember being so frustrated, because I was like, why can't he see what I'm talking about when I tell him how exhausted I am and how overwhelmed I am and how much stuff I have going on? And then I read this amazing book called Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. And this book was a game changer for me, because it started to talk through how do we make the invisible labor visible?

And this is so common for so many people who are navigating this particular challenge in their homes. And believe me, this challenge in your home does impact your business. Because these are things that women somehow by default are expected to know. And men somehow think that they're helping, but they're not actually going through all the stages of understanding that all the things that we have going on in our lives and our family and our homes require some layer of knowing what needs to be done, conceptualizing it, planning what needs to be done, and then actually doing the thing.

Men tend to default by saying, just write me a list. And that still makes the mental load your responsibility, right?

So in our experience, as we were navigating this, I remember being so frustrated because I was asking for more support at home and he was saying, just give me a list. What is it that you want me to do? And we were in therapy, and I was saying, you want a list. Here's all the things that I am thinking about.

I was like, I need you to take on the forms from school. I need you to be the default person that they call. I need you to look at all the kids' clothes and make sure that they have what they need for the school year, or if the seasons are going to change, do their shoes still fit, do their coats still fit? I need you to plan months in advance so that when it's time to get a new coat, they're not all sold out and we actually can get a coat.

I need you to know who the pediatrician is. I need you to have their phone number. I need you to know who the dentist is. I need you to have every single thing already in your brain, instead of me having to sit down and come up with the task and then plan it, and all you do is the execution part of it. Because the execution part, the taking the kids to the doctor, is actually the easiest part. It's the finding the pediatrician and researching and making sure you have all your questions, and knowing what the pediatrician needs to know. That is the hard part. That is the mental labor.

So going through all of these little things takes up an incredible amount of mental capacity for each and every one of us. And this was the conversation that really helped me to see that I wasn't feeling supported because I was still holding the majority of the mental responsibility, of the planning responsibility.

Nobody Starts the Workday at Zero

So it becomes now who's in charge of all these different things that keep your life running smoothly. And I just gave a bunch of examples here, but these are things that are the daily grind of life. And these are the things that, if you don't have clarity about who's in charge of what, and you find that you're constantly putting out fires in your life, or you're constantly getting frustrated that someone else isn't remembering these things, they start to build up, right? Until you have an absolute level of protection.

And where things go wrong, especially for those of us who are parents or who are caregivers, is who is in charge when something goes sideways. And now it requires you to come out of your business. Who's in charge of picking the kid up if they're feeling sick? Who's in charge of going to the hospital if your parent calls? Who's in charge of staying home if the kid can't go to school that day? What does that look like?

All of those things become so absolutely overwhelming. So none of that's on a job description for your business. It's not going to show up on a P&L, it's not going to show up on your revenue goals, or any framework for anything anyone ever gave you related to your business. But all of it is the underpinning of what we're all navigating as we're running our business.

And when you sit down at your desk to do the deep work for your business, you're not starting at zero. And here's where I think a lot of the advice out there is getting wrong. They're assuming that you got up, you had plenty of time to yourself in the morning, you ate a good breakfast, you got a good workout in. They aren't assuming that you just had to have an argument with your kids about get your shoes on, it's time to get out the door. Or no, you have to wear a coat, there's snow on the ground. Or rushing around to find their homework that they can't find, or somebody had a meltdown because you handed them the wrong color sippy cup, right?

So you're not starting your day at zero. You're starting your day having already had a day. You're starting your day having already had a lot going on. And that is a big shift, right? That means that we need to adjust what is going on when we're putting our days together.

The important thing that I keep coming back to is this is something different for families. This is something dramatically different. And I remember sharing at the most recent CEO Retreat, I had a room full of women, and I was talking about the fact that we are the first real generation of women who are running into these problems.

Because chances are our grandmothers and maybe even our mothers didn't have this level of complexity going on in their lives, especially if they were primarily stay-at-home moms, stay-at-home caregivers. A lot of our grandmothers weren't also raising kids and running a business. A lot of our moms weren't even doing that. So there's no inherited playbook, right?

And it also means not only do we not have the playbook for what it looks like in our life, our spouses, our partners don't have a playbook for what that looks like. We are all making this up right now and trying to figure out how to make it all work right now.

And this is why it feels like such a personal failing. Because when everyone is improvising, when everyone is winging it, when we're all just trying to figure out our best day to day, we all assume that we're the only ones who can't figure this out. Y'all, everyone is in the same boat.

So many women I talk to get so frustrated because of how long it takes them to get focused to sit down and get work done. Because of how distracted they are by the state of their home. By how anxious they are by not only the list of to-dos for their work, but also the list of to-dos that's running in the back of their head about keeping their life going.

And I feel this so much. I mentioned at the very top of this episode, this has been something I've been thinking about since I had children in 2010. My kids are now juniors and in eighth grade. We have teenagers now. We're getting closer to the end of this stage of my life. And I'm also in the last six years taking care of elderly parents. I am definitely the sandwich generation. So I understand what that squeeze feels like so much.

And that's why I am here to fight for women to hit the reset button and say, hey, it's time we stop winging it. It's time we stop flying by the seat of our pants. And we actually figure out what is it that we really need in order to make this a little bit easier.

Two Questions Before Any 90 Day Plan

I realized pretty early on that the way I work with my clients had to dramatically change if I was going to help them actually resource themselves better. And that meant re-examining everything I thought about everything I teach: how to plan, how to be productive, how to build these systems in your business.

So we were hosting the most recent CEO Retreat here in Richmond, Virginia. And before we kicked off planning, because that entire retreat is about creating your 90-day plan for your business, before we did any of that, we started with a really simple grounding exercise followed by two big questions that each person has to answer.

First, who do you want to be in this stage of your life and business? Who is CEO right now? What does she look like? How are you showing up as her right now?

For me, at this particular stage of my life and my business, as I mentioned, I have teenagers, I'm caregiving parents, I'm the sandwich generation, I have chronic illness. The stage of my business is ramping back up after intensive caregiving and losing my mom and my grandma. So that is really important context going into planning, right? Big for me to acknowledge that, and then layer in the next piece of it.

How do I want to show up right now? I want to show up rested. I want to show up resourced. I want to show up grounded. I want to make sure that I have a ton of energy. I want to show up having prioritized my health and movement. I want to show up feeling very plugged in and excited about my work. So how do you want to show up in this season of life and business?

The other side of that, the part two of this question, is what does that version of you, CEO you, need in order to be that version of you? And this is all about resourcing yourself. How do you need to resource yourself? What will make it easier for you to show up as that version of you? And there's so much that goes into this question, right?

For me, it's not just getting enough sleep and drinking enough water and getting some movement every day. It's also having quality one-on-one time with my family and my friends. It's making sure I'm prioritizing my health, especially because I have chronic health challenges. It's resourcing myself by, if I need support in some area, do I need to hire food prep? Do we have the housekeepers coming in? Do I need to outsource something that's going to just take some of the pressure off?

What the Women at the Retreat Actually Needed

It's all about how are you resourcing yourself? And that question opened so much conversation at the CEO Retreat. And we asked people to share this, because women are used to being the resource. We're not used to resourcing ourselves. We're used to being the unpaid laborer, the default parent, the person who catches everything that falls through the cracks. We aren't used to saying, these are the needs I have.

So we went around the room, and some of my clients shared so many amazing things. One of them shared that she wanted more real local friends. She had a huge network all over the world and almost no one near where she lives that she could actually do life with, that she could call if she needed some emotional support. And she said she kept coming to the CEO Retreat and asking herself, I see you, Racheal. You're going on these weekends with your friends, you're going out to dinner with your friends, you're sharing that you've built these amazing friendships. And I don't have that.

I had another woman who came in late that morning, and she came in late because she was in the middle of getting ready for an event that she was hosting that night. And she was running out of the house late because she was trying to get her kids out the door to school. She said her house was a wreck. She couldn't focus. And what she wrote down to resource herself was, I just need a housekeeper. This is driving me crazy. I feel so stressed by the state of my house.

And she said, it's not business, but. And then as we continued through the conversation, she's like, I know I don't need it to be just a home thing. I feel like it should be. I need to resource myself with outsourcing something in my business, but this is what's stressing me out. And I said, yeah, because we're all impacted by these things.

We had another woman who shared that she has multiple pets at home and they travel a lot. But because one of her pets has special needs, it's really hard to get a dog sitter if they're trying to travel or if they're trying to leave. And so she kept feeling like she was stuck, like she couldn't go anywhere or take these opportunities because of how complicated that became. And we talked about how can you resource yourself and have multiple backups in a list ready to go.

Same thing if you have kids. How do you resource yourself? Who are your go-to babysitters? Who are the people who can step in and take an overnight shift if something happens?

We had a woman who said, my husband and I are both running these big careers. I have this business. He has a big career. We just don't have any time for just the two of us. It's like every bit of time we have is back into our kids. And I realize I really want that back.

So what's happening here is everyone's sharing, right? And they're all sharing, this isn't just what I need in my business. I don't just need support in my business. I need support in my life. I need support in my relationships. I need more rest. I need space to be creative. I need more space just for me. I need to give myself permission to have needs, and to have those needs be important enough to be fulfilled.

They didn't feel like they had to ask for permission if they wanted to set a big revenue goal, but they somehow felt like they needed to ask for permission if they needed a housekeeper a couple times a month, or if they needed to order meal prep during really busy seasons.

And my response here is, there's really not many men out there who are running businesses who even ask themselves these questions. They don't feel like they need permission to get the help they need. They don't feel like they need permission to hire the trainer. They don't feel like they need permission to hire a housekeeper. They don't feel like they need permission to have someone come over and detail their car. They don't feel like they need permission to have the meal prep. They don't feel like they need permission to go on a guy's trip or to travel for work.

But we have all this somehow that as women gets installed on us, that's just like, you're supposed to be able to juggle all this on your own. And somehow we're less than if we can't do it on our own. Just because we want big things for our life and our business doesn't mean we have to be the ones doing all of it. It doesn't mean you have to be the one doing all the things. You can make it easier. You can resource yourself. You can ask for help. And you can think about what help you'll need in advance.

Reducing Friction and Building Emergency SOPs

So when I share some of these examples, and I often share examples from my own life, these are things I have had to learn and I have had to make peace with, right? Because I had that same default setting. I was raised by a grandmother who was meticulous. I was raised by a family where the house always looked like there could be a photo shoot at any moment. There were no messes allowed.

So the pressure I put on myself was insane for years and years and years. And then I realized this is dumb. This is not making anyone happy. It is making me incredibly stressed out. I deserve for my needs to be a priority and for me to be a priority. So that means I need to resource myself.

If I don't have the time, energy, or desire to deep clean my house every month, I'm gonna hire it out. If things get really busy, I'm calling the laundry service. And I'm gonna tell the kids, put your laundry out on the porch, they're gonna pick it up, they'll bring it back washed and folded tomorrow. If we're in a really busy season, especially with three kids and a business and taking care of parents, you better believe I was ordering meal prep so that at least I was eating healthy during those really, really busy weeks.

I talk to all my clients about how I pay for the grocery delivery. The math makes sense, because I'm probably gonna spend way more picking up random stuff as I walk around the store than I would the fee to have it delivered, or to just pick it up outside of the grocery store.

And the thing is, all of these little decisions reduce friction in my house. They reduce all the friction. And it makes it so much easier for me and my family, which means instead of feeling like I'm constantly fussing at my kids to do these things, or I'm constantly getting upset that my husband is not doing what I want, instead, we have created less friction. And we've created less friction by creating systems and simplifying everything and by resourcing ourselves. If we can afford to outsource it, we're going to. And often the money is such a little piece of that puzzle. The outsourcing isn't actually that expensive.

And for a long time I remember thinking to myself, isn't this a little much? Am I being ridiculous here by outsourcing these things, by hiring out this type of stuff? And then I realized, nope, I am just a human who deserves to be taken care of. And especially when we are in super busy seasons where my time is at a premium, especially as someone who needs to prioritize their health and wellness, the minute I start feeling stressed, or the minute I know there's a busy season coming, is when I start going through my checklist of how can I streamline this in my life? How can we make things simpler in our house? Because ultimately that makes it easier for me to show up focused, clear, able to get done what needs to get done in my business.

And having a chronic illness is the thing that made me realize I had to build these constraints into my plan. I was really tired of always having to triage when something went wrong, of having my business go into crisis mode when I physically was unable to do what I had planned, what I had put into my 90-day plan.

So, yes, I actually have emergency business checklists. We have SOPs for what happens if Racheal's sick. What happens if I'm at my lowest energy level versus what happens if I'm at really good energy levels. I have checklists for, an example, when I was taking care of my mom, what happens if I need to shut down everything one day to get to the hospital to take care of my mom? What does that SOP need to look like? What happens when there's something going on with my kids? What does that SOP look like?

I actually started building out emergency SOPs because I wanted to make sure that even if I couldn't take the entire plan as written, I knew what I needed to do in order to at least keep things moving forward within the constraints that I actually had.

Maintenance Is Not Self-Care

And even more than that, I started realizing, okay, how am I gonna move from reactive to proactive? And this was the biggest shift that I made in my business, because as someone with chronic illness, I realized that if I was always reacting to a flare-up instead of proactively planning to avoid it, and planning what needed to be done in order to maintain my health, then I was always going to be having to activate that emergency playbook.

So I started doing things to help me make sure that I was doing everything I could to maintain the highest level of energy and health. That meant things like, my supplements are on auto ship. All of my doctor's appointments are on the schedule well in advance. It means nothing is deferred until I'm actually actively in pain.

This is a big one. Because as someone with chronic pain and health challenges, it's really easy for me to wait, because my pain threshold is different than a lot of people's. For many years, I would wait until I was in such excruciating pain that I couldn't get out of bed before I would say, okay, I need help. Now I don't wait for that. I don't wait for it to be in the red zone. As soon as it's like, think about the dashboard on your car, as soon as that little light starts to ping on, and it's like, little alert, something's happening here. We activate the plan, right?

And even more than that, we'd have a maintenance schedule for our car. I have a maintenance schedule for myself. It looks like my supplements are on auto ship, my medications are automatically refilled. And we make sure we're on top of all of those things. It means all the things I do to take care of my health, my monthly massage, my chiropractic visit, acupuncture, any of those things that help me, are automatically put on the calendar every single month, every single quarter, before anything else gets scheduled around it. All of my health maintenance stuff gets put on the calendar first.

It means when I'm looking at my calendar months in advance, I'm flagging, this is gonna be a busy season. And I usually know it's gonna be a busy season if there's travel involved, if there's a holiday coming up, if there's something on the calendar that is going to take a lot of extra effort. I make sure I'm always looking at my kids' calendar and my parents' calendars. And the minute there's a busy season, I have an SOP for what happens during a busy season to take the pressure off. How do we resource ourselves more?

I used that when I had to step in and take care of my parents. The moment that it became clear I was gonna have to move my parents into senior living and sell their house and start navigating memory care and hospice and all of that end of life for my mom, the minute I knew that was gonna happen, the first thing on that checklist was to sit down with my team and talk through the plan and figure out, okay, what is a must do? What is a nice to do? How do we handle it if I can't show up and do something? What's our backup?

And that is a whole nother level of resourcing yourself, my friends. I went through that list and I said, okay, what do I personally need in this season? I need a therapist. I need a coach. I need to have plenty of downtime. So make sure I'm actually writing in my calendar, do not book here. Do not book on these weekends. Make sure I'm blocking off time instead of saying yes to everything. Making sure I'm really protecting my time as much as possible.

We went through and talked about what appointments I could say yes to and which ones were a no. That was so important. We updated my entire calendar SOP so people would know how to handle that and my team could support me in protecting my calendar. We went through and looked at all of our emails and things that come in from people who aren't paying clients, and what is a decline right away. People asking for things that I couldn't do.

So all of those things went into this process, and it's all about resourcing yourself. Not just day-to-day, not just the maintenance level resourcing, but also kind of having these go-tos like, if this happens, what needs to happen here? If my capacity is somehow limited, how do we keep the Client Growth Engine™ going? If I only have this much bandwidth right now, who gets priority? And how do we triage that?

Suddenly now, not all the pressure is on me. And suddenly now I'm resourced. My team knows how to support me. My clients have clear expectations about what's happening, and everything works so much better. I don't have to throw the plan out the window, right? And here's where a good system will handle any plan that falls apart. A good system is better than a good plan.

And it's so funny, because I remember when I'm sharing some of these things, I think when people hear that I get a massage every month, that I do all these maintenance activities for my health, they're like, that must be nice. Kind of like this is me going to a spa where someone's just kind of lightly rubbing essential oils on my back. I'm like, no, this is not a relaxing massage with spa music. This is maintenance. This is trigger point massage. This is me breathing through them releasing fascia. It hurts in the moment.

But it is what helps my energy stay up. This is me sometimes going and getting IV hydration therapy so that I'm able to handle everything that's coming my way. This is me doing everything I can to keep my immune system up so that when seasonal allergies come along, or whatever this season's illnesses are gonna be, I don't get taken out by something like a simple cold that then escalates into something worse.

Why I Plan for 70 Percent Capacity

So there is a business consequence here of not resourcing yourself. A few months ago, I talked about how I never plan as if I will have a hundred percent capacity all the time. I always plan for 70%.

What does that mean? If you only plan for your best days, then when the bad days inevitably come, you're going to have to radically triage your plan. You're gonna find yourself constantly in reactive mode. But if you plan for only 70% and you build in more buffer, then you're able to navigate, and your business is able to be more resilient going through those ups and downs.

And guess what? If you plan for 70% and you actually had 80 or 90%, yay, that means you can go into that plan and maybe there's a list of things that are like, it would be nice if we could do these, but they're not essential to the plan. That comes up all the time for me. Sometimes there are seasons where I have more energy, where I have more capacity and I can do a little bit more. But I always build them into my plans as, if I have capacity, I can pull from this. If I don't, we're staying focused on the core plan that needs to get accomplished.

And if I have less than 70%, or I've used up my buffer and we're actually in a triage mode, I have these emergency SOPs that help make sure that I'm not having to just grind it out and then suffer the consequences, which usually is some sort of flare-up and me ending up in bed.

So my business does exactly what I designed it to do. The year I had to take care of my mom, it ran on cruise control and I only worked five hours a week. Now that I have more capacity, I'm still making sure I'm resourcing myself. And every quarter when I'm building that plan, I'm asking myself, what do I need right now? I'm looking for the busy seasons. I'm saying, how can I make this easier? I'm looking for any friction in my life or in my business and going, okay, how can I eliminate that friction? How can I make it easier on everyone?

It could be as simple as, these are the types of meals we have on our weeknights so that we're not stressed about what's for dinner. It could look like, literally I wear a capsule wardrobe while I'm at home working at my desk from home, because I don't want to think about what I'm putting on my body when I'm just bouncing between getting work done and picking kids up from school. How are you reducing the friction? How are you reducing the friction?

Self-Care Advice Versus a Proactive System

So as I'm starting to wrap this whole thing up, I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that a lot of the advice aimed towards women is that we just need to do more self-care, right? That if we are stressed, that if we are overloaded, if we are overwhelmed, if we are overworked, if we are burning out, then the answer is to take a break, to have some self-care, get in that bubble bath.

Don't get me wrong, I love a bubble bath. I just had one last night, except it was an Epsom salt bath, because that's part of my recovery process.

The real thing here is that a lot of the advice out there given to women for how to handle all that is on our shoulders is so reactive, and it's not addressing the systems underneath it, right? It's not addressing the things that would actually make our lives easier, the things that would actually make our business run smoother. We are being sold a reactive answer instead of a proactive framework or a proactive approach that actually builds into the system, that builds into the plan, ways to make it smoother and easier and more efficient. What to do when you're having a great day versus a bad day, how to navigate the ups and downs.

And that's what I want you to start thinking about when it comes to your own business. I want you to start thinking about how do you build this into the system from the get-go? How do you build in more buffer? How do you look for any friction in your business and start going, how can I make this easier for myself? How can I make this easier for my team? How can I separate out what must get done, essential, from what is a nice to get done? How can I simplify this? What actually works for the real capacity that I actually have?

Because building a game plan that depends on you to be available a hundred percent, at a hundred percent energy, a hundred percent of the time, for a steady 40 hours a week, that's not realistic for most of us. We have to start looking at it from a different approach.

The CEO Capacity Audit and What's Next

So if this is resonating for you, then I want you to know that coming up this month on October 20th, Tuesday at noon, I'm gonna be running the CEO Capacity Audit live. And this is a 100% free conversation. This is where we are gonna look at five pieces inside of your business where you're quietly feeling maxed out.

We're gonna look at your calendar and your buffer. We're gonna look at your cognitive load. We're gonna look at your emotional capacity. We're gonna look at your marketing stability. We're gonna look at feedback loops. We're gonna go through together and we're actually gonna score them using green, yellow, or red so that you can walk away knowing where the constraint is, where your capacity is actually being limited.

And this isn't about giving you a million things to fix in your business. This is about helping you identify where are you actually experiencing the bottleneck in your business that is forcing you to overcompensate, to overfunction, and to again be the default person who has to pick up all the slack, because this isn't working for you. And then we're going to talk about what are the next steps to redesign so that your business truly works for you and you can actually enjoy it a whole lot more.

So this is free, it's live, the replay will go out to everyone who registers. I highly encourage you to go. I had a lot of people show up when I ran this free class in the spring and they absolutely loved it. So you'll be able to join us at theceocollective.com/ceo-ceiling-assessment. The link will be in the show notes.

Okay, this was a pretty long episode, kind of laying the foundation here, covering a lot. Next week we're gonna talk about Patriarchy in Pink, the old model that has just been repackaged and rebranded for women in our cute little pink entrepreneurial projects, and why it doesn't work for us, why it's actually insulting to me, and why it makes a lot of us feel like the failure is our fault instead of this system that we've all unknowingly been a part of.

Then we're going to talk about how to effectively resource yourself before you plan, especially going into a new year in just a few months. I think this is going to be really, really important for us to think through, how we effectively resource ourselves. Then we're going to talk about how we actually build it, the five pieces of infrastructure we need in our business and what each one looks like in an ordinary day.

And then we're gonna talk to a member inside of The CEO Collective® who is four years into this process, how she navigates managing this, and even how she was able to take a full month of sabbatical off this summer and continues to grow her business at an incredible but sustainable pace.

There's a connective line through each and every one of these. And every one of these is the same, right? It is naming that invisible default setting, refusing to accept that, and then saying, how can we make this actually work for us and replace it with something better?

The Question to Ask Instead

So here's what I want you to take out of this episode. And it's just one thing. If you're ever looking at your business and you're beating yourself up and you're thinking I should be further along by now, I really want you to ask yourself a different question. Not what's wrong with me. Ask who was this actually built for? And does it actually work for you? Does it actually work for the life you want and the life you have right now?

Because if you're the one holding onto the calendar, the pediatrician's number, the shoe sizes, trying to keep track of everything in your life, and you're running a company, and you're the default person who everyone calls when something goes wrong for your family, in your life, if you are the safety net for everyone else, then we need a different way to plan. We need a different way to build strategy. We need a different way to build businesses. One that actually works for us.

And that's what the rest of this series is about. That's what matriarchy would do, is make sure that you were considered, and that you were built into the plan, and that your needs were built into your business.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I can't wait to share the next one with you. I'll talk to you soon.