Hi, I'm Becky. Welcome to Short Story Long. In this podcast, we discuss ways you can integrate who you are into how you lead. This year has not been just stressful or difficult. That just doesn't speak to the depths of it. Most leaders I've spoken with feel the heaviness of uncertainty, the polar swings and social and economic frameworks. It has fundamentally eroded leadership focus and capacity. And by that I mean the ability to think, to decide, to influence, and to stay centered. Most leadership advice stops at boundaries, routines, or clarity. Yes, those are important, but many of you already know those tools. The real issue isn't the mechanics of leadership. It's what the stress, distraction, and inconsistency does to you. It distorts and blurs your leadership identity. It distracts you from being the leader you are. Stress doesn't just make leadership harder. It disrupts your identity. When the environment becomes chaotic, you shift without noticing it. Stress turns you reactive instead of visionary. You start moving faster but thinking smaller. Distraction pulls you out of the strategic role you're meant to hold. And you drift back into tactical work because it feels easier to control. Over time, inconsistency begins to erode both your credibility and your self-trust. It's not only your productivity that suffers, your confidence takes the hit. And that raises a deeper question. The goal isn't simply how do I cope? The real challenge is how do I stay the leader I intend to be when the conditions around me aren't well, they aren't cooperating. To answer that, we have to name the real burden leaders carry. You know, things like decision fatigue from constant high-stakes choices, or the emotional residue that comes from absorbing everyone else's urgency, or maybe the pressure to appear steady even when you feel anything but. And then there are those invisible responsibilities no one sees, yet everyone seems to rely on. It's the landscape of leadership. But coping strategies alone won't rebuild your capacity. Traditional advice often says to set boundaries, but boundaries assume that you have margin, space, and that magical thing called leverage. Many leaders don't. What you need is something more strategic. You need to reduce your surface area, the number of places stress can grab hold of you. And you need a weekly checkpoint that allows you to pause, assess, and make intentional adjustments before small cracks become huge fractures, chasms, or even larger gaps that I can't think of the name for right now. This isn't about managing stress at the edges. It's about protecting your cognitive capacity, your attention, and your steadiness. It's about constructing the architecture of your leadership so you can remain the leader you commit to being, no matter what the environment throws at you. So what's a leader to do? Well, one thing I talked about there is reducing your surface area. You know, when most people hear boundaries, they think of saying no, blocking time, or protecting their calendar. Those are useful, but they only scratch the surface for what is needed. Leaders struggle with access more than with boundaries. They have an open door policy where everyone has a pathway to them, which is a great thing right up until it's not. They may also be a bottleneck for questions, decisions, approvals, escalations, updates, and more. You'll notice that it was a bit of a pressure there for me to even say all of those words without taking a deep breath. So what kind of pressure does that put on you as a leader? These show up as slack pings, hallway asks, crisis texts, got a minute moments. It's not only about your willingness to say no, though practicing that is still important. It's about the fact that you're so reachable from too many angles. Reducing the number of contact points where you can be reached is a more strategic move. You might remember from my discussion with Kayla that she had talked about creating office hours when she started to shift from being a solopreneur and moved into being an agency owner. And she needed to protect her time. In order to make that shift, she needed to reduce the footprint of her own time and be able to delegate that out to others. Yeah, I know that delegate word. We'll talk more about that, maybe in a different episode. But yes, many things absolutely come back to that. This idea of surface area and minimizing your surface area. It isn't to rule out everyone's access to you. I applaud the office hours. It's a really great idea. The open door policy, also big applause. The only thing that I'm saying is that you have an opportunity to consolidate some of those windows of opportunity. So maybe there's a decision-making system. Everybody's coming to you because what do I do? How do I make this happen? What's my strategy? Where am I supposed to go? Isn't that what the money's for? For them, right? So create a container for them. Help them understand these are the boundaries. There's that word. Here are the boundaries that you have for making a decision. If it doesn't fit within that container, then bring it to me. If it fits within this container, then it's for you to decide. And you don't need me as the leader to approve your decision. You have authority. And if you don't trust your people to use that authority wisely, then you don't necessarily have a time problem. You have a trust problem. And that means that you need to make that container smaller. And you need to start to grow that container, or you may need to change staff. It's a tough reality, it's just our truth. The other component might be that you have all of these touch points with your team. I've talked with clients who like to have one-on-ones with their staff. Sometimes they do skip level, sometimes they do client meetings so that they're really in the know and they have their hands in it. Again, I applaud these in philosophy. Where it becomes a challenge is when your time is under pressure and you're in a position where you need to start thinking about how do I do this judiciously. One of the things that I think is a really interesting meme that I've seen a couple of times now is this, it has a title on it that says, This is how we keep our meetings short. And everyone is in a plank pose down on their elbows during the meeting. Sometimes you have to find creative and sometimes okay, funny ways to maintain effectiveness in a meeting. If everyone is all sprawled out in a conference room, virtual or real, you're taking too much time in the meeting because they're not necessarily engaged anymore. What you want to have is that you want to have the right people present who are ready to make a quality decision because they understand the landscape that they're in. Focus on getting those things lined up before you even have the meeting to make a decision. The thing is, the decision that you make without the right people having the right information in order and also have the authority to make the decision, that decision's not going to hold anyway. You know what that does? That creates another meeting. That's a colossal waste of your time. And all of this surface area that you have on your calendar gets eaten up by unnecessary meetings that are on rinse and repeat. One of the key reasons that you want to find ways to reduce this surface area is to make sure that you have the most efficient model for creating the best quality decisions and also growing the people who are around you who may or may not report to you. What you want is an opportunity where others can generate alternatives, they can identify opportunities to move forward, and then you can allow them to make some of the lower risk mistakes so that they learn that on a visceral level, so that the next time they take that into consideration and they don't make those mistakes again. When you shift from always being available to a form of intentional visibility, what it does is it creates a reality and an understanding where you're involved when you need to be in the mix. Delegating to strong resources at the right level, that's what really helps you free up your time and free up your mental space, especially when all of the external things are churning and tossing all over the place. One of the great examples of making this kind of shift is the interview that I had with Aaron Wilkerson. Aaron had talked about letting go of being the go-to guy and starting to build leaders behind him. That way, it really built up this capacity for him to reach into more strategic places and not always have to take responsibility for the day-to-day items. It also is an episode that talks about making cookies, and anything that includes making cookies is a good reason to listen, in my esteemed opinion. One of the other things that I think can be really, really valuable in terms of really quieting the noise outside is creating a periodic checkpoint. I talk about this most frequently as a weekly checkpoint. It gives you a time to revisit what's been happening. It gives you an opportunity to adjust to any recency kinds of things, because if it's a from a month ago, you may not remember the noise that was happening at the beginning of the month. You likely remember some of the noise at the beginning of the week. I hope for your sake there's not so much noise that you can't remember the noise at the beginning of the week. And look, I'm not asking you to do a fundamental reset or a comprehensive review on a weekly basis. There's no leadership scorecard here that I'm building for you. Right, and I get it. The immediate response I get is I already know I'm stressed and I'm unfocused, so don't make me talk about how I need to give a lot more time to some kind of deep dive analysis. Rest assured, that is not the solution I'm offering you. I can't afford the time to reboot my system like that either. I hear you, I respect it. Instead, what I'm talking about is creating a point in time, quick reflection, small corrections. And that way you don't have to shut everything down and try to rebuild. The things that you might be checking in on. Let's keep it simple, let's go with three. Consider one moment where you were proud of how you showed up. Yay me moments, celebrations. Nearly every coaching session I have starts with my client sharing a celebration or a win. It does not need to be a parade-worthy celebration. And in fact, some are, you know what? I was able to log in for this call, and I'm just going to celebrate that today. That is not a one-time occurrence. I've had more than one person say that to me. And it's a chance to focus on at least one thing that went well. And other times, sometimes it just takes a minute. And so we take a minute. If it doesn't come to you quickly, then you haven't been tuned in to the things that have been going well. So maybe there's an opportunity to tune into that more. A second one might be a moment where urgency hijacked your intentions. You know what? The best laid plans don't always go as we hoped. Maybe somebody else's urgency pressed you to choose before you were ready. Maybe it was your own inner voice saying you were taking too long. And that's whether it was true that you were taking too long or not. My invitation to you, name it, acknowledge it, stop hiding from it. Just know what it was. I'm not even asking you to solve it right now. Just name it. The third thing that I would invite you to be thinking about is a place where you drifted back into the weeds instead of staying strategic. This is one of those challenges that happens on the regular. I can control it if I'm in it. I can be there. I can help. And there's a challenge with this because you're no longer the expert. Back to the idea of when I was talking about Aaron and the interview that I had had with him. If he went into the system, he'd even declared, look, you know, I might actually break something that was working because it's not my system that I was in on the day to day anymore. And so recognizing where you need to be able to provide that overview instead of going in and saying, I'll just make this change. I'll create a band-aid solution. The problem is when you have too many band-aids, you no longer have the ability to understand what the root cause actually was. From that check-in, you choose one thing, one adjustment you'll make to shift from reactive firefighting into conscious intentionality. This is your opportunity to lay it out for the next week. You focus on recentering your leadership on internal stability instead of the external swirl. There's no news flash when I tell you there's no controlling the swirl anyway. Own and name what you can, and the rest of it is going to happen as it's going to go anyway. And if I think back a couple of decades ago, my husband and I were planning our wedding, and we decided to create a basic framework and let the chips fall where they may, because we acknowledged that the chips were going to fall where they may anyway. And yes, we nearly forgot to cut the cake. We had to be reminded. The cake got cut, it was fine. There were a couple of snafus that came along the way. They made the day adventurous and a funny story for later. Some of these things that are happening when they go off course within your organization, within your team, within yourself, they feel huge and they feel like a big problem right now. But then as there's a little bit of distance from it, it just becomes a funny anecdote. You remember that time when I did that thing and it fell apart? Yeah, I learned a lot that day. Yeah, that day, that day not so fun. Later on, it becomes a learning experience that you share with other people. One of the things that I think about a lot is that most leadership programs, especially anything that has like a daily or weekly component, they get framed as behavior change. It shows up as do these things, build these habits, follow this routine. Those systems never worked for me because they weren't built for me. They're generalized and frankly a little bit preachy about who you should be and how you should act in different situations. And if you know anything about me, I don't really take direction from others really well. I have to process it, put my own thumbprint on it. It's why I work for me now. And also, do you really want to add more behaviors or model yourself based on someone else? That's entirely against my whole philosophy of integrating who you are with how you lead. Your plate is already overflowing. And who wants to be forced into someone else's idea of leadership? In my experience, it never feels quite right. And that's why I actually created a 75-day challenge called the 75-day lead challenge. Uniquely named, right? It puts you in the driver's seat. It's a guided path to fine-tune your leadership approach from the inside out. Each week, you reflect on how you want to show up based on daily prompts. You migrate your thinking about how you operate. That operating system of your leadership style shifts when you start thinking about how you feel as a leader, how you get grounded, how you make decisions, how you rally others toward a common goal, and how you show up when the pressure is high. 75 Lead is a system that brings you back to your strategic identity every single day, even when the world around you refuses to cooperate. It creates a steady cadence you can rely on, a rhythm that restores consistency when everything else feels unpredictable. In less than 20 minutes a day, it offers a reset for your mind, your energy, and your influence so you can lead from a grounded place instead of a reactive one. It's not about putting yourself into yet another two by two matrix where someone else designed a label. Instead, you're thinking about where is it that I can leverage my strengths? Where is it that I can be myself first? Some weeks are a light lift and very affirming because you already have that aspect of your leadership style locked in. Other weeks require an honest look in the proverbial mirror. Are you acting as the leader you are or the leader others are telling you to be? The challenge really is to calibrate your leadership identity through 75 days of small, repeatable signals to yourself. This moves it far beyond a brief challenge or a product. Activity trend, it really helps you construct those leadership architectures based on things that you add every single day. It doesn't change your behaviors, it makes you think about what your behavior really looks like. The truth is, this year didn't just test your workload. It tested your leadership identity. And if you felt the distortion, if you've noticed yourself reacting instead of leading, drifting into the weeds, or feeling less steady than you'd like, you're not alone. This is the reality leaders are navigating right now. And it's also the moment where your operating model matters the most. Reducing your surface area, building in a weekly checkpoint, and choosing small intentional adjustments, these aren't nice to have. They're the shifts that keep you centered when everything around you is pulling you off balance. They help you stay the leader you mean to be, not the leader the chaos shapes you into. If you want structure and community around making those adjustments, that's exactly why I created 75 Lead. It's a simple, steady rhythm, less than 20 minutes a day, that helps you realign your leadership identity through small, repeatable signals. No pressure, no perfection, just the space and support to lead with clarity again. If that sounds like the kind of reset you're craving in a year like this, you're welcome to join us starting on the 5th of January. You can learn more and sign up at Focusforgrowth.com slash 75 Lead. Take very good care of your leadership, especially now. The rest of the organization takes its cues from you. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who could benefit from it. Until next time, I'm Becky Fraser, reminding you to integrate who you are with how you lead. Okay, bye.