Is Your Business REALLY Working for You?

Racheal Cook: Have you spent so much time and energy making sure that your business works for your clients, that you're available when they need you, that you can reply to them as soon as they send you that email or that text, but you're finding that your business really isn't working for you? If so, I want you to keep on listening because today, we have an incredible guest CEO, Libby Wilson, sharing about how in the last year she has turned things around so that her business not only works for her functional medicine clients, but also works for her and her family. Let's get into it.

Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. 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.

I have an important question for you today, CEO. Is your business really working for you? Really, is it working for you? Or are you finding yourself feeling like you are working 24/7, 365 for your business? This is such an important conversation, such an important distinction. Because too often I hear from women entrepreneurs who can tell something is not right. Yeah, their business has clients. Yeah, they're making money.

On the surface, everything looks good. But really they're up eight o'clock at night instead of being on the sofa with their partner, a glass of wine, some popcorn, and the latest Game of Thrones season out. Instead, they're sitting there looking at their phone feeling like they have to answer the email that just came in. Or instead of enjoying family time on the weekends, they feel like they have to touch base with people who are constantly asking for your attention.

This is a massive problem because it's leading to burnout. It's leading to the perpetuation of hustle culture, where we all start to feel like we have to be available 24/7, 365. We always have to be there to put out fires and our business becomes a nightmare. Let's dig into this today. I am so excited that Dr. Libby Wilson reached out to me.

She just wrapped up a year inside of The CEO Collective, and when she came to us as a functional medicine doctor who had left the traditional practice model to a cash-based functional-medicine practice, she had a lot of shifts to make to adapt and adjust her business. But while her business looked great on the surface, had clients, was successful by all standards, it wasn't truly working for her. That is going to be the huge, huge thing to think about as you get into this episode.

Dr. Libby Wilson is the owner of Best Life Functional Medicine. She works with women who are struggling with adrenal fatigue and she helps people to really figure out how they can get to the root cause of what's keeping them feeling stuck and unwell so that they can be more vibrant and optimally healthy.

Her latest book, The Path of Intention: Five Habits to Optimize Your Health and Create a Life You Love is now out. We cannot wait to dig into this conversation about the shifts she made over the last year to get back her time, to free up her nights and weekends, to even enjoy long luxurious mornings so that she can have time for herself and the impact of working with us in The CEO Collective.

Hey there Libby, I'm so excited. You are joining me today for Promote Yourself to CEO. Welcome. Welcome.

Libby Wilson: Oh, Racheal, thank you so much for having me. I've listened to your podcasts for a long time. I never miss it. It's just such an honor to be a guest here today.

Racheal Cook: Oh, my goodness. It's such an honor to have you because the work you're doing, anyone who has followed my story knows that I have struggled with adrenal fatigue and a lot of other chronic-health challenges. It's always fun for me when I end up with clients who I have been in their world because it's been a service or something I've personally needed. I'm really excited to hear about what has changed for you.

But to get into this whole conversation, let's start with can you let everyone know, a year or so ago when you found The CEO Collective, what did your business look like and where were you stuck or struggling?

Libby Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. I'm Libby Wilson. I'm a functional medicine doctor. I started my business about three years ago. I came from family medicine for 15 years, decided I had to get out, I had to find a way to help people better. I had no idea how to do it. Medical school, they teach you a lot of things about how to be a doctor, nothing about how to run a business.

I was so stressed out and I was so overwhelmed. I had no idea how to do it. But I hired a business coach who helped me escape that world and create this little tiny little happy little practice. It worked. It worked overnight and it worked really great. But I found myself recreating some of the things that I had just escaped because I was doing it all myself.

When I found Racheal's podcast, you were a guest on Meghan Walker's podcast, and I listened to her podcast and I immediately was like, “Oh my gosh, this lady, I need to follow her.” So I started listening to your podcast. I was like, “This is where I'm at. I need to grow from a business of one to a CEO.”

Because I had found some answers. I had found some answers for myself personally and physically, I'm like, “I have to share this information with more people, but I'm out of luck where I can only share it with so many unless I shift the way that I'm doing things.” Around the time I started listening to your podcast before I even joined The Collective is when I realized I had to hire an assistant and that I needed to stop doing it all myself and I needed to let somebody else do some other stuff for me.

The thing was, I was so busy. I was like, “How am I going to even find someone? How am I going to train someone?” all of these things and I just decided I've got to do it and it was such a game changer adding someone to my team. Now I've added someone else to my team and so now I've got two assistants and I'm able to stay in my zone of genius and help more people that way too, which has really been super fun.

Racheal Cook: This is such a common story that I hear. We have so many people who are doing what I would call like a lateral transition. This is work you had done previously, you had previously worked in another medical practice, wanted to go do your own thing, and it's really easy to bring old habits with you. It's really easy to try to start your own thing but when you don't really know a different way of building a business, it's easy to just do it by default instead of by design. It's really easy to get buried in all that busy work.

Libby Wilson: Absolutely. I had learned how to be successful by hustling.

Racheal Cook: Yeah, and hustle will only get you so far.

Libby Wilson: It will only get you so far, and guess what hustle created for me, adrenal fatigue. I needed to escape that and I learned how to fix that for myself. But I'll tell you what, if you don't fix the root cause, which is the way I was living my lifestyle, it's not going to stay fixed for long.

Racheal Cook: Exactly. It's so interesting, because there are so many parallels in my own personal health journey, and I'm sure yours too, in the way you approach business. It's like how you do one thing is how you do anything. I think one of the challenges I see for a lot of small businesses is instead of really looking at their business and evaluating how they can get to that root cause of what's causing them the stress, of what's causing them to be in that hustle mentality and hustle mode, instead of really digging deep there, they just want to keep slapping band aids on top of it and they just create this nonstop cycle where they can't escape what they've created.

It's like the dream business becomes a nightmare business because you don't know how to back away from what you accidentally created. That happens in your health too. It's such a good parallel. You have to get to that root cause and really look at how can you redesign your business?

Libby Wilson: You know what I think was one of the things that I learned from you that really helped me was the 90-Day Plan.

Racheal Cook: Yeah, tell me about that.

Libby Wilson: Oh my goodness gracious. I've always been a goal setter but I always have lots of goals and maybe tend to spread a little too thin because I'm trying to focus on too many of them. But really sitting down at the first CEO Retreat that I went to and thinking this through, and I thought it through maybe in more like weeks at a time but never in this 90-Day platform that I will continue to do forever.

By the way, I absolutely love this idea. But yeah, so just sitting down and looking at what one or two things do I want to focus on? Then I have these lists of next in line and some day, it's like saying yes to the great but no to the good. Just letting some things for later potentially, and then focusing on one or two things, and in 90 days, when you break it down, week by week by week, in 90 days, you can accomplish so, so much and it doesn't feel overwhelming.

It's just a little bit at a time. I think my superpower is consistency. I am consistent, I show up regularly. But it's amazing when you take some big goal, you just break it down into small little chunks, and you just keep doing it, what you can accomplish.

Racheal Cook: Well, and what I find with a lot of our clients who really get into this 90-Day system that we've designed is once you get through the first couple of cycles of it, suddenly you start to see, “Oh, this is a rinse and repeat. I don't have to be recreating the wheel every quarter or even every year.” Tell us about what has happened in your business as you have gone through a full year of 90-Day Planning with us every quarter. What's happened for you, what has gotten streamlined, what has gotten easier?

Libby Wilson: I love rinse and repeat. I hear you say that a lot. I realized that what I'm doing is working, so quick changing and quick creating new things. In this last year, I've created a 12-month content calendar. I have 12 months of content that I have mapped out and I'm creating it this year. I'm almost through and then I'm just going to rinse it next year. Next year is going to be so incredibly easy and it's just been one little topic per week generally. It hasn't been too overwhelming. I've done that.

The biggest thing is I've written a book in this amount of time, and that was part of my 90-Day Plan too. I've also hired my second assistant to help me facilitate all of this. Those are the big ones, but it is just one more thing after another. I decided this 90-Day Plan, I was going to work on an SOP document for my business because this is something that keeps getting pushed to the wayside.

When I hired my first assistant, I said, “Let's make an SOP of everything we do in the business.” It just kept getting pushed aside, like saved for later. Then when we hired the next assistant, same thing, and I brought it to them, I said, “Look, no new projects until we wrap up the other projects and get this done. Because when we're onboarding new people, it's like we're reinventing the wheel and we need to quit doing that.”

Racheal Cook: I love, love, love that you've identified “Hey, this is something we've been pushing off. Because let's face it, some of these things that we have to do as entrepreneurs are not fun. This is not the sexy part of entrepreneurship, sitting down and documenting your processes. But it is the work that feels like you're maybe slowing down during that 90-day period when everything else is paused because you're doing that. But then you can speed up in the 90 days and the 180 days, 360 days later, it's amazing what changes there.

You brought up something I think is really important. You said you are creating a 12-month content calendar. This year has been all about creating the content and next year, you're just going to rinse and repeat. Tell me about this because the content is a major sticking point for a lot of people. A lot of people get stressed out over creating content, but you've got a new approach. Tell me about that.

Libby Wilson: I do. I learned this from Sean in one of our masterminds. She was like, “Libby, I think your content works because you always have enough clients and your business is going, why are you creating a bunch of new content?” I was like, “Oh my gosh, you're so right.” But as a doctor, I love to teach my patients and so I have so many things that I want to tell them.

I sat down, actually my daughter was at swim practice and I was waiting for her and I had my little notebook and I just mapped out something like “What are the most important key concepts that I want my patients to know about?” I was delivering this topic in multiple different ways. I have this weekly Zoom call with my clients, and we talk about a topic but then I also write a blog. I also have this Best Life Challenge Group which is my free Facebook group.

I'm like, “What if I just picked one topic per week and that was the topic for all of these things?” I really brainstorm the most important things and how I can coordinate them all. It was really easy. Literally, I mapped it all out in this one swim practice and then all it took was creating it. Every month we just look at what are the topics for the month, the topic for the Zoom call the first week of the month correlates with what The Best Life Challenge is for that month and the blog correlates with the topic that I prepped for the Zoom call. It's all the same information delivered in different formats. It's all being stored neatly and organized in my computer. Next January, we don't have to talk about what we are going to talk about, we already know.

Racheal Cook: I love that. This is a huge shift because content marketing is so powerful. It can be an amazing way to grow your business. But I think too often, entrepreneurs create what I call couch-potato content. They create it once, that week maybe there's a lot of noise about it. Then that content gets buried. It's in the archives, it is not working for you and it's not working for your business.

When you're always, always, always creating, in any part of your business, but you're not promoting what you've just created, you're never going to move ahead, you're never going to see the efficiency and optimization you could if you really drill down and think about “How does content really work for my business?”

I love this because as a doctor who has a business, the content serves a little bit of a different purpose and in a different way. There's a different relationship your clients and potential clients have with content compared to a marketing business or a coaching business. I really love that your content is almost like a library of resources that you're just going to be highlighting again and again.

You really won't have to recreate anything. You're doing the hard work once and then constantly promoting it, pulling things out, and making sure everybody knows like, “Hey, here's our library resources we're going to go through.” Every single year you'll hit everything and it's now working for you.

Libby Wilson: Yes. You mentioned something that I have learned from you too, is that people need to hear things multiple times. I sometimes think I just tell them something one time and they're going to remember it for the rest of their life. That's not true for me. It's not true for them either. So it's good to have these things coming at them from multiple different avenues.

The same information coming in the email newsletter, on Facebook, on the blog, and all of these things doesn't have to be the exact same thing but the same concept just told in a little bit different way. Sometimes just the wording of one post versus another will catch somebody a little bit differently. It's information overload so there are so many things coming at us so people need to hear these things again and again and again.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. This is one thing that I hope everyone listening really takes away because if content is a sticking point for you, research used to be 20 years ago, they would say you need to show it seven times before it really sticks for people. That has probably gone up two or three-x simply because the sheer volume, like you said, of information overload, we really have to be sharing the same message 20, 30, 50 times.

Anybody who's followed me, you've heard me say the same things over and over again. That's why so many of our clients are like, “Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.” They hear me say the same things over again because it's that consistency. Anyone who has been around business for a long time picks their core message and they just keep coming back to it. Again, it's the metronome of their business. It's just keeping pace and helping your clients attuned to what you're talking about.

Libby Wilson: We need to be reminded. That's what I love about a lot of your content too, Racheal, I know a lot of the things you teach now, but just listening to your podcast, every time I'm like, “Okay, yes, I needed to be reminded of this.” I do a lot of mindset work. This is something new that I've done since I left my family practice but every morning I start with journaling and I'm trying to get my brain into a good spot to manage all this coming at me.

But then as the day goes on, you start to divert back to your old ways and you need to be reminded. That's what you do in the podcast. It's like you just remind us of these core tenants that are so important. It's like we know them but we're forgetting, we're drifting back to the old ways and Racheal's reminding us again. That's what I love about the consistency of the content that you provide to people that follow you.

Racheal Cook: It's again another parallel to helping people with their health and their wellbeing. It is so easy to drop a habit that you know is good for you or to get off track a little bit. I even think about for me, one thing I wear my Oura Ring, anybody who's in functional medicine, you all know the Oura Ring. I start tracking things like my sleep and it's so easy to be like, “Oh, a week and a half has gone by and my sleep score has not been good, I'm not getting enough movement, or this has changed.”

That reminder all the time is so crucially important because it's not what you do once in a while that helps your business, it's what you do consistently. Same with anything: your health, your wellness, your relationships. It's not what you do once in a while. It's what you do consistently that will make the biggest difference. I love that.

Libby Wilson: And prioritizing a few things like what are the really important things for you now. You think about that 90-Day plan, same thing with your health, there are so many things to focus on and I think it's so easy, I try to avoid shiny-object syndrome. There's always like, “Oh, I'm on this plan. I'm going to do this,” and I see this little pop up of something, it's like, “Oh, maybe that's the better way.” It's like, “No, just stick with the plan.”

I tell my clients this all the time. It's working. It just takes time to see it. We tend to sometimes, like a month in, think “This isn't working. I'm going to give up and try something different.” We haven't given enough time to actually see the fruits of the labor that we're putting forth in business and in health both.

Racheal Cook: Well, in a lot of ways, it's just hit me, hustle culture is very similar to diet culture. We have been programmed as a society to be very instant gratification, quick fix, if I'm not seeing results within a week, then I'm going to jump to the next thing. This is why so many people have destroyed their health through all of this bad information, misinformation, terrible crash diets, and trendy health things end up hurting everybody.

It's happening in business too. We have to be so aware of it. We have to be so discerning and come back to the basics, come back to the simple things because these aren't sexy things but they make a huge difference.

Libby Wilson: Absolutely. I say this in my business, and it's true for my patients, but it's also true for business too. It's not complicated, but it's not easy. Don't confuse simple and easy because they are not the same thing.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. It's really hard to stay consistent. Just human nature, it takes a lot of practice. That's why we have a full 12 months of practicing this 90-day process because it does take practice for it to not just become like a one-time thing that you did and maybe saw some results. The results come when you're cumulatively practicing. It's like compound interest in your business. It’s when you're doing it again and again and again and again.

Libby Wilson: Absolutely. I didn't realize how many parallels there are with just business and actually the same health things that I'm telling my patients until we are having this conversation today. But you're absolutely right.

Racheal Cook: Well, I keep coming up with these myself just because I've gone through my own health journey with my own functional medicine practitioner. I'm just like, “Okay, yeah, there's a parallel here.” It's so fascinating to me. I love being able to connect with clients who can also see how these things are interconnected.

One thing you shared when you sent an email to me recently was that you really got a lot out of watching how we run the business when it comes to thinking about boundaries, working with your team, and working with your clients. I'd love for you to share a little bit more about what has changed for you there because I think for a lot of women entrepreneurs, we tend to over deliver to the point of not just over delivery, it can almost be like a codependent relationship with our business or our clients, where suddenly we are depleted all the time, because there is no boundary. I'd love for you to share a little bit about what happened for you over this past year as you got more clarity.

Libby Wilson: I love that. One thing I love about what you share in The CEO Collective is the inner workings of your business. It's not you telling us how to do it. It's you like, “Yeah, I'm in this with you guys. This is what I do. That works for me.” I remember several times thinking, “Oh, you're allowed to do that.” But I think the biggest mental thing for me was when I was a family doctor, it was an insurance-based practice. I had lots of patients but it was free because their insurance paid for it.

When I switched to my functional-medicine practice and it was a cash-based practice, I had this thought that was definitely holding me back, that they're paying me a lot of money and so I need to give anything and everything of me to make that worth it for them. That meant if they texted, I was going to answer messages all the time.

I tried to create some boundaries there but I was struggling to hold them firm because I just had this belief that they're paying me so much money. If I don't do all of this, they're going to leave, then my business is going to implode, and I'm going to have to go back to the family medicine way of doing things which I definitely didn't want to do.

Then I saw what you did and it's that being a member of The CEO Collective, I can't text you any day I want to just ask you a question, but you have regular support that you teach your clients how to access, you're there consistently. We know we have questions that we can come on Thursday and have them answered.

If it's more urgent, pop in the Facebook group and get support from everybody, but I felt so taken care of, but yet not that you had to give me all that I was thinking I had to give my clients. I was like, “I think that this is a great value. I am so thrilled and so I'm sure my clients will think the same thing if I just explain to them how it's going to work.” It absolutely does.

Racheal Cook: This is a huge shift. This is such a huge shift and we spend so much time answering questions and working this out with a lot of our clients in The Collective because, again, it's the over delivery, it's the belief that you have to be available 24/7 and this is something like we have to deprogram people because we've been brainwashed. We have been brainwashed by society to believe that your highest value is to be available 24/7.

I remember when I was going through my personal health journey, and I don't know if you know this or not, when I first started having severe anxiety, panic attacks, and adrenal fatigue, I was in corporate working 85 hours a week and I had a little BlackBerry, and everybody remember BlackBerry?

Libby Wilson: Yes, I had one.

Racheal Cook: That thing would go off and I could feel my chest tighten. I felt like I was on a leash all the time. Prior to that, no one really had the expectation that people would be available 24/7, prior to cell phones becoming just part of everybody had one, they would have had to call your landline to reach you. That was not expected. People didn't have some expectation to answer emails or to answer phone calls once they were at home.

But when I was in consulting with that freaking Blackberry, I was starting to get panic attacks because I had no time. I was always on call. That was a huge decision for me when I started my business. I was like, “I cannot do this. I cannot have panic attacks because the phone is triggering me so much.” For me, that was one of the major things that had helped me to start thinking about “How do we set boundaries in our business that are more realistic?”

A lot of people have struggled with this. I remember I have an auto reply on my email racheal@rachealcook.com and I'll update it once in a while. But I had someone who was so offended that I had an auto reply that said, “Hey, I prioritize taking time off. Here's when I'll email you back,” and they were just like, “This is unacceptable. You should reply within 15 minutes.” I was like, “No, that is not how this is going to work.”

I love hearing that it says setting the boundaries and it's also giving a lot of expectation setting. Because I think truly, most people are reasonable people and if you lead with “This is how we run things. This is to honor our whole team and honor you. Here's what's going to happen. Here's how this is going to move forward,” most people are reasonable people. They’re going to be like, “Okay, cool,” and they're okay with waiting to get the reply that they need. It'll only be a couple of people who will really be annoyed or upset about it. Those are not your people. Those are not your ideal clients.

Libby Wilson: Exactly. I realized, and you model this to me, I needed to create a business that worked for my patients but also worked for me and that I was part of that equation as well; that my wants, needs, desires, and what I needed for myself were equally important; trying to create a system that encompasses that all and realizing that I tried a long time to be everything for everybody.

You know what that got me? Super severe adrenal fatigue and a life that I wanted to run and hide from. I found myself thinking I was going to escape that but then recreating it and the boundaries are super helpful. I pretty much work nine to four, Monday through Friday, and occasionally, my kids will be busy and my husband will be working. I'll have something to do in the evening. But if I'm answering messages in the evening, I schedule the send for the next day during business hours because I don't want to create this like, “Oh, she answers messages on Thursday nights,” because I don't want to have to answer messages on Thursday nights.

Racheal Cook: It is absolutely expectation setting there. I love what you just said that you realized you had to create a business that not only worked for your clients, but that also worked for you. That is a revolutionary thought. It seems so obvious in a lot of ways, but at the same time, there are so many people who are in businesses that are not working for them.

That leads to burnout, that leads to people just throwing in the towel saying, “I can't do this. It'd be easier to go back to what I had before because it wasn't as stressful.” It is really a huge shift. That's a huge shift, Libby, in a year that you set your business up to really work for you. Tell me a little bit about how setting your business up this way, implementing these 90-Day Plans, getting more rinse and repeat, how has that worked for you? What has the result been for you personally, outside of the business results?

Libby Wilson: Oh my gosh, my relationships in my family are so much stronger. I've been married for 25 years. I have two daughters. They're 16 and 13. I had a note for my 13-year-old on my desk this week. It said, “Mom, you know how you and Dad used to put notes in my lunchbox when I was little? I wanted to leave you a note. I love that you're home and that you're there for me when I need you now.”

That's what allowed me to do is that I work from home, which can be challenging at times, but I've created a life that I can be the wife that I want to be, I can be the mom that I want to be, I can take care of myself, and I can also take excellent care of my clients. One doesn't have to supersede the other, they can all happen in unison.

I just recently shifted my workday to starting at nine instead of starting at eight. I had this elaborate morning routine that I liked to get up, I like to read, I like to have my coffee, I like to take a walk. There's all this I want to cram in and I was trying to do it before eight o'clock in the morning and I thought, “No, you're the boss. You get to choose. You can start at nine if you want to.” That just freed me up to have extra time and I love the choices that I've created for myself and then the control that I have to be there for my girls, for my husband, and myself, to take care of myself.

Racheal Cook: Yeah, taking care of yourself is one of the things we talk about over and over and over again because we often, by default, put ourselves last on the list. I say all the time, you have to protect the asset and the asset is you, you are the most valuable asset in your business. If you were to slow down, if you were to get sick, if you were to not be operating at your best, highest level, it's going to create a cascade of challenges in your business.

I love this simple shift of instead of starting at eight, I'm going to start at nine and I get to add a walk into my day, I get to have some breathing room, and I get to have some journaling time. These are the choices you get to make. It's okay to start at nine. I don't even start until 10 most days to be honest.

Libby Wilson: I'm a super morning person so I get up pretty early, so just naturally, I get to bed early too. That just really works for me but I love that you can create what works for you. If you want to start at 10, you can. I realized when I made that shift, I was like, “You have a jerk for a boss and that boss is you. You don’t need to be a jerk.” I think I'm a really nice boss to my assistants.

If they make a slight little error in something so that they make a little tiny mistake and say, “Oh, my gosh, I messed this up, I'm going to message the person and fix it all, no problem.” I'm like, “Oh, it's fine. It happens. Just tell them, be honest what happened, and we can fix this.” But I realized when I make that tiny little mistake, when I forget to dot the I and cross the T, what I told myself was a completely different story. “How could you have done that? I cannot believe you messed that up. Are you kidding me, Libby?” It was this really terrible thing that was going on in my brain where I would never expect anyone else to achieve that level of perfection so I've been working on that too.

Racheal Cook: That's huge. Again, a lot of us struggle with this. You can be your own worst enemy. I think it was Brené Brown who said, “Speak to yourself the way you would speak to your best friend.” Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why are we so cruel to ourselves? Honestly, we can beat ourselves up. I think when you're an entrepreneur, there's a lot of opportunities to beat yourself up because there's so much that you're responsible for.

But we've got to give ourselves a break. That shift is huge too. Because when you give yourself a break and allow yourself to just be a human having a human experience, now you're giving your clients permission to not be perfect all the time, they're watching you be imperfect, they're watching you make a couple of mistakes but just continue moving forward knowing it's better to be 80% instead of trying to achieve 100% all the time, and you give yourself permission, your team permission to be human as well because they're going to make mistakes. They're going to not always get it right.

I think this is one of the things as entrepreneurs, as you continue to grow, perfectionism is one of the big things I think holds a lot of women back in their business. It holds them back from hiring people, from retaining great team members, from letting go of control because they're so worried that no one's going to do it the way that they want it done or that they used to do it.

These are really toxic mindsets that a lot of us, again, have to deprogram and get away from and know that your 80% is enough. Your 80% is still going to get you where you want to go. It's going to get your clients where they want to go, get your team where they want to go. But when we're always striving for 100%, sometimes that is just going to cause a lot of dysfunction.

Libby Wilson: I had this realization, no one really likes perfect people.

Racheal Cook: No, they’re annoying.

Libby Wilson: They’re annoying. When I see somebody that's so perfect, I think, “Man, I couldn't live up to that person,” and I just don't feel super connected with them. What I feel connected with are authentic people. That's what you have modeled in your business, Racheal, is that you're authentic and you're real and you. You show us the ups and the downs, and the highs and the lows, and you're real honest about that. I think that's what draws people to you and that's what drew me to you.

I try to be that way with my patients too. It's like, “Yeah, we're having pizza tonight. I don't eat perfectly. I normally exercise in the morning. I didn't really feel like doing that this morning so I didn't.” I'm really open and honest about that with my patients because I don't want them to think that I'm this perfect person on a pedestal that I'm wanting them to try to be like, no, I'm a real person struggling through all this stuff with you too. They relate to that so much better. I think that is another parallel between our businesses, between business, entrepreneurship, and health too.

Racheal Cook: Absolutely. Well, as we wrap this conversation, which has just been so fun, I would love for you to share what would you tell somebody who is looking at The CEO Collective, is looking at joining us, what would you share with them about whether or not they should join us?

Libby Wilson: Oh gosh, this year has been such a year of growth for me. One of the things that's made my business such a success is learning that other people have answers that I could maybe find on my own, but would take me a long time. Hiring someone who's already figured out the answers, has a system that works, and a support there is going to accelerate your results big time. I am so glad that I invested in myself and made these changes. I would just recommend that you give it a try because you won't be disappointed.

Racheal Cook: Oh, thank you so much. I just so appreciate everything that you've shared with us and that you have been such an amazing part of this program, that you saw these incredible shifts in your business and your life. As we wrap up and close out, can you tell us two things? One, about the book that's coming up, because I know you have been working on that and it'll be coming soon. I think it'll be a topic that a lot of people will be interested in. Two, where people can find more about you and your work.

Libby Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. The book is available now. It is on amazon.com. It's called The Path of Intention: Five Habits to Optimize Your Health and Create a Life You Love. It's all about getting out of the autopilot default path, choosing really where you want to go, then making sure you're taking steps to get you there.

That has been a really, really fun book to write. It's available on amazon.com. It’s the best place to get the book. My business is called Best Life Functional Medicine and its bestlifefunctionalmedicine.com. I work with patients really only one-on-one in the states of Ohio and Florida where I'm a licensed medical practitioner, but I do have an online adrenal program that anyone can take and it's the DIY version of how I heal my adrenals and how I heal them for my patients too, which is the first thing I do in all my patients that work with me one-on-one.

I'll tell you what, in the hundreds of tests that I've done on patients for adrenals, no one is normal. This is what happens beneath the surface before chronic disease happens. For people that resonate with my messaging, these busy moms that are trying to do it all, our adrenals are tanking right beneath us.

I was somebody who’s like, “Perfect physical exam from the conventional medicine standpoint, you're fine, see you in a year.” When I tested my adrenals, they were tanked. My adrenals were one of the worst. I've seen a couple people beat me but they were bad. This is all like, “Conventional medicine told me I'm fine, but I knew intuitively I wasn't.” I have such a passion for helping fix things that people have been told there isn't an answer for.

Racheal Cook: I love it. Well, I hope anyone who found value in hearing about what you have been working on will check out the book, which I'm sure as you're reading this, now we got to read through it again and see, “Okay, what are the parallels between life and business?” because again, there are a lot. I think anyone who is looking for more support around getting more energy, getting more vibrancy, and knows that their adrenal problems are part of it should definitely be following Libby because she is just amazing and has so much great content that she shares about this. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Libby Wilson: Thank you so much for having me, Racheal. This has been super fun.

Racheal Cook: I love this conversation with Dr. Libby. I hope you did as well. There are so many parallels between our work and I find this often with many of my clients who are doing deeply transformational work. Because it truly isn't about looking for the quick fix. It's not about perfectionism. It's not about making everything super complicated. It's about finding the systems that work for you, the systems that might feel hard to implement because they are the basics, they are the things that are very rinse and repeat, but over the long term create massive momentum and progress.

I hope you really enjoyed this conversation and if you want to learn more about The CEO Collective, we are taking applications. That's right. The CEO Collective is now by application only. If you are interested in learning more about The CEO Collective and how you can create this transformation in your business, I would love for you to head over to theceocollective.com/apply.

When you apply, you will be invited to also attend a private training that I am hosting on how you can truly create a business that works for you, that creates that freedom, that flexibility, that financial independence that you are looking for. I would absolutely love to have you there. Okay, hope this was a helpful episode for you and I cannot wait to talk to you again next week.