Today marks the start of a new series where we’re going to talk about the energetics of being a business owner and a CEO of a highly profitable, highly leveraged business. We’re going to talk about what that actually looks like, as well as some of the energy shifts that we need to make in order to make that transition easier and smoother and faster!

The Energy Shift

This energy shift from hustling doer to visionary CEO is just as important as all the strategies and tactics that you’ve applied previously to your business combined. If you as the CEO remain the hustling doer in your business and hold on to the role that brought you success in the first place rather than letting go of the doing what held it all together for all of those years, you won’t have the bandwidth to do what’s required of you to level up your growth and income and freedom in any sustainable way.

This energy shift is perhaps one of the hardest evolutionary journeys that our visionary CEOs take when they’re partnering with us. It’s a whole different way of leading their vision, their team, and their community than what they’re used to, and it’s a hugely difficult adjustment. 

The knee jerk reaction when something inevitably goes a little bit wrong—and it will go a little bit wrong, which is part of the adjustment— is to fall back into micromanaging people and jumping in on projects before the team gets a chance to really do the work, which leaves the CEO feeling that nothing gets done in the business unless they’re there doing it. But in reality, they’re really not letting the team shine. 

Sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do during this energy shift is allow our team to fail.

I know that sounds a little crazy, but it’s true. It is such a powerful thing when we allow our team to fail, because that means we also allow them to figure things out without us stepping in and fixing it for them.

Now, yes, we are still there to guide and course-correct them as we’re committing to this energy shift, but sometimes letting them flounder a bit before figuring out how to fix their own mistake is the best thing we can do. It really gives us that experience of watching them make the right decisions at the right time, which is the only thing that will finally give us that relief of knowing someone else can handle these responsibilities we’re trying to let go of.

As a leader, you give your team the tools to succeed. You give them the guidance to course-correct and the guardrails to meet your expectations. But you don’t continue to cling on and keep them from shining after that.

We talk a lot about guardrails in our company. One of our guardrails here is our company culture, which is really how we behave and how we show up in a company that’s really aligned with the CEO’s (or in this case, my) values. We also talk about the standard operational procedures, which is how we do the things that we do and how we get the results that we do for our clients. 

Those are the two guardrails that we have in place for our team, but we do not jump in and fix the problems for our team. We want them to figure these things out themselves, because that’s how they level up in their own roles.

 Now, this energy shift is not a total hands-off thing either. This is how most CEOs trip themselves up throughout this necessary energy shift: they either step in and do it all themselves, or they step out too far and hand it off to someone else, because they finally have someone capable of doing that on their team, and they never look back.

What happens with the latter? That trusted person ends up hijacking the business and taking it over, in the sense that they grow so entitled to the business that they think that they know better than the CEO because they’ve done so much of the business development on the back end.

This happens when the CEO completely lets go during this energy shift and just kind of goes off to do their own thing, and we don’t want to hit that extreme with this energy shift, because it will end with your authority being undermined.

Obviously we’re relieved when we have the opportunity to step away from our business without things falling apart anymore, but we don’t want to end up completely absent. We still want to be the leader of that business and lead with our sovereignty, our integrity, and our intuition in a very powerful way. The sweet spot really lies somewhere between micromanaging and completely letting go. 

I remember what it was like when I first actually worked myself out of a job in my business, when I had finally delegated all the day-to-day stuff off my plate and handed it over to my capable team.

I couldn’t relax during that energy shift at first. I ended up twiddling my thumbs and wondering…what am I supposed to do now? What could I do now that my business didn’t need my constant attention to run on its own?

Honestly, I felt a little useless during the energy shift from doer to visionary. I had to fight the urge to jump in and do and fix things again.

Handing Over the Cape

If I’m being honest, there are times even today that I fall into this trap of thinking that I am the only one who can handle certain parts of my business. 

The reality is, when you break things down and get the systems in place, anyone should be able to do the things that you do in your business and do them just as well or even better than you.

Through all these years of hustling hard, I’ve been telling myself that I was a badass. I was the hero. I was the super smart, super capable, super brilliant CEO that came in and saved the day.

But eventually, making the energy shift from doing to leading actually requires us to let go of having to be the hero. We have to let go of the kudos that we get when we sweep in and save the day, and rather than making ourselves the most important person in the company, we really need to learn how to empower our team to become the heroes of our business…as well as the heroes to our clients.

There are only two tasks that should be left on our plate as true visionaries: firstly, creating the vision, and secondly, keeping the team accountable to that vision. 

Creating the vision takes way more spaciousness than we think. Years of running our businesses by the seat of our pants and never quite having the bandwidth to think strategically about where we are steering the ship have left us reactive rather than responsive. 

A lot of times, when we get stuck in that doing mode, we tend to make key business decisions in a reactive way just to plug the holes and keep moving. 

Because of that, a lot of us feel some serious decision fatigue. We’ve been making tons of decisions for a long time, and we might be a little cranky, a little grumpy, a little overwhelmed. 

From that place, it’s very hard to make strategic, long-term, well-thought-out decisions for our business. And it’s also really difficult when we are stuck in hustle mode to tap into our own inner wisdom and intuition that help us lead the way in our businesses.

Ultimately, slowing down and creating space is one of the best things you can do to step into your place as the visionary CEO and hit that sweet spot. And though it’s a difficult shift to make, it is a journey that I believe is absolutely worth taking.

The Start of a Series

So, this was the introduction into this energy shift that is so necessary for us to level up and become the visionary leaders we are meant to be. We are gonna be talking about this over the next couple of posts here on the blog, and I am so excited to share more about this. It’s something that I spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about behind the scenes, but I don’t think we’ve actually touched on this subject here before. So you’re in for a treat! 

Are you wondering if you’re ready to take the next step in your business? Curious about whether you’re a good fit for our services? Take the free business assessment quiz to find out! And if you want to learn more, you can visit my website or schedule a call with me today. I can’t wait to hear from you!

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