The Hardest 5 Years of My Life

I don’t think you’re going to mind, but…

I’m calling an audible on this email.

Honestly, I was supposed to write to you today about copyrights– but between horrific national news of yet another mass shooting and my own personal family stress lately, I’m not in the mood to talk copyright stuff.

During the time I’ve built my company, I’ve had the roughest personal time of my entire life.

🧠 I had brain surgery.

🩸 My Dad got cancer and I became his caregiver.

💔 My Dad passed last summer, breaking my heart.

😢 My Mom has been very ill for a while now, and has been in the hospital for the past 2.5 weeks.

In between those capital T traumas I’ve had little bumps along the road too: lost friendships, a big move, house stress, my own health challenges, business stress, etc.

I know the last few years have been hard for you, too.

And so often you reach out to me asking me how I’ve “kept it all together” (spoiler: I haven’t!) or to share how inspired you are that I’ve soldiered on (what choice do I have?).

So I thought I’d break my weekly Thursday tradition – if you don’t mind 😉 – and chat with you about how I’m keeping (some of) it together.

I want to give you some concrete examples too :)👇

The Question //

How do you manage your business and life stress?

The Answer //

Not well, necessarily! 🤣 But here are 3 specific things that help me manage my ever-growing business while my life has been stressful:

01. Prune

The first thing I do in my business when I have intense moments of life stress is to prune back what doesn’t need to be there.

For me, that’s anything that’s excess or just for fun like some social media since that takes up a lot of time but isn’t totally necessary. I also reschedule any meetings that aren’t time sensitive and push off any new launches, if needed.

I focus on my core business components:

a) customers (answering their questions via my community + email)

b) core content (planning / recording podcast episodes + writing these emails + SEO blog posts)

c) CEO tasks (high-level strategy and delegating the implementation of my ideas and campaigns)

02. Wave the 🏳️

I’ve actually never done this before, but this most recent situation with my Mom has caused me for the first time in my life to say, “I’m not OK” when people have asked.

I’ve let people know I’m really struggling, asked for help, and had to let a LOT go (including whether people are mad at me for disappointing them in having to do what’s best for me right now).

03. Evergreen Content

Speaking of core component (b) above, I make sure that any content I’m creating right now is evergreen content — meaning that it has a long shelf life and leads people to my top of funnel resource (for me, my free legal workshop).

That means that lip sync reels, blogs with no purpose, or pointless Facebook posts take a back seat (tbh, I’m not doing any of these anymore anyway!).

I’ll be honest — my business sort of runs like a well oiled machine these days. So it’s easy for me to put this “paired back” system into place… because it’s not really that far off of what I run day-to-day.

But that ^ is SUPER intentional on my part. My life circumstances made me build such a successful business. I haven’t had time for BS or lots of doom scrolling.

And my business is stronger for it.

So while you might not be able to change your life’s circumstances — you may be able to use it to fuel your business’s success.

A lot of the things you feel are so urgent and pressing right now are likely either:

1. not that urgent, or
2. not that useful to ultimately moving your business forward

Even if it doesn’t feel like it right now, your hardships might make that super apparent and help you ultimately grow as a CEO and a company.

PS: I shared 3 quick tips on how to make sure your contracts actually stick! Take 5 mins to listen to my latest podcast episode of On Your Terms here!