I was talking this morning with a woman that owns a cleaning business.
She’s a little overwhelmed right now. She’s seen rapid growth, but a lack of structure and systems means there’s a lot of chaos. She’s also had a lot of change in her personal life.
She’s recently moved house, and needs to get some maintenance done on her gear, but her equipment is now housed 50 minutes away. All the while, she’s trying to manage new staff who don’t seem on board with her vision.
We often have a few ways to go when things start to get to be too much:
- We can keep pushing, trying to carve out enough time for what Stephen Covey calls “Quadrant 2 work” – important, but non-urgent work that allows us to get back on track, and on top of an already high stress load, or
- We can enrol others, but this can be difficult if our own situation and vision needs some attention.
- We can press pause. If we have a buffer, we can put a hold on new client work, reduce our time in the business, and spend a week or two on getting our house in order, reframing or unwinding high level stressors and getting clear on our vision again.
When everyone’s on board and the wheels are turning, it’s scary to get off a moving bus, but if it’s not heading in the direction we want to go, it helps to address it sooner than later.
Sometimes the most helpful thing to do is to pause, take a breath to regroup, and in that space, create the foundation we’re looking for to go to the next level.
