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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.

 

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.

 

The roadblocks to consistency

The roadblocks to consistency

by | Apr 14, 2026 | Business foundations, Business Growth, Client Creation

The roadblocks to consistency

I want to talk about consistency.

It’s easy to argue the point that consistent revenue and clients come from consistent business growth effort and from continuing to show up, share your work and stay in relationship with the people you serve but in truth, we’re often thinking about consistency all wrong.

How many times have you thought to yourself that if you could just show up more consistently in your business, sharing your ideas, writing, reaching out and connecting with people, things would start to move more easily but then reality lets you down? Same. I used to beat myself up often for not being more consistent, more disciplined, more productive. I would create an annual business plan that on paper seemed flawless but then when it came to execution, I repeatedly found I just couldn’t deliver on what was required of me to achieve the goals I had set for myself.

Something always happens that I haven’t planned for. Getting sick or my menstrual cycle or perimenopause symptoms kicking my butt. My kids getting sick and being off school. Needing to travel to be there for a loved one who is having surgery which has happened twice in the last two years. Sometimes it’s the inevitable heartbreak and despair over world events or extreme weather cutting the internet for whole days and closing down school.

And sometimes, I am just tired or low energy and simply don’t have it in me to follow the plan. I need to take more breaks, sleep in instead of getting up early to exercise, meditate and plan my day.

The difference between how I now handle these situations and how I used to handle them is night and day. Before I would allow these setbacks to completely derail me and when there wasn’t an obvious cause of my inaction, I would take it as evidence of my failings. I would feel bad about myself and sink into a rut, taking even longer to get back on track.

These days, I not only accept that life interruptions and lows happen but I expect them. I make my plans in light of their inevitability and I pay attention to what tends to interrupt my rhythm of showing up in my work.

I have even created a whole framework around them.

That framework is something we use inside The Clearing during our monthly Focus + Priorities reflection, especially when we notice that something we intended to move forward, share or follow through on simply didn’t happen. I also wanted to share it lightly with you here in case it’s useful.

Usually when we plan to do something and it doesn’t get done, there is a specific reason that goes beyond laziness or lack of motivation. I refer to these reasons as roadblocks and I’ve identified seven of them.

#1 Capacity and health
This relates to illness, chronic health conditions, burnout and energy levels. 

#2 Time + Competing Priorities
This happens when we have too many demands on our time, when we have set unrealistic timelines or when other responsibilities take over.

#3 Mindset + Inner Dialogue
This looks like perfectionism, self-doubt, fear of being judged or a feeling of inner resistance.

#4 Clarity Gaps
This is where the next step is unclear. Perhaps the task is too big or vague or we are missing information or support.

#5 Emotional landscape
This might look like overwhelm, anxiety or tenderness resulting in low motivation.

#6 Environment + Systems
This could relate to your workspace or a lack of reminders, structure or systems that support the work.

#7 Alignment
This comes up when we perhaps planned the task out of a “should” or when we realise on reflection that it isn’t actually a true priority.

I’ve found that something quite profound happens when I’ve used this framework for myself and with clients as a lens to look at stalled tasks. More often than not, it becomes immediately clear that the issue does not represent a lack of commitment. It is that a very real and tangible roadblock was present, something that interrupted the rhythm of showing up or moving the work forward. And once we can see that clearly, there is almost always something that can be done to get back on track.

When I do this, sometimes it’s a really simple fix. For example, I failed to carve out time for the task and then my schedule got booked up with calls. The fix? Block out time to work on the task, perhaps the time to write, reach out to someone or share something I have been meaning to publish.

And sometimes it’s trickier. If for example I’m dealing with a hormone issues like fatigue, the fix isn’t always so obvious. But acknowledging what’s going on brings about more self empathy and compassion which in turn helps me to think of small things I can do to feel better, such as getting more sleep or reducing my expectations slightly so that I can still make small progress.

That is very different from simply feeling defeated because tasks went unfinished and not really being sure why.

When we look at unfinished tasks or a lack of obvious progress through the lens of possible roadblocks it allows us to get proactive about support rather than simply applying more pressure on ourselves to just get things done.

Examples of this include:

  • Reducing the number of priorities you’re setting yourself.
  • Breaking tasks into even smaller steps.
  • Creating better structures or systems in place to support your work.
  • Getting support or accountability.
  • Allowing rest or emotional space so recovery time is shorter.
  • Letting go of something that isn’t aligned and freeing up mental space.

I find that this practice helps us to notice patterns with curiosity and compassion rather than judging ourselves or forcing momentum. And when we understand what tends to interrupt our rhythm, it becomes much easier to return to the work and begin showing up again.

And now a question for you. If you think about something in your business that hasn’t moved forward recently, which of these roadblocks might have been present?

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 Most Important Skill For Introverts In Business To Master

The Most Important Skill For Introverts In Business To Master

by | Mar 22, 2023 | Business foundations, Business Growth

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
~ Herman Melville

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 One Thing I Can’t Teach You About Business

The One Thing I Can’t Teach You About Business

by | Nov 3, 2022 | Business foundations

“Life is a balance between what we can control and what we cannot. I am learning to live between effort and surrender.”
~ Danielle Orner

In this blog, I want to talk about the one thing I can’t teach you in relation to growing a sustainable business.

Let me start by sharing what I can teach you.

I can teach you what to do in your business to bring about more growth. A huge part of how you apply this is, however, out of my control.

The part I can’t teach you about achieving business success is how to feel in your business.

Let me break down what I mean by how to feel in your business.

I’m talking about a few things, the energy you bring to your work, your attitude, the intentions you set (consciously or not), the mindset you have and so much more. It’s the intangible part of running a business and as many of you (as coaches and healers) will know, it’s what makes the difference between getting the results we desire and not getting them.

This is precisely why I never promise results in my marketing and why you shouldn’t trust anyone who does.

It’s why I could work with two clients and teach them the exact same strategies and whilst client A will succeed, client B won’t gain any traction.

How a person feels and shows up in their business has a HUGE bearing on how well they will do in business.

Now whilst this isn’t something I teach primarily, I do cover this in my work with clients. Not as extensively as a Mindset Coach or healer might, but it’s impossible not to come up against this when trying to apply business strategy.

Allow me to share some of what I’ve learned in this area over the past 10 years of working for myself and coaching hundreds of clients.

Your energy is everything.

One of the biggest issues I see when it comes to business is the energy the business owner brings to the work. In the early days of business when money and clients aren’t yet flowing, it can be easy to fall into a “grasping” energy. This is when you might feel so desperate to get the next client that as you put out your content and marketing and connect with potential clients, you unwittingly give off a desperate and grasping energy.

This is where I lose people sometimes because it’s a bit woo. But stay with me.

In my world energy is everything. It’s not something we can see or touch but it’s why you can get a bad or a good feeling about someone you’ve just met.

It’s how I chose the construction company for our house reno. Despite not having the biggest team or the most experience, the head builder we went with has good energy and I felt it the moment I met him. Within minutes of speaking with him (even in a second language!) I instantly knew that he would care for our home just as he would his own. It wasn’t anything he said, I could just feel it. And I was right, he’s been hands down the best part of this whole process. This is what I mean when I talk about energy.

Sometimes if we’re not careful and we’re not feeling especially confident about our work we can put out an energy that feels off. That’s why when we show up to our work desperate to get the next client, we may be subconsciously sabotaging our strategic efforts.

Something my first business coach taught me when doing gift sessions, was that whilst I might need a new client, I didn’t necessarily need this particular person to become that next client, allowing me to release all neediness and simply focus on being of service.

You may have experienced this, perhaps you’ve done a discovery call or gift session with someone and they expressed some interest in potentially working with you, but then they go quiet, as a result, you obsess over them, checking your email constantly to see if they’ve been in touch, counting the hours or days until you can message them again just to “check in” or follow up.

Even if you don’t actually tell the other person that you desperately want them to become your next client, your energy may well be sending that message. Nobody wants to hire a needy practitioner, so this is a really important one to watch out for.

Your attitude matters.

What’s your attitude like around business? Do you have a good attitude about the work or a bad one? I’m aware that terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are crude, but bear with me.

If you constantly sit down to your work with an internal narrative that says: this will never work, this is hopeless or when creating content to market yourself, continuously hear a voice muttering what’s the point, no one is ever going to read this, then it follows that you’re going to have problems.

A negative attitude permeates everything (not least your energy!). When we feel and think negatively about our business, our subconscious looks for evidence to prove our point of view.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to tell you to suck it up and think positively and all will be well, but I have found that the more I focus on the positive, the more I feel grateful for the small wins, the better I feel and the clearer my energy is for my work.

This undoubtedly helps me to make better connections with potential clients, spot more opportunities for collaborations and just makes me a nicer person to be around.

The mindset piece.

Closely linked to attitude but not quite the same. Mindset for me falls into one of two camps. We usually operate from a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. I’ve written a whole piece about this before which you can read here.

To illustrate the point, I’ll use the words of Carol Dweck, Author of the book Mindset:

“When we have a “growth mindset,” we believe that our intelligence, creative abilities, and character are things that we can improve in meaningful ways. We can always learn and get better at what we do.”

By contrast, a fixed mindset describes people “who believe their intelligence, talents and personalities are fixed traits that cannot grow. They believe we are born with a certain level of ability (or special skills) and we are unable to improve our level abilities over time.” (From the Big Life Journal)

If you have a fixed mindset when it comes to your business skills, you will inevitably miss out on the many opportunities there are to improve your skills.

I hear people talking from a fixed mindset all the time. Often using sentences that start with the words “I’m just not someone who can…” and ending with things like: create content on demand, stick to a schedule, use spreadsheets, get to grips with technology, write web copy and so on and so on.

If you can shift from a fixed to a growth mindset, I have no doubt that it will benefit your business immensely.

Check your intention.

Something I see often is people getting tripped up by the intentions they hold as they put their work out into the world. In my work, I talk a lot about holding an intention to serve because I believe that when people feel truly served, they are more likely to buy from you. I also love this intention because for myself, and the types of business owners I work with, being of service is the main reason we’re doing this!

However, due to the need to make money sometimes this intention can get muddied. When we sit down to write a piece of content, rather than hold the intention that what we create truly helps our audience to overcome their struggles, we write from a place of hoping it makes them want to work with us or that it gets enough ‘likes’.

Or when we offer a gift session to someone, rather than holding the intention to serve and come from a place of generosity, we fall into the trap of focusing on the outcome of making the sale.

Of course, this is all perfectly natural and you’ll find no judgement here.

Holding an intention to serve has been a practice for me since day one. In the early days of my business when I was just starting out as a coach and it was easy to get caught up in wanting to impress the other person or come across as a good coach, I used to meditate before sessions so that I could get my ego out of the way just long enough to make my intention about the other person and not about me! My best sessions were always when I forgot about my “performance”.

How to improve how we feel in our business.

Having shared a few of the places that how we feel can derail our strategic efforts, I feel a bit bad about not giving you my best advice on how to work on this side of things, but here’s the issue.

There is no one way to improve how we feel about our business.

Personally, my journey with this has been long and complex. Over the years I’ve seen a myriad of therapists, coaches and healers.

Lately with all the external “stuff” going on in my world, feeling good both inside and outside of my business has been hard.

When this happens to me, I don’t hesitate to call in support. I book sessions with my most trusted healers, Laura Perkins and Megan Caper, I use my EFT sessions with Liesel Teversham to work on what’s coming up for me.

I lean on my favourite mindfulness practices like morning pages and taking walks in nature and most recently I jumped at the opportunity to get a customised flower essence made for me by the wonderfulTracy O’Meara Smith | Holistic Therapist.

I’m aware that not everyone might have the resources to hire help but that needn’t stop you. Some of the resources I mentioned above have come about from exchanges, i.e. swapping my business coaching skills in exchange for someone else’s skills.

In short, I do what I can to get back to a place of feeling centred and grounded and good in my mind, body and spirit. The effect this has on my bottom line is undeniable.

Your journey might look totally different, as it should do.

The point I’m trying to make here is that you can’t build a sustainable business without spending some time on the emotional and spiritual side of doing so.

I hope what I’ve shared here is useful to you, let me know what comes up for you in the comments.

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.