277: Sarah Dawn — Happiness Over Burnout

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill g. One more time. Docsatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. There we are. Oh, today we're talking all about how to grow your business without losing your right. Keep yourself together, do a smart job of your growth, keep yourself in balance while you grow your business. That's, I think the core of our topic today. We're going to talk a lot more with Sarah dawn in just a minute. Hi again, everyone. Welcome to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. So we do shows like this three times a week. We've got a show on growth with a guru about the experience of an entrepreneur in developing their leadership. A tip for from something that happened with one of our clients. All that and more@scalingcoach.com we're approaching our 300th episode now. So anything that you want to know about growing your business people, strategy, execution, cash, leadership, who you have to be in the face of everything to get your business right and to navigate the journey. And that's the topic of today. So I want to welcome the show Sarah Dawn. Sarah is in Scottsdale, Phoenix, Scottsdale area and joins us today. She has deep experience as an entrepreneur, as an attorney. She comes from a remarkable background. She's endured some substantial hardships herself in navigating all of this and she's going to share not only some of that personal experience, but also kind of the work that she's done with clients and how it's evolved into the business coaching that she does today. Share some interesting insights with us. Welcome to show Sarah.

Bill, thanks so much for having me on.

Tell us actually about your background. You have an interesting story and before you started doing this kind of business coaching consulting work, you worked as an attorney for a while. So talk to us about the evolution. I'm guessing it started as a child or something. Actually it did.

It did Twofold. One, I was a little girl with a lot of opinions. So pretty frequently, I remember that second grade teacher when I had my third comment about whatever she was putting in place, it was easy to say, sarah, you should be an attorney. And I thought it was a compliment at the time. I still do. Yeah. A little bit of both. A little bit of also trying to shut me down or appease me in the moment. So that personality in me was there. I'm pretty sure I came out of the womb with it, but I also was looking for something like that, especially as a little girl. I came from poverty. We stood in the food line, we didn't have utilities on our house all the time. And I noticed that that wasn't how it should be. That's not how I was okay with my life being. And I was looking for that other answer. What else? You know, kind of thinking back on my thought processes, I had a little extra wisdom in there than you would expect from most younger children. And I wanted something else. And when I would hear the attorney comment, you know, my friends whose parents were attorneys, they had food on the table, they drove rich people cars like Lexus. And I really latch onto that early. But it definitely stem from, I'm going to create anything out of my life other than what I have right now. I'm not doing this forever. There were some specific times. I remember my mom sitting, you know, probably a little older, about 12 years old, but coming in late at night, I should have already been in bed. And my mom's sitting on the stairs crying. You know, kitchen's dark, and I come in and I remember telling her, we're not doing this anymore. I'm not doing this anymore. This can't be how it is. And that was the attitude I took into everything. I put myself through college, put myself through law school. Certainly wasn't content just working as an attorney for someone else. I built my own law firm. But that hellbent I'm going to make this work is what I put into every single aspect of my work. Nothing was balanced or what. You know, there was never that thought of, what does personal success look like for me? It's, I've got to have the career, success. That's how I'm going to have the life that I want. But I didn't really know what that life looked like other than, you know, having utilities and food, what was the lifestyle I really dreamed of. So I worked, and that's all I did. I had a family, I had a husband, I had kids. But I just worked until my body finally said, you're not doing this anymore for me. You know, slow learner, not going to act like. One quick thing happened. I was like, oh, look, it's all better now. I went through a year that I had walking pneumonia five times. I wore that as a badge of honor. It's walking pneumonia. I can still show up. I can still speak and teach and tend to my clients. And I think our bodies are really smart. They know what we need to keep itself alive and intact. And I was the face of my law firm, and my body knew that's what it needed to attack. And I had a sudden onset of Bell's palsy. Middle of the afternoon on a Friday, not a particularly stressful day. I was joking around with my law partner, and suddenly half of my face just didn't respond. It was paralyzed.

Yeah, that's got to be an unnerving thing, especially as a young person. I have family members who've had Bell's palsy. It's disturbing at any age, but as a young person that you're like, oh, this isn't supposed to happen. Right?

Yeah. And I thought I was having a stroke. I went to the emergency room thinking I had a stroke. And in my work, pulling out of the work habits that I had, I had to come to grips with the fact that at 33, 34 years old, it seemed very logical that I might be having a stroke. Like that was something I had to go, okay, what am I doing in my life and career? That seems like a logical thing that would have happened to me. And fortunately, it was only Bell's palsy. But, man, that's rough. And all you can do is get introspective because my mouth wouldn't even form the F words that I wanted to say with all the frustration that. That it felt from that.

So what happened after that? What'd you do with that experience?

You know, like I said, slow learner. I spent a few months coming up with all the reasons that it wasn't stress induced. That confirmation bias you can you Google will tell you whatever you want to hear. And. But also at the same time, started looking into naturopathic remedies, seeing practitioners, seeing mentors to help me get my body back where it needed to be. And dang it, they were there to help me get my lifestyle where it needed to be, too. And that was one of the things they pointed out to me, is why do you feel like that would be normal, that you would have a stroke at your age?

Right.

Okay, well, it's not. What else are you doing? How's this working for you?

Yeah.

And that was kind of the short game in that first year is realizing this isn't going to work for me and it's not going to work for me long, long term. And the long game in the couple of years to follow was completely replanting everything about my career. I had to look at what parts of my practice did I need to delegate and. Or the people that were already on my team need to let them shine with it and quit trying to keep everything on my own plate. What part of my business needs to just go. What isn't even for me anymore. It ended up replanting me geographically. I was in north Texas. I'm in Scottsdale now. There was a lot that flowed from that that let me see. I can still do this career or parts of this career that I love and I don't have to do all of it. That's not what makes me successful. Doing what I'm really good at is what makes me successful. And I had worked with small business clients throughout my legal practice. And that's the part that I realized. I would sit down with them and we'd go through their LLC documents or their contracts and be like, okay, here's. This is what you need to do. Check the box. I can let that out in my sleep. And then I wanted to talk about the meat of it. What do you want this business to be? What do you want your life to look at as you grow this business? And I realized I don't have to be a lawyer in everything I do. I can do that too. And I can actually make some really great impacts from both the legal clients I've worked with and that experience and my own experience.

Yeah, interesting. So you learned some things about yourself and then you started leaning into the more. Did you just became a lawyer who did some coaching or consulting? How did you navigate the transition into. In doing that? What was the first experience like?

Yeah, I suppose I'm still kind of navigating it and will be for forever to come. Yeah. It started out a lawyer that started doing some coaching. It's funny how things work that the few legal clients that I was, I was like, this is going to freak them out. They're going to think this is weird. I'm going to block them from like my social media, not let them see that I'm doing this as well. They called me out so quick. They found it. They called me out and I got a phone call literally within minutes. And said, why can't I see your social media stuff? And they were the first people, they were the first transition clients that said, no, this is big. This is huge. We're really using this. We want to hire you for this. And that's where I realized, okay, all right, that's what I needed. That this isn't my secret little side project. This is actually something really powerful that I can make some great impact with, and I can go all the way with it and just keep narrowing, I think. And this is what I advise my clients to do. You've never arrived, I've never arrived at. This is exactly what I'm doing, and I'm never going to do anything else. You know, as my coaching business has grown, I do less and less legal work. I've made some great contacts to refer that stuff out. I say no to things that when I first get the call, I'm like, the money's good, but I don't want to do that. I don't do it. I don't care about that money anymore. And that's powerful.

So maybe without embarrassing anyone or breaking any agreements or confidentiality, tell us about some of the client experiences. You've dealt with some people who are control freaks, who are stuck in certain ways of doing these. Talk to us, share some of those with us, because I think it reveals your way of looking at the business.

For sure. I have really kind of narrowed down these five perfect personality types. And who knows, maybe we'll add to it. But everyone I've worked with so far, myself included, falls into these five personality types. On why you're overworking in your business. You don't have the life balance that you need. And it's stopping you from scaling, it's stopping you from growing, but it's also making your life kind of miserable. And I love that you said control freak, because that's one of them. My shining star that I think of. It was a professional services company, pretty good sized company, but still had owner operators in there. The owner operator, she would have to reschedule our meetings and, you know, or cut a short or wasn't mentally there. And I'm like, what you doing? What you working on? And some of it was typical owner operator stuff. Plenty of it was things that I would say, why on earth is that still on your plate? Why would you be doing that? You have 100 employees. Why is this on your plate? And she said, well, I just, I can't find a strong executive assistant. I've looked, I've hired, tried People, I just can't find anybody strong. I said, okay, well with all love, you're probably not the easiest person to work for. So let's, let's look into that. What's going on and what she was doing. I don't care how strong the executive assistant was, what she was doing is managing every single task. You know, and the control freak says, and you know, every, I'm sure plenty of people listening to this podcast are going to be like, oh, the control freak says if I don't do it myself, it won't get done right. So she would give stuff to her executive assistant, very perfectly fine delegating task. And then she would want to double check every single step of the way that the person had done and she would want to make adjustments to every single way that her assistant had done each thing. And she just thought that was the right thing of doing, way of doing it. It didn't mean her assistant was wrong in the way the tasks were completed. It just could have been done a little bit better. So every little step got remanaged by the end of it. This person had no confidence in any task that they could complete. They walked on eggshells. Not because this challenging personality wise, she was actually a really awesome leader as far as how she approached her team. But they didn't feel confident in their ability to complete anything without changes. So everything stayed on her plate no matter how much she delegated it. That takes time to change those habits because it's, well, what if they make a mistake? Oh yeah, they're going to make a mistake. You've got to be okay with that. I have yet to have a neurosurgeon client. I say this all the time. I've yet to have a neurosurgeon client. Your mistake's not going to kill anybody. It's fine. Let it be. Have set meeting times that will review everything. You know, once a week we're going to review everything, but not every little step.

Yeah.

And then that person learns to shine. They learn to see the results you want, manage the results, not the tasks they learn the results you want. And then it's measurable. They've either completed or it's not. But you're not burning yourself out by trying to micromanage every little thing. And you're not disempowering your team by feeling like they have to be managed every single step of the way.

So how did that one go? What did you do to reduce their micromanaging and that, that all that business and how Is it? I'm sure it's a work in progress, but.

Work in progress. Work in progress. But the key was saying delegate results, not tasks. Telling her, you're not going to tell her, I need you to do this, this and this. And actually let me backtrack a little bit. The first key was getting standard operating procedures in place. If the business as a whole was just react as things come to you, then that's really challenging to give guidance because your team needs guidance. Not micromanagement, but guidance. We started with standard operating procedures in general, the things that happen in this business, how are they done? And then move to delegate results, not tasks, and have one meeting. That's not all day long. It's one hour. Pick the most important things and then talk through. Hey, how was your result on this? Okay. It didn't quite meet the expectation. This is how I notice you did these things. This is how I would have done it a little bit different. Then you can go into the meat of the activities behind it. If they did it completely different how you wanted. And I know this is going to make the control freaks cringe because it makes my control freak clients cringe. If they got the result you wanted but did it a different way, it's fine, it's good. It's not just fine, it's good. You're not the only one with ideas. Yeah, it's good. Now you have new innovation. Now you have a team member that feels empowered to innovate in your business and it can be more profitable that way.

The then you also talked about some folks who are stuck in the mud and the type you talked about is traditionalist, right? Yes, about that.

The traditionalist, you know, I'll kind of define it for you and then give you my shining star traditionalist as well. The traditionalist believes they have a mentor or you know, maybe mom, dad, grandpa. That was their example of success. Or you know, in, in my client's case, the business was actually passed down to them from their parents. And they see, they admire the people that came before them. They see the success that they had and they then think they have to repeat the exact same methods, doing everything the exact same way. And that's the only way to be successful. Or if there's another way to be successful, they're dishonoring their legacy by changing things up. My client was in the real estate business and was mid inheriting the business from his parents. And everything was well, what my dad would do, what my dad would do. Great. Your dad was really successful. But even in my business, even just 10 years ago, we didn't have the technology and resources and, like, really cheap tools that we could implement in our business to make things more profitable and easier. If your dad had those, he would have used them. He's not. You're not dishonoring him by making this business easier and more profitable. So take the best parts of what your dad did, but don't marry every single part of it to your own personal dismay or to thwart the growth of your business. We can. I'll be careful naming names also, but we can look at major retailers that have not survived the last five to 10 years, and it's because they were so proud of the way they did things that they were unwilling to shift their business to serve the way people shop now.

Right.

And we see these huge businesses that thought that they would be a cornerstone forever that aren't making it because they're so stuck in tradition that they're not meeting the market demand.

You know, it's a really good point. And I. I think a lot of times when we're running medium and smaller businesses, we look at it and we go, oh, that's why XYZ failed. That's why Sears went out of business, or whatever. But we don't stop and say, actually the same rigidity, the same inflexibility and lack of innovation affects me and my business. And there are things that we do that, you know, we just learned because that I learned this business from the person I bought it from or from where I apprenticed or from my dad or mom or whatever it is, and we miss the opportunity to upgrade that. And we're not necessarily selling it. So I don't know, maybe you make some really traditional product, right. And you're going to then sell that craft approach. Oh, we make the olive oil in this way with all these steps. So you're going to charge an ultra premium process for the fact that it never goes through some stainless steel barrel or, you know, that kind of thing. But for the most part, we're not doing that. Right. We're just doing things in dated ways because nobody's challenged it in our industry. Right.

Yeah. And the key word I hear from clients that I know, you know, I said the key word with the control freak was if I'm gonna. If I want it done right, I gotta do it myself. The keyword I hear from the traditionalist is, well, we just love adding that personal touch. Is this a personal touch that your clients give a crap about? They probably don't. And you actually might be making your client's life less convenient. I've worked with salons that say, well, we just like the personal touch that the client calls to make an appointment. Your client doesn't want to have to call to make an appointment. They want to get on an app at 2 o' clock in the morning when they remembered that they needed their nails done and schedule an appointment that works for them. They don't want the extra tasks. So your personal touch is losing you clientele because you're making it inconvenient for them.

The woman who cuts my hair today has an app kind of thing like that. And if I, as it happens often, she actually is pretty proactive. When I, when she finishes cutting me, she's like, okay, do you want to schedule your next cut? And she knows that it's about six weeks for me, so she'll say, okay, six weeks out is this date, what do you got? You know? And she'll put it in, but every now and then we've had to cancel it or something like that. And I can just text her and say, hey, I can't go Friday, you got anything this weekend? Or can we do it sooner or whatever. And she'll do it all via text. I, I don't want to call and wait till normal hours to call or anything like that or, and I don't even care if she responds immediately. I just don't want to have to deal with it in any like, I don't want to put that much effort into it. Nor necessarily.

That's how buyers work now, right?

Like yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's how customers work now. And this is a great example. She has one option that's automated. She has another one that respects her business boundaries. It's a text. She doesn't have to stop everything and answer a call. So she has a personal touch option that's still convenient for you. Respects her business boundaries and she has tech. Perfect. Whoever your hairstylist is, tell her she got the big applause from Sarah dawn, right?

If I send her something at 10 o' clock at night or whatever, she's not going to respond. But the next morning I'll get a follow up. At some point there is that app built in where if I go and find the text from the last one, I can click on it, find my own spot. And except in my case it's often like, okay, none of those spots work. Can you do anything else for me? And of course you can just by asking. So yeah, it's really great.

Exactly. And and then sometimes it's something that's not even customer facing. That's just, I mean, pardon the words, but it's just a dumb thing to add. This wasn't my client, but it's somebody I heard from. You know, I heard it firsthand story that it was like a sauce company, like hot sauce or barbecue sauce, something like that. And the owner operator, even though, like you said, you know, that's what made me think of it, like you said, some companies, they have. The whole part of their brand is that it hasn't gone through a machine. Fine. There's other people. But this owner operator, the creator of the sauce, insisted he had to personally be the one to put the lid on every bottle. That's ridiculous. No, you don't. Nobody is going to buy or not buy your sauce because you personally screwed every lid on the bottle. What that meant to him is he hadn't taken a vacation since his business opened because somebody had to put the lids on the bottle, and it absolutely couldn't be anyone but him. Your customer doesn't care about that. You're burning yourself out on ceremony and. And it's not scalable. What if a major retailer picks up your sauce? You have to tell them no, because you can't. Your hand can't screw seven or a thousand bottles in a day. Like, no.

You know, it's funny. So I hear a story like that and I. And I can see how it evolves and somebody gets invested in it, but they don't do that thing that you learn. Like, if you ever do improv or learn brainstorming, that kind of thing. And that's a yes and something. Right? So be like, okay, we're known for this personal touch, and we can say every bottle is finished by the owner or whatever. But what if you just said every bottle is finished by a master craftsman and then you can just certify a whole bunch of employees as master craftsmen who could all spin those bottles closed at any hour. Day. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. And. And keep the spirit of it, or if it even matters. The other thing you might want to do is just check if that is the aspect that matters. Right.

Is this actually a part of your brand that. That matters?

Right.

And I think the reason this continues is because the business owner just does what they know. This guy knows how to make sauce. That's his key. He didn't take a break from sauce making and go to business school, which, I mean, I don't know that business school would help that much, but, you know, train himself as a business owner. And that's each one these, these craftsmen, the hairstylist, the salon owner, the graphic designer, they are experts at their field. When would they have learned how to turn this into a scalable business? And that's also the gap in the market that I saw when I said I need to step out and be helping these people. I was an attorney, I didn't know, I didn't know any business owners. We were on welfare. I had to learn the hard way through a lot of pain and then hiring my own consultants to teach me what I needed to know. And I'm like, we need more of that. Because each of these people then sit back in shame when they've burned out. They sit back in shame and kind of put their head down and are embarrassed to say, yeah, but I didn't know this business stuff. Of course you didn't. When would you have learned it? That's not shameful. But you're at a place that you can't scale, your business can't make any more money because it's dependent on the number of hours you work or the number of widgets you turn. And you're hating life. This passion project is a huge pain in your life now because you're burning yourself out. And there's some pretty simple, simple in theory, some work in application, things to do to realize, you know, are you the control freak? Are you the traditionalist? Realize your belief patterns behind these actions to then make some shifts and change your business where it can become what you dreamed it would be when you first started the whole thing, you know.

So we're going to talk about some of the other personality types that you identify and deal with. But before we do that, let me just underscore that some of the things you're talking, talking about, they sound right now in this conversation pretty small business, small craft people. But I have personally coached leaders of companies. 200, 300 million, 500 million, 1,500 million valued over a billion with some of these issues going on. Right? And absolutely. You might hear these as particularly small ones. I don't care what size business you are. They're human leadership traits and we all make them at any stage, right? I've seen leaders of multi billion dollar companies be control freaks, right? We see them in the news sometimes. We'll touch on these five personality types in just a second. Where did, how did you come up with these? Are these your personal ones? Did you combine them from some other things? Is this your observation? It feels like they could be mixed A couple of different ways. So before we talk about what they actually are, maybe share with us how you identify them.

Yeah, this is 100% my. My invention. And it came from the observation of what each person I was coming across needed. And it's. It's kind of my superpower. I've always been able to look at somebody and, you know, they'll be lamenting about whatever their pain is, and I can pick a handful of words out and say, oh, this is what it is. And that went great. When I had a team, I had a small team, about a dozen people, but that worked great. I had one employee that I really struggled getting her to take to the next level. And I would hear her almost every time. She would say, I just don't want to look stupid, but I just don't want to look stupid. And she wouldn't take her skill set to the next level because she didn't feel competent. Now, she would give all these other reasons, well, I'm too busy. I have this. I have this. But the words I kept hearing were, I just don't want to look stupid. And so I could move all of her other excuses aside and realize that's what we needed to attack. And that's what I've done with my clients in developing these five personality types of is. I've heard their words behind their reasons. My control freak client, her reason was she just couldn't find a strong executive assistant. Okay. But I heard her other words in because I have to show her how to do every single thing, and then I'm changing every single thing she does. And when I have her bring it back to me and show me. And that's how all of these were ultimately born. And then when I've presented these both in public, speaking to groups and one on one and gone through this, I have yet to have anyone say, yeah, but I'm this other thing. But I have this completely different problem. They go, oh, yeah, I'm that one and that one. Yeah, help me with that. What do I do?

So we talked about one, the control freak, Right? And then we talked about the traditionalist. And then you were one of them. What was yours?

I was the martyr. The martyr says, no pain, no gain. You know, the martyr fits into so many of our traditional phrases. The martyr says, you have to earn your way to success. You have to pay your dues. Of course, you have to earn your way to success, but you have to pay your dues. It's this cosmic belief that there's some kind of formula in the universe that until I've had so much pain, I'm not worthy of the success that I've built. And I have to keep hurting to show that I've really earned it. I'm not just lucky. Us successful people hate being called lucky because we have put a lot of work into it. But it doesn't mean it has to have been painful in that that's the formula for you've now earned it. I would catch myself doing the most ridiculous things if I would hear my office. When I had my brick and mortar law firm in Texas, my office was at the end of a hallway, and my team was on the other end. If I would hear somebody walking down my hallway, even if I was already, it didn't matter what I was doing, because who cares? My name's on the door. I can be sitting on my hands. I can be actually diligently working. I can play video poker if I want to. But if I heard, it didn't matter what I was actually doing, even if I was busy, if I heard one of my team members walking down the hall, I would hurry up and try to look even busier than I was. Why? But I'm not the only one. Yeah, I would try to work both.

A traditionalist and a martyr. Right. That martyrdom, that suffering, that working harder could show up, and some of these could overlap, but there might be one that is more leading for you.

Yeah. And I don't think any of us are. They're not exclusive of each other.

Yeah.

And yeah, I think that traditionalist, a lot of times can be the. Like you said, the reason for the martyrdom. You know, my grandpa gave his whole life away to build his business. Who am I to just sit back and make it easy? But I would catch myself, like I said, I had a law partner, and I would. Kept myself trying to make sure I worked more hours than him. And he came from a much more wealthy family, you know, a much better upbringing than I had. And if I'm honest, I thought, well, yeah, he naturally belongs here, but I don't. So I have to prove my worth here. And that's. That's tough. Right. But you hear it repeated among business owners that, you know, I especially people that came from less privilege or, you know, a rougher background or that, you know, that first, you know, first kid in the line to actually be able to support themselves financially, they feel like they don't belong. I felt like I didn't belong. So I need to prove that I really did.

Yeah.

And I didn't know to who.

Yeah, yeah. It's just a general thing. Then your next one is multitasker. And I feel like there's a lot of people who do this. Like, oh, I have too many things to do. I'm just going to work. They'll work really hard. They'll work lots of times. They'll get multiple things at once, none of it that well. They're keeping lots of things up. I do this one all the time myself.

Yeah, the multitasker, I'm being nice with that word. You're disorganized. That's what it is. But you hit the nail on the head that they say, I have all this to do. It's going to take. It's quicker. You know, the control freak says it's better if better work product if I do it myself, which is just really not true. But the multitasker, it's a time thing. They have so much on their plate, so many things moving at one time to them. It takes too long to stop setup processes and get it delegated to someone else or automated through technology. It just takes too much time. Their result is they're just reacting. They have no plan. They don't enter their day with a plan. I love that. Which, you know, I'm a little bit of that. This personality too. Not huge, but enough that when I hear the mentor say, well, I start every day with an exact task list of exactly what I'm going to do. And then I, you know, work out at 4am and do all these things, I'm like, no, you don't. Yeah, they probably do. But there's no plan for the multitasker because they're just reacting as things come to them. And that means they can't make a plan for what they want for future growth and they can't get the systems put in place to really maximize their profits because they're just in response mode. But if we can just, like, put it on pause for a week, and I know that sounds like treacherous to some people, but if we can just put it on pause for a week, you're still getting some stuff done. Because doing stuff is the best way to map out those operating procedures. But you're mapping it while you're doing.

So I said, I do this one sometimes. And I would say I probably would always do this forever and screw things up if it weren't for some of the regular routines that we've put in. So, like, I finished a quarter. I did my review of the quarter as I was approaching the Review. In the middle of the review, I'm like, wow, it was really hard. It felt really scattered. Let's rethink this. Let's put in some structure. Let's decide when things happen and when things. Let's create some alarms. Same thing in lots of the other things I do. I have a recurring client for a few years now that has some unusual needs. And every quarter I've got some specific things to do with them that are a little different than others. Now I just have in the reminders of when I need to do what. And I don't worry the rest of the time, like, oh, what am I going to do with that? I just know that there's an appropriate reminder in there that tells me when I need to start this. So I'm like, I know, okay, I haven't begun that work for them now and it's probably coming up soon, but. But I don't have to stress because it's out there. So then you have that reminder more organized and much more focused because I stopped the usual multitasking and then put in stuff, but only with some periodic reminders, right? To stop and create structures and things like that and to debrief, which is built into the way that we work, probably similar to what you and others do with people. Where we stop, we do a little review, we build in some process checklist, that kind of thing, so we don't make the same as stick again.

Yeah, I have every one of my clients set up with a monthly business review. And actually people, you know, you don't even have to be my client to get my monthly business review. But it's a structure that, you know, I say go through it monthly. And if monthly, some of the depending on, you know, smaller businesses, maybe not need to deep dive into everything, but you go through and you score yourself on each of these topics and how you did, you know, how successful you felt. Score it however your gut feels, but then give specifics. You know what, we could have improved on this. Let's set a system in place for that. And I say, okay, go through it monthly, but quarterly. This needs to be a deep dive quarterly. You need to spend a half day on this and say, what do we actually need to improve of where do we need to move budget to put the systems in place that will let us meet our other goals, our growth goals, and be successful in them. Because none of this is one and done. We're going to slip into old habits. But like you said, and having those reminders are so golden because not only are you now a little bit more organized with those clients, but your heart rate isn't spiking as many times each day. Those cortisol levels sleep better at night.

Right. There was a time in my life where I was always waking up a couple times a week at three in the morning, just anxious about something that I didn't feel like I had any control over. Right.

I forgot something or. Oh my gosh, when is this coming up? Those reminders, you just, you know that they're there when it's time for them. I mean, what if you did that with this podcast? Every guest. Oh, yeah. When so and so going to be on the podcast?

Yeah, I don't think about it at all.

Have I asked them the question? No, you have a system.

Producer gets it set up. We have a system. I know what to do. It's going to be great.

You have a system in place and that's how it ends up great. But could you imagine what it would do to your health if you had the 3am Wake up in the midday freakout of wait, when's that podcast guest? We got to figure that out. What are we talking about? I know nothing about them, but we have all these.

And I have spent a lot of my life worried about that kind of thing just because of this mindset. But. But putting in an end of day review, beginning of week, end of week, beginning of day, all these different quarterly review, quarterly plan, all these kinds of reviews and checks, putting in those routines, just make sure that I have leveled up that stuff that left to my own devices, there'd be procrastination and multitasking and last minute stuff all the time. That. Which is funny because your next one here is failure. Phobe, I think, is your word. And it's funny because I'm so not dead. I'm like the total opposite of that. This weekend I screwed up something in a big way. And I could see that I was gonna be late and miss this appointment. I was kind of going along weekend morning, not thinking about what time it was. I get this text from my brother. I'm like, w, you're really jumping on this thing early. We got plenty of time. And then I look down, I like, talk with him. I like sort things out. I sent a text to my wife who's just upstairs. And then I look down at my own watch and I'm like, oh crap, it's really late. I gotta get out the door. And I start racing out the door. And as I get in the car and I Start driving. Of course, the GPS gives you a pretty accurate picture of when you're going to get there. And it's substantially beyond. And. But I don't give up. I don't stop and quit and whatever. I send a text message ahead that says, hey, I think I'm going to miss this thing. And it was a pretty hard stop time. But I kept going all the way till there. And even after I was clear, like, well, maybe the thing's late or the gates are open or whatever, or the parking or, you know, maybe something will just line up and it'll actually turn out. So I will almost always play all the way through what looks like certain failure, because about half the time something unpredictable happens and I manage to pull something off.

The weirdest, coolest things happen when you can chill out in those emergencies.

Yeah, I wasn't totally chill.

Well, when you don't do the.

I was playing through. I was like, it was still like, okay, we're gonna go. Come on, something's gonna happen. I'm gonna get the right lane or the. Whatever. The lights are gonna line up for me.

Yeah, it's. I, I'm with you on that. I'm. I may be optimistic to a fault on the other side. Early, early, early in my career, before I started my own firm, I worked with a really, really challenging supervising attorney. Just. And everything was in the end of the world for her. And I got so exhausted on her roller coaster of everything being certain doom, that I remember one day specifically sitting down with my husband and being like, I just need to talk this through. Let's just talk through all of the certain doom that she thinks is going to happen happens. Can we just talk it all through? And I said yes to every worst case scenario. Yeah, worst case scenario, this happens. Cool. That happened. And the worst possible outcome was this. Okay, that worst outcome happened. Now, I don't recommend this exercise. If somebody's like high anxiety, it may go the opposite way. But for me, I needed to live in that worst case scenario for a few minutes and be like, okay, I lived. So at the end of my story at this, in this session, I had lost my law license, we were bankrupt, and we had to live off of my husband's salary. Okay, not the life I want to set up, but like, okay, survival. Yeah, I knew worst, worst, worst, worst worst case scenario of every possible thing was survivable and I could quit responding like that. And this failure phobe, what they do to thwart their own success also is even when nothing's wrong, even when they haven't missed any deadlines, they don't trust the ship that they built. I can think of a life coach that I've worked with that she had to. Pretty cool program that was getting really awesome results for her clients. And she's just rowing, just, just rowing, because if she stopped, the whole thing was going to sink. And so every time she had this really cool launch or a new offering for her clients that went really well, she didn't have the patience to fulfill all those promises because she was so busy trying to figure out what the next thing was. Because if she just sits in the success of this launch, everything's going to come crashing down around her. And she made some really weird leadership mistakes and some really weird branding and marketing mistakes. Just trying to hurry up and do something next. It's like, okay, not on brand and we're getting weird. So let's stop being so afraid that this ship is going to sink and trust that if you've come to this level of success, you have something cool to offer. Let's get strategic with it rather than just spinning.

I don't tend to be that doom and gloom, and I tend to think optimistic, sometimes too optimistic and rosy. And I notice that some of the people, though, that I work with are very anxious and have some kind of active anxiety pattern. And, and for those people, it doesn't always work in quite the same way. Like for me, I'm, you know, I was facing a possible bankruptcy once, many years ago, and, and I had a friend say to me, listen, there's no debtors prison. Like, yeah, you could go bankrupt and you'd have to deal with that, but you're not going to prison. You're not going to die over this thing. And because you've done nothing wrong, you just failed at something. And in the end, I, and the, the fear of that was kind of paralyzing me for a little bit. When I heard that and some other related things, I got in action and it freed me up to take action. And actually, I never did have to go bankrupt. I navigated the crisis of the moment and came out really, really strong, but only because I stopped being frozen and fearful and started acting.

And that's, that's human. That's neurology. You know, we're, we're in an evolutionary way. When we're in panic mode, it's run from the bear. Yeah, all your, you narrow. Like in. If you really watch it, your sight will even narrow. You just need to get out of the emergency. Well, when you're living in that in a constant state. Your ability to innovate and create awesome solutions, it's not there. Your brain isn't wired to be able to even access that. You got to chill out. You gotta. You've gotta kind of pull away from that, you know, realize that worst case scenario will not kill you. Now let's get creative. Yeah, but that, that heart rate's gotta go down before your brain will even let you access that part.

Totally. So let's recap a few things before we run out of time. You've covered up so many things and shared so many stories at this point, but the business, right, whatever size business you're in, it does come down to the leader and leaders in the business and how they operate. And it isn't just you doing everything, turning the knobs and dials, pulling the lever, screwing on the caps of your business. Right. You've got to get a whole. If it's going to grow, if it's going to be significant, there's a whole bunch of things to do and it could be for anyone. There's not any inherent worthiness or unworthiness of all that. That's all in your own head. And it's going to take a lot of people to do stuff. Right. And there's systems and approaches to do. And I hear in all of this what we hear again and again, which is it's so critical just to know yourself and then start to figure out how to work around your, like, inherent tendencies. Right? To recognize.

Yeah, absolutely.

Did I capture it wrong? Is that.

You got it?

You got it, folks. If you want more information about her work. Sarahdawnconsulting.com and it'll be in the show notes. If you're listening to the audio of the show, SarahDawnConsulting.com and like that. Thanks, Sarah, so much for coming on the show today and sharing a little bit about your work and your clients with us. Thanks.

It was a great talk. I appreciate you having me.

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