Are you overwhelmed with success, yet you know you’ve barely scratched the surface of your potential? That was me back in 2010. The PR firm I’d started from nothing had grown exponentially every year for nine years, expanding from press releases and media pitching, to a full service marketing and advertising firm. Did I mention I had a six-year-old and a one-year-old? And a husband? And a hobby I loved? And was trying to write a book?

I was exhausted to the point where I was crying on the daily and starting to make mistakes inside my business. Things needed to change, but that felt like quitting and I wasn’t a quitter. It never occurred to me that things could be different so I kept grinding, telling myself to be grateful and appreciative for all the things that were working in my life and stretching myself thinner and thinner. Until I broke and felt like a failure.

It wasn’t until years later that I heard the word burnout and understood that’s what happened to me. I wasn’t a failure. I was a business owner who was also a wife and mom, plus likely struggling with postpartum depression. To top it off, I was a people pleaser who always found the bright side of every situation, even if that meant not taking care of myself.

In the end, I scaled my business back (still a thriving business by most standards) and took the opportunity to work on my fiction writing, all the while wondering why I let the difficulties grow into giant monsters until the only solution was making myself smaller. 

I had (and still have) wild dreams to accomplish. If diminishing myself and my business wasn’t the answer, what was?  

The Big Leap

When you’ve outgrown your business in its current shape, instead of digging in and trying to work harder, you have to do the opposite. You have to stop doing the very things that made you and your work a success in the first place. This will feel mighty strange, especially if you’re a woman who was raised to believe that being “good” is doing as much as you can with as little as possible.

You have to de-story those beliefs and replace them with new ways of thinking. The most successful people, those you look up to, have stopped doing most of the activities that got their business off the ground. 

Once you’ve created something from nothing, your job description changes. Now you have to focus your energy on going deeper on your brand, your offers and your messaging. This is the big work. The kind of work that elevates your business to the next level. The kind of work that takes a lot of energy, but not necessarily a load of time. 

Because of the energy required, it’s easy to avoid this new, bigger, more important work and instead continue to respond to customer inquiries, complete the work your employees aren’t quite mastering, do all the research, create all the deliverables, etc. The list can go on and on. And if you let it, you will never step into your next level, never reach your potential, never do the real work you came here to do. 

So where to start? Create a stop-doing list. Block off 10 minutes in your calendar and brainstorm all the areas of your business currently keeping you from doing the REAL WORK in your business. 

This can include repetitive tasks that need to be systematized, manually scheduling appointments, avoiding your money, creating new social media posts every day, overthinking instead of taking action, being positive instead of honest, creating new email sequences for every launch, manually emailing your bio and photos instead of having a link to all your press materials, doing all the YouTube and/or podcast editing yourself, coaching calls all day every day, the list can go on and on.

Don’t be surprised if you have trouble differentiating a task that needs to be on the stop-doing list versus other tasks that actually are important. Often we’re so engrossed in what we’re doing we can’t see clearly and have the misbelief that we are the ONLY one who can do something correctly. That was me back in 2010. It was easier to do something myself instead of creating a process and a system for review so that a highly capable person could do the work.

Once you have your stop-doing list, you can make a plan to systematically remove these to-dos from your calendar. This takes time, energy and resources, and it’s something I help my 1:1 clients with when we start working together in my Revision program. It’s pretty common that they need to get some responsibilities off their plates, either permanently or temporarily, so they have the bandwidth to dive into next level storytelling that results in a larger media presence, more collaborators and more sales.

While getting honest with yourself about what you need to stop doing can be confronting, the end result is what allows you to uncap your energy and bring more of yourself to what really matters.

After I stopped allowing tasks to siphon away my energy, I published a novella, won a major national writing award, went to the national championships in my sport and finished in the Top 8, spent more time with my family, pivoted my business model and am currently starting a podcast. 

What are you going to create once you stop doing all the things?