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Why you’re more producutive than you think

Why you’re more producutive than you think

by | May 26, 2026 | Big picture, Business foundations, Business model, Ethical Marketing

Why you're more productive than you think

Recently we had our monthly Focus + Priorities call inside The Clearing where we looked back over the past month and set direction for the next. 

When I first sat down to design that call, one thing that felt really important to me was understanding why we hadn’t done what we said we would do. Not from a place of judgement or shame, but to actually understand the roadblocks that get in the way of following through on our plans.

But after the very first call, I immediately realised something was missing. By focusing on what hadn’t got done and why, we were completely missing out on what did.

Because here’s the thing.

The people I work with are nearly always productive. They are always doing something, even if it’s not what they originally planned. Sometimes that’s navigating life or health challenges. Often it’s other meaningful work inside their business. That might, for example, look like not completing your marketing tasks because you were fully focused on serving your existing clients well.

Also by ignoring the wins, we miss the fact that sometimes something we planned to do one month actually got done a month or two later. The follow-through was there but our expectations of how long it would take were just off. 

When you only look at what didn’t get done, you ignore the progress you have made. And for most of the people I work with, myself included, that inability to see our own progress is the norm. We move through our weeks doing real, meaningful work and dealing with life and we barely pause to register what we have accomplished before we’re already berating ourselves for where we still haven’t got to. 

So I added a wins section to the call. Not as a warm-up or a formality but as a crucial part of the work. Because I’ve found that if you try to look honestly at what stalled, without first anchoring into evidence of what moved, the whole thing tips into self-criticism very quickly. You absolutely need both. The wins without the honest look at what didn’t happen can feel like denial. The roadblocks without the wins can feel like deflating to say the least.

For me, the call has now become an opportunity to take an important and honest look at my business progress, month on month. Something I’ve always known was important but that now has a proper space in my schedule. 

If you want to try the wins reflection yourself, here are the questions we use:

What went well last month?

Where did I show up well, even if the result was imperfect?

What feels stronger, clearer, or more aligned than before?

And then the question I find changes everything:

What does this remind me about my capacity?

When you have real evidence of your own follow-through, it becomes much harder to convince yourself that nothing is moving.

As you look back on the past month, remember this: You did more than you think. I guarantee it.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

The power of momentum

The power of momentum

by | May 19, 2026 | Conscious business, Content creation

The power of momentum

Lately, life has been full on with the type of projects that can become all consuming when you get into them. 

Because of that writing this kept getting pushed back and my usual publish date came and went. In other times, I would probably just have given up on the idea and promised myself that I’ll get back to it next week.

But for some reason, this time I couldn’t let the newsletter go. And so here I am on a Friday lunchtime writing it. Not from discipline. Not from summoning the effort to push through. But because somewhere in the middle of all of it, writing this letter was just there in the background. Ever present. Sort of inevitable. Much like a scratch I had to itch. 

And I’ve realised that’s the power of momentum.

I’ve been consistently writing these past few months, and what I’ve noticed is that getting to this level of consistency has changed my actual experience of writing.

Rather than feeling like something I have to gear myself up for or even remember to do. It now lives in my week. It’s almost as if the task is a blinking light calling for my attention.

I often find myself writing in my mind. So much so that the writing, when I sit down to do it, tends to come more easily because in some sense it has already happened in my head.

When I contrast that with periods where I’ve let several weeks pass without writing content, it often disappears from my mind entirely. And when I eventually return to it, the whole thing feels like a huge effort. I’ve realised that the resistance isn’t about the task, it’s actually more to do with starting over again. 

And here’s the thing I find interesting.

The effort involved isn’t spread evenly across the task of writing a piece of content. The bulk of it lives in the starting. Getting back to something after a gap, picking up a practice that’s fallen by the wayside, sitting down to write when you’ve got out of the habit of writing. That’s where almost all of the friction is. Once you’re in motion, continuing is actually the easy part. 

I think a lot about momentum in this context, because it’s something that has derailed me more times than I care to admit. 

We tend to think of momentum as something that requires the discipline to keep following through. Something we create and maintain through effort. But what I’ve observed, both in my own work and with my clients, is that momentum in business is less about discipline and more about rhythm.

The activities that create clients, showing up with content, reaching out, staying in relationship with your audience, work in exactly this way. When you have a rhythm with them, they become self-sustaining to a surprising degree. You don’t have to rebuild the motivation each time. The motion itself carries you forward. The practice pulls rather than pushes.

But when there’s a gap, a week becomes two, two becomes a month, something shifts. And it’s not just the lost visibility, though that matters too. It’s that you’ve put the brakes on. And now you have to begin again, which is where almost all of the effort lives.

This is why I’m so interested in the idea of rhythm rather than consistency as a goal.

Consistency, as a concept, tends to put the emphasis on the output. Did you do it or not? Rhythm puts the emphasis on the relationship between you and the work. And it’s that relationship that determines whether the task pulls you towards it or it requires your pushing to begin.

Building a rhythm with your marketing, with your newsletter, your content, your outreach, isn’t just a strategy for staying visible. It’s the thing that makes staying visible feel sustainable. Because once you have it, the momentum is partly doing the work for you.

And once you lose it, no amount of pushing will feel the same as simply staying in motion. Which is why when I considered skipping this week’s letter and restarting my momentum next week, I thought better of it. 

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

Not all results are visible

Not all results are visible

by | May 12, 2026 | Big picture, Business foundations, Business Growth, Client Creation

Not all results are visible

Recently I had a research call with someone in my audience where we were talking about content and outreach and what gets in the way, and she said something that I hear all the time.

“I think I stop because it feels like I’m not getting any results.”

Not because she doesn’t know what to do, and not because she isn’t capable of doing it, but because from her perspective, nothing much seems to be happening.

And I think this is where a lot of people quietly fall off.

There’s this underlying assumption that if something is working, you’ll see it. That results will be obvious, visible, and measurable in real time. More responses, more engagement, more signs that it’s landing. Ultimately, more clients.

But that’s not always how it works, especially at the beginning.

Someone shared an analogy with me recently about working on business growth as being like a pot of water on the stove. For a while, it looks completely unchanged. There are no bubbles, no movement, nothing to suggest that anything is happening at all. And yet the temperature is rising the whole time. The water is heating, slowly and steadily, even though you can’t see it.

If you turn the heat off too soon because you think it “isn’t working,” you don’t just pause the process, you reset it. You go back to the beginning and have to start all over again.

Growth activities like content and outreach often work in exactly the same way.

There is a period of time where you are showing up, sharing your thinking, reaching out, and it can feel like very little is coming back. A few likes here and there, maybe a reply, often silence.

It’s very easy in that space to assume it isn’t working.

But what I’ve seen over and over again, both in my own business and with my clients, is that there is far more happening than you realise.

I’ve lost count of the times people have said to me, “I loved your last newsletter” or “That post you shared really stayed with me,” and I’ll realise I had no idea they were even reading. They’ve never replied, never liked, never engaged in any visible way, and yet they’ve been following along, taking it in, and trusting me more in the process. 

The same thing happens with my clients. They’ll tell me they “only” got two or three responses to something they shared, and they dismiss it almost immediately because they’re focused on all the people who didn’t engage.

But those two or three people matter. They are paying attention. They are leaning in. They are often much closer to working with you than the numbers suggest. A brilliant coach once said to me, “Your next client is right in front of you,” and half the time I think we’re too busy looking out there to see them.

When you overlook this, you miss the actual signal. Because here’s the thing: 

Not all results are visible.

Attention is a result. Recognition is a result. Trust building is a result. They just don’t always show up in ways that are easy to measure or validate in the moment.

And if you only trust what you can see, you will almost always assume it’s not working far sooner than is actually true.

That’s the point where people stop, or pivot, or start something new, thinking they need a different strategy, when in reality they just haven’t stayed with the current one long enough.

At the same time, there’s another question that matters just as much.

It’s not only “is this working?” or even “have I stayed with this long enough?”

It’s also “am I doing this in a way that can actually create results?”

Because consistency on its own isn’t enough.

You can show up every week with content, but if what you’re sharing doesn’t speak to a clear problem your ideal clients are facing, it’s unlikely to lead anywhere.

You can be reaching out to people regularly, but if those conversations stay at the level of friendly catch-ups, without any direction or depth, they’re unlikely to turn into opportunities.

So there are two things to hold at the same time.

Staying in the process long enough for the invisible to become visible.

And making sure that what you’re doing is actually designed to create results in the first place.

When those two things come together, that’s when momentum builds.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

 

The difference between a plan and a rhythm

The difference between a plan and a rhythm

by | May 5, 2026 | Business foundations, Organization, Planning, Productivity

The difference between a plan and a rhythm

One of the things I see a lot in the business owners I work with is a really understandable confusion between having a plan and having a rhythm. They sound similar. But they’re not.

A plan is tied to outputs and timelines. Post three times a week. Send the newsletter on Wednesday. Do five outreach messages every Monday. A plan tells you what to do and when to do it, and when life intervenes, which it always does, the plan breaks down. You miss Wednesday. You don’t get to the outreach. And suddenly you’re not just behind on a task, you feel like you’ve lost your footing entirely. The momentum is gone and you’re back to figuring out where to start.

A rhythm is something different.

A rhythm is built around understanding what matters and why. Not the specific day or the specific number, but the activity itself and its role in your business. And crucially, it’s built around you, the life you want to live, the capacities and responsibilities you actually have, not a borrowed blueprint from someone else’s business or someone else’s life.

When you have a rhythm, you know that your newsletter isn’t really about Wednesday. Wednesday is just where it usually lives. The newsletter matters because it’s how you stay visible, how you share your thinking, how you nurture your relationship with your audience. So when Wednesday becomes impossible, you’re not derailed. You just come back to it on Thursday. Or Sunday afternoon while your husband naps and your kids are having lunch with a relative.

For me having a rhythm means I don’t have to decide what matters on a day to day basis. I already know. I’ve already identified and decided on my top-level priorities and how I work with them.

For example, years ago I had “send newsletter” as a single task in my plan and schedule. But I soon learned that’s not how I operate. It didn’t matter how much time I allocated. If I sat down to a blank page with the goal of “write newsletter”, it wasn’t going to get done.

These days I’ve broken that into a rhythm that works for me.

I spend time in the week beforehand thinking about it. Noticing what’s coming up in my work. Letting ideas land and choosing the topic.

I make notes.

On another day, I come back to those notes and develop my thinking.

And then, yes, on a Monday or Tuesday, I sit down to write.

Because I understand the role the newsletter plays, I don’t rely on one perfect writing window to make it happen. The process is already in motion long before I open a blank page.

And this is why rhythm is so important when it comes to the activities that actually grow your business and bring in clients.

Visibility and connection are not things that produce results when you do them sporadically and in bursts. They work over time. There’s a cumulative effect, they compound. A piece of content you wrote two years ago can still bring people into your world today. A conversation you had six months ago can still turn into a client tomorrow. The people who end up working with you have usually been in your orbit for longer than you realise, gathering evidence, building trust, waiting until the right moment for them.

That kind of compounding only happens when the underlying activities have enough rhythm to sustain themselves through the inevitable interruptions of a real life. Not perfectly. Not without gaps. But consistently enough that the thread is always there.

What I see derail people most often isn’t laziness or lack of motivation. It’s that they’re working from a plan rather than a rhythm. So when the plan breaks, and it will break, they lose momentum entirely. They stop. They feel defeated. They restart. They stop again. And all the while they’re wondering why client flow feels so unpredictable.

The shift from plan to rhythm starts with a simple question:

Do I know, without having to think about it, what the non-negotiables in my business are and why they matter?

Not a long list. Not a perfect system. Just a clear enough sense of what keeps things moving so that when life does what life does, you know where to return to.

If any of this is landing, if you recognise the start-stop pattern, if client flow has felt more unpredictable than you’d like, if you’ve been working from a plan that keeps falling apart, I want you to know that the shift doesn’t require more discipline or a better system.

It starts with finding your rhythm. And your rhythm, once you’ve found it, is something you can always come back to.

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.