[00:00:00] I don't build my business for my best days, and if you do, your business may be fragile. Most entrepreneurs I know, especially the high achieving women that I work with, build their businesses around peak capacity when they have their sharpest thinking, their highest energy, their most motivated version of themselves.

But here's what no one really talks about, especially in the business space. Capacity is not fixed. It changes, especially for women. It changes with your health. It changes with your family. It changes with your grief. It changes with your season of life. And when your business is designed as if you have the same capacity every single day, then eventually something is gonna give.

Today I wanna talk about what it actually means to lead when your capacity changes. Because mine did, and the way my business held, told me everything I needed to know about what I'd actually built in my business. 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 with candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, 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. We are kicking off a new conversation here. On the show, and I think it's so important because the more I talk to women entrepreneurs, the more I see that one of the biggest challenges we're all facing in our businesses and in our lives is we set the bar so high we expect and we plan as if we're always gonna be at a hundred percent.

But that's not the reality for a lot of us. We have so many other things going on in our lives, and the moment that we run into a hiccup where we can't be at a hundred percent, then we beat ourselves up so badly. So I wanna have this conversation around how do you actually lead with the real capacity that you have and plan around the real capacity that you have, because.

Trying to be at a hundred percent all of the time. It's an impossible task. It's impossible for any normal human to be at a hundred percent, a hundred percent of the time. We are not machines, but we live in a world that expects us to be the same level of productivity all day, every day, every week, every month, every year.

As someone who was raised with a disabled parent, this has been probably something I'm hyper aware of compared to other people. Growing up with a disabled parent, you always have to be thinking ahead and you can tell when your disabled parent has maybe not slept well the night before and suddenly she's not as strong that day, and we would see these patterns all the time.

So you naturally start to plan, not. For when they're gonna be at their best. You plan for when they're gonna be at their worst. I had this conversation with my mom a year ago when I was deep into triaging for my parents. Both of 'em needed so much more help. It became really clear we had to move mom into memory care, move dad into senior care, sell their house, all of these things.

I've shared a bit about this on the podcast, but I remember very clearly having this conversation with my mom. And she was not happy about the wheelchair van we had just purchased for her. She preferred her old van, her new wheelchair van had a ramp that came out of the side, so we could literally just wheel her right in and then strap the wheelchair into the van and go off, run her errand, take her to the doctor, so on so forth.

She didn't like that van. She did not like riding in her wheelchair. But when I knew we needed to get this van. Was when it was no longer safe to transfer her in and out of the other one. The other van had a lift seat, so she could actually sit in the passenger seat of the van and the seat. You'd push a button and the seat would come out of the [00:05:00] car and drop down to the level of her wheelchair, and we could transfer her from the wheelchair into that seat.

But over the years, mom's strength was declining and she had fallen multiple times trying to transfer, and it got to the point where. It was taking more than one caregiver to, to transfer her. So I knew this was no longer a safe option. We had to change what we were doing given the reality of our situation, given her actual capacity.

But mom did not like this at all, and I remember her looking at me, you know, pleading, can I just get the other van back? I will work harder. I'll do more exercises, I'll get stronger so that I can transfer. And it was really hard to look at my mom and say, mom, I can't plan for your best days. 'cause your best days aren't the reason we had to get a different van.

It's the worst days. It's the days where you're not well, and I have to get you to the doctor. ASAP. I have to get you up to the hospital, ASAP, and it's faster and safer for everyone to just wheel you into that van and strap the wheelchair down than to get multiple people to transfer you from the wheelchair to the lift seat.

Now granted mom was going through cognitive decline at the time, I, I remember just being bewildered, like, what are you talking about, mom? This is no longer safe. But it's such a good example of we all want to plan and make decisions around when we are at our best. And the reality is if we're making all of our decisions.

Based on us being at a hundred percent. Then when you're not at a hundred percent, you're setting yourself up for so much unnecessary struggle. It doesn't have to be so difficult, and this is a lesson, yes, I learned early on having a disabled mom, but it's also when I learned early on when I got.

Diagnosed with chronic pain and fatigue. When I first got diagnosed, there were a lot of times where I just could not get outta bed. I was using all of my energy just to, you know, take care of myself very basically get a shower, and I was so exhausted and in so much pain for months at a time that I knew I had to prioritize my health.

And when I started this business, I had to make that the first constraint. I only have this much capacity. If I only have a few good hours every day to do meaningful work, then I have to make sure that everything I'm doing is going to set me up for success instead of for struggle. Then I got pregnant with twins.

And so of course I not only had a chronic illness to contend with that was taking up my capacity. I also had, you know, babies that I was trying to navigate around. So I intentionally designed my business with these constraints in mind. If I only had 20 to 25 hours a week where I could stay focused, do high level deep work and.

The rest of the time needed to be invested into taking care of myself first and foremost. 'cause if I can't take care of myself, then nothing else works. Time to take care of my family, time to do other things in my life. If I didn't have that constraint, it would be so easy for me to overwork and then to have a cascade of negative effects, right?

So that constraint was actually a huge. Plus for me very early on, because it made me. Be very intentional about my business. Everything from the programs and services I decided to offer the structure of my team, how my business operates, the way I do marketing, the way I do sales, the way I do everything in my business is run through this filter of does this work with the capacity.

That I actually have, and I initially gave myself that capacity of 20 to 25 hours a week. It was enough time, about five hours a day where I could be really focused, get meaningful work done, and still have the time I needed to take care of myself, take care of my family, take care of other things that matter to me.

Well, last year I really got to see the. Structure and strength of my business because when I had to go in and triage my family, my parents, and basically run their life for a whole year, I no longer had 25 hours a week. I really only had about five hours a week. So my team and I had to [00:10:00] make surgical level decisions about what was and wasn't essential for me to do in the business.

We made some decisions that were changing the way we were approaching things. For example, I didn't have time anymore to do three or four podcast interviews a month. Um, if I only had five hours a week, I couldn't give a whole one or two of those up every week to do an interview. I needed to shift to a different attract strategy.

So we leaned into a different strategy, a different system. I hired somebody to run ads for me, and we were able to keep momentum going. While removing me from that part of the equation, I knew that I was still gonna need an hour or so to manage my team, check in with my team, make sure everything operationally was good, answer questions.

I needed a few hours to show up for client calls that I was committed to because that was a non-negotiable for me. I wanted to be able to continue those calls with my clients, but everything else, we figured out another way that didn't require me. Allowed us to lean on our systems, allowed us to lean on the infrastructure of the business, allowed us to lean on the team and allowed us to lean on the assets that we had.

And even coming through that year, you know, the end of the year when mom was on hospice and then after her funeral, I really did not have. Any capacity come back right away. And I think this is something that took me a while to wrap my head around. I think somewhere in the back of my head, I had assumed that when my mom passed, it's like a switch would flip and I would just boom, be able to go right back from the five hours a week I was giving my business to 25 hours a week.

And that was not the case. That was not the case at all. And it was such a huge example to me about how we put so much on ourselves. I had a conversation with my therapist around the time of my mom's funeral, and I told her, I was like, wow, I feel like I just got my whole life back again. All of the responsibility of taking care of my parents, like that's off my plate.

My dad's settled. He's fine. He doesn't need me the way mom needed me. I feel like I just got all this time and energy and mental space back, and I feel like I should get back into work. And she was like, okay, let's pause. Let's think through this. Because the reality is she knew that if I tried to flip a switch and go from five hours to 25 hours, that was the equivalent of going from like zero to a hundred for me.

And she was really cautioning me against replacing caregiving with work and using my business and productivity to avoid grief. So I'm really grateful for that conversation because it's one of the craziest experiences I've ever been through in my life. Navigating. These last few months because there are days where I get so excited.

I have so much, um, new ideas and new enthusiasm for what I'm working on in the business. And I've been able to do some cool, awesome things that I'm really proud of and excited to share with you all, um, over the coming weeks. But then there will be days where I feel like I get hit by a grief truck and I cannot function.

Do not have the mental clarity. I do not have the emotional capacity where it's like all I want to do is cry and sit in bed. So I think this is such an important conversation because that's how life is, right? We all have situations in our life where we can't go from zero to 100. We can't stay at 100 a hundred percent of the time, like that's not realistic.

And sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to ease back in to things. We have to give ourselves permission to take our time with transitions in our life, especially major transitions in your life, whether it is. A loss or a diagnosis or moving or anything, you know? And I've seen and experienced so many of these myself, but I've also seen them with clients who are moving from one city to another, and there are so many things that go into moving.

And that's not a negative thing per se, that's taking your capacity up. But it does take like time on your calendar. It takes all the cognitive capacity, it takes all the emotional capacity, like it takes capacity to go through any major transition in your life. And I feel like we all need to give ourselves a lot more grace.

And give ourselves [00:15:00] a lot more permission to build the infrastructure in our lives and our business that actually meets us where we are instead of expecting us to be Superwoman every single day of the week. So when I'm talking about capacity, what am I talking about here? There's a few levels to capacity because it's really easy to believe.

It's just like what's on your calendar. How many hours do you have dedicated to doing something, to working or whatever, and time is a part of it, right? That's one way we can track our capacity. If your calendar is slammed, then clearly you, your calendar is maxed out. You have no more time to do anything else, but there's other types of capacity that we have to consider.

I think about your physical capacity as sp someone with chronic fatigue with chronic illness. Physical capacity is huge for me. Uh, this is my actual energy, my fatigue level, um, how I feel in my body. Am I in pain? Am I not in pain? Am I sleeping well? Am I not sleeping well? Um, it could be. Like, sometimes I'll get these nerve tingles that will drive me absolutely crazy, but it's a, it's a specific symptom that I struggle with, right?

So all of those things can impact your physical capacity, and I think we all know what it feels like when you're sick or. Broke a bone and be limited by that physically, but sometimes, especially at this stage of life, let me tell you, perimenopause has taken a toll on me on top of the chronic illness.

Sometimes just a bad night of sleep can really impact my physical capacity, and I have to work really hard on taking care of my physical self so that I have the capacity I do have. Then there's also your cognitive capacity. Cognitive capacity is so important, and again, it's really easy to believe that you're at a hundred percent a hundred percent of the time, but when you have chronic illness, let me tell you, the brain fog does not help the cognitive capacity.

The cognitive capacity for me is thinking about how long can you actually stay focused? Does it take you a long time to get into an activity? Can you make smart decisions? Or are you experiencing decision fatigue? Can you think strategically and big picture and abstractly? Or are you losing the thread somewhere?

Are you able to really learn and comprehend and understand? Or is it just, you know, totally going over your head and you listening to something or reading in something and look up and realize I didn't absorb any of that. Cognitive capacity is limited, right? We don't. Operate at a hundred percent cognitive capacity all day long.

I'm sure you've heard of decision fatigue. Decision fatigue is one of the reasons why it's better to do higher level strategic thinking in the morning, because over the course of the day, you have to make so many micro decisions and it does wear away at your cognitive capacity. And if you're suddenly overloaded with a lot making decisions for your parents about senior living and selling their house and all of those things, there might get to be a point where you're just like, I cannot make another decision.

And then there's emotional capacity. Emotional capacity is. When I'm thinking of it, I'm really thinking about your ability to face whatever is in front of you without getting triggered into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It's your stress tolerance, and if you are navigating a really stressful situation, then chances are your emotional capacity is gonna be really limited.

Right. So that is definitely something I've been experiencing a lot. You can be physically fine, but emotionally maxed out. Right? So I've actually been physically pretty good over the last year, physically my, my physical health. I put systems in place where I could take good care of myself, where I was eating pretty well, I was moving my body, I was taking all my supplements, doing everything to make sure that physically I could keep up with what I needed to keep up with.

But emotionally I was zapped. Right? And on the flip side, like you can emotionally feel very grounded and very calm, but still be depleted when it comes to. Your cognitive capacity where you no longer can make another decision, right? If you've ever had your [00:20:00] partner look at you at the end of the day and you feel fine, you're not stressed out particularly high, but you, they just ask, you know, what do you wanna do for dinner?

It's like, I don't care. Just do something. Figure it out for me. So all these things are happening at the same time, and they're changing constantly. The good news is we can all. Do the work to increase our capacity, right? When I am being proactive about taking care of my physical self, I will have higher energy and lower fatigue.

When I am making sure that I am doing the things that help me to manage my stress, I will have more emotional capacity when I am, um, giving myself cognitive breaks and not putting the world on my shoulders like I will be able to make strategic decisions. But when it's all happening at the same time, you know, this is where it can get really maxed out.

And one of the ways that I really understood capacity as someone with chronic illness was hearing about this concept called spoon theory. So spoon theory is this concept. If you've ever heard someone say, I'm a spoony, this is their way of saying I have some sort of chronic illness. And it can impact their physical capacity, their cognitive capacity, their emotional capacity, any of those.

And the way that it was explained by this woman, Christine Mi Mino, if I'm saying her name correctly, is she was trying to explain to a friend. You know how limited she is through the day and how much energy it takes for her to get through the day. And so she grabbed a handful of 10 spoons. She said, imagine every day you're given 10 spoons.

And these 10 spoons each represent a unit of energy. You don't have a hidden reserve when it's gone. When you've used up all 10 of your spoons, then you're borrowing from tomorrow's energy. So let's say that it takes me one spoon to get up in the morning and make myself breakfast. It takes two spoons to take a shower and dry my hair.

It takes another spoon for me to get my kids all to school. You can see every activity takes a spoon. Well, if you get to the end of the day and you're out of spoons. And you start borrowing against tomorrow, then chances are you're gonna have less to work with, right? When you are someone facing chronic illness, this makes so much sense to you because you don't have a hidden reserve, you don't have the ability to just refuel as quickly and easily as other people do.

As a small business owner, I want you to understand that every big thing you're doing in your business. It applies, right? So every decision costs a spoon. Every hard conversation costs a spoon. Thinking time is a spoon. Decision making is a spoon. Having a hard client conversation or hard team conversation, letting someone go on your team making these huge decisions that could impact your business, like those take a lot of mental.

And emotional capacity and sometimes physical capacity too, right? So we're gonna talk about this so much this month because what growth actually requires in your business isn't more hustle. You have to really understand that once your business is off the ground, once your business is pretty successful, like you've built something real.

You can't just multiply yourself and clone yourself to take on more, right? You have to manage with the constraints that you have. And it's not more hustle. It's more buffer, right? You actually need more buffer, and this is the design problem that comes up against small business owners especially.

Especially when you're at that tipping point in your business where what you have is working, but you are maxed out. And now you are at the point where you don't have more capacity to do more. So what do you do instead? Well, if your calendar has no buffer, then your business has no buffer period. If your calendar is scheduled every 15 minutes, um, that is not CEO level productivity.

That is actually going to make it so challenging for you to get to the next level in your business. It's going to make it so challenging for your business to be unshakeable because when you have no buffer in your calendar, then what starts to happen, you have to give up. You have to [00:25:00] sacrifice the time that you actually need for yourself, for your family.

F you know, you, you have to sacrifice in order to handle those things. If your business requires all your spoons on a normal day, then you are overspending. This is something that I think about a lot because as someone who has to really manage my capacity, I actually have a limit for how many calls I'll have a day, and sometimes people think I'm being really.

Probably overly controlling when I say this, but I have a calendar, SOP, and it tells me that my limit for the number of calls I can do a day is three. And in fact, if I have more than two days of calls with three calls a day, I require a down day. So if your business requires you to be at a hundred percent every single day, you are structurally overspending.

You need more buffer. Growth without buffer isn't impressive. It's volatility. Wearing a good quarter's clothes, it's looks good. On the surface, it looks like you have it all together, but underneath, you're secretly wondering, oh my gosh, when am I gonna get a break? And what starts to happen is you start saying things like, when it calms down next month, then I'll rest.

When it calms down next month, then I'll get to do this bigger picture thing that I really wanna do. Structure will absorb the shock of challenges that come up in our businesses. If you don't have any buffer though, it's not going to do a good job absorbing that shock. It's going to cause your business to collapse on itself.

You want your business to be like. Unshakeable, like one of those buildings that they build, the skyscrapers that they build, that have a little bit of sway in them so that they don't collapse during an earthquake. That's what we all need in our businesses. We need the ability for our businesses to move and flow with us, and that's one of the things I love about the way I've structured my business is because of the 90 day CEO operating system that we've designed.

We have. This flexibility built in. And it means that, yeah, our business is going to sway a little bit when my capacity changes or when things happen, but it's not gonna collapse on itself. So as you are listening to this episode, I'm hoping this lands, I really hope this lands, um, because. My goal for everyone, and the reason I'm really doubling down on this conversation is I just went through one of the hardest things that I think anyone can experience and my business held, it continued going without me having to be the Energizer Bunny.

A hundred percent on a hundred percent of the time. It allowed me to step back, not just for a week, not just for a couple weeks, but for almost an entire year. And I realize now what a big deal that is. And I wish more women entrepreneurs had that kind of like strength in their business. I wish more women entrepreneurs had that kind of true freedom and flexibility in their business.

And the only way it's gonna happen is when you stop designing for your best days. But instead you desar, you start designing your business, your infrastructure, your systems, your team, your offers, everything around how would this work if I had to step out of my business? And once you have that designed that way, then suddenly when you know something is coming up or something happens, you can do exactly what I did, which is sit down with your team and say, okay, we're gonna go through the business one thing at a time and we're gonna talk about what is essential for me to do, and what is something I can delegate or handoff or, this is not essential at all.

That is how you build unshakeable businesses. If your business depends on you to be the Energizer bunny, then you are setting yourself up for a lot of stress. You are setting yourself up for something that can collapse the minute you need to step back and take a break. If your business only works when you're fully charged at a hundred percent, then it's this is not a sustainable business.

Our goal is to make sure that we are building in real margin, on purpose [00:30:00] way before you need it. We do not want to build a business that is so dependent on you that you taking care of yourself in some of the hardest days of your life requires you to make decisions that you would never ask anyone else to do.

Right. The days where my mom, I knew she was at the end, not even a question of what was gonna happen and how we were gonna handle me having to step out of the business, it just became, okay, here's how we're gonna manage this. Here's how we're gonna take care of people, and most importantly, here's how we're gonna take care of you, the owner, the CEO, going through this really hard thing.

So we wanna build that into the way you run your business. So something I want you to think about and sit with this week. What has changed about your capacity in the last three years? Not what you wish were true, not what the overachiever in you wants to claim. What has actually changed for you in your health, in your family, in your energy, in your life?

Maybe you're going through a big transition. Maybe you are actively working on an area here in your life. Um, maybe you're navigating perimenopause like I am. Like it doesn't have to be life changing, but chances are your capacity has changed over the last three years. And if your business was. Still designed, and you're listening to this going like, oh my God, this is designed for my best days.

I have to be at a hundred percent, a hundred percent of the time for this business to really work. What would it look like for you to design it for your real life and your real capacity? What would it feel like to you to know that it's okay to take care of yourself, that it's okay to take a break, that it's okay to.

Step back for a little bit and know that everything on the business is gonna be fine, and you don't have to feel like you have to sacrifice, heaven forbid, the last day of your mom's life in order to be on calls for clients. This is what this series is about. It's about making sure that we are bringing your humanity back to your business and taking care of you.

Because if your business isn't taking care of you, then why are we doing this? It should be making your life easier, not harder. It should be supporting you. It should actually be designed based on what really works for you and your life. Today. We're just getting started, y'all. So next week I'm gonna talk more about what growth actually requires, and I promise you it is not hustle.

There comes a point where you've maxed out and there's nothing left. We've got to structurally make some big changes so that your business doesn't require you to be the battery behind it. We want it to be able to be more self-sustaining, more sustainable, and unshakeable when things happen. All right.

I'll talk to you then.