What You'll Discover In This Episode:
I'm checking in a little later than usual this week to share my latest podcast episode, and I wanted to be totally upfront with you about why. In fact, I felt motivated to do a whole different episode today about why instead of the topic I had planned to release this week - not as an excuse, but as a permission slip.
I want to give you guilt-free permission to step away from a deadline when needed to prioritize your mental and physical well-being. Doing so can ultimately be the most productive move you can make on occasion!
If you’re anything like me, you probably pride yourself on hitting deadlines. For 400 episodes of this podcast, my team and I have bent over backward to get content out every Monday with only a handful of late episodes. A Monday drop is always my goal. But last week, I hit a wall - a business trip followed by a nasty sinus infection that put me out - and I had to make the hard decision to step away from working on this episode.
Honestly, it felt wrong, so I tried to push through, writing the episode content on Thursday and Friday, but it was just busy work. The task that should've taken a few hours was dragging on because I couldn't focus or think clearly. I realized I wasn't just delaying my recovery; I was compromising the quality of the work I was putting out.
So, I made the call to delay the episode and prioritize my overall health. I decided I would work on the episode once I was feeling back to myself. The end result? I did start feeling better after much needed rest and banged out an episode that flowed naturally because I had the mental clarity to get my thoughts out in a meaningful and concise way.
Your team, your clients, your family, and your business all deserve the best version of you, not an exhausted, compromised version of you. So when necessary, gift yourself some grace, step back from a deadline, and give yourself time to recharge.
In this episode of the Small Business Straight Talk Podcast, I go behind-the-scenes once again to look at my whole experience last week of realizing that the most productive, most strategic thing I could do for my business in the moment was simply to stop and rest - even when that meant making a hard, public decision like missing a deadline.
