Three steps back
📸 Photo by Kent Banes on Pexels
Sam’s in a fast-moving start-up. She’s been managing a team that’s gone from three people to twenty-five in two years. Good problem, on paper. In the room, it doesn’t always feel like one.
She says she has about 500 tabs open on her laptop, and it feels the same inside her head.
Under pressure, she gets pulled into conversations she doesn’t want to be having. Sharper than she means to be, venting about individuals, contributing to a work culture that feels less professional than she wants it to be. Not every day. Often enough that she named it as something she wanted to change, right at the start of our work together. She wants to lead more professionally. Lead by example.
We’ve been working on it since. Noticing the moment before the vent happens. A pause, a choice point, right before the words come out.
It hasn’t fully worked. Not for lack of trying, she’s been consistent with it. She’s reported being able to stay a bit more detached, to not take things quite so personally. But it hasn’t stopped the old behaviour often enough.
Today we worked out why. We’d been focusing on the moment. We needed to be watching what leads to the moment. Three steps back, not one.
That’s when we got to the real question. Not how do you catch yourself before you vent, but why is your patience this thin in the first place?
The answer wasn’t complicated once she said it out loud. No time to move her body. No time to cook a proper meal. Drinks after work because they change how the day feels, even briefly. A collapse on the sofa at the end of the day, no energy left for anything else.
‘I don’t need to focus on the pause,’ she said. ‘I need to focus on my recovery time.’
The thing before the thing
Most of what I write about here assumes a baseline. Permission to be a rough draft. The right-sized next step. Holding two true things at once. All of that assumes you’ve got enough in reserve to actually do it.
Sometimes you don’t. And the work isn’t a better technique. It’s building the conditions that make any technique possible at all.
That’s not the same as waiting for everything to be perfect before you start. I see people get stuck exactly there, holding off until the conditions are ideal, which is just procrastination wearing a sensible coat. This isn’t that. It’s the difference between the tank being empty and the tank being full to the brim before you’ll drive anywhere. You need enough. Not everything.
Creating those conditions is itself an iteration. You don’t land on the right boundaries, the right rhythm, the right amount of recovery, in one go. You try a version, it’s wrong, it works partially, you adjust. The work of getting your own conditions right follows exactly the same shape as everything else I write about here. It’s just aimed at yourself instead of the business.
A van, and a room of your own
Another client, a creative business owner, has been building something more literal: a van, kitted out as a space of her own. Somewhere to sleep, write, think, be inspired, get distance and out into the landscape when she needs it.
It’s a real van. But it’s building the same thing Sam is after: a physical container with four wheels that makes the rest possible, her condition for everything else to work. Creative work, clearer thinking, the ability to be present with her loved ones, all of it downstream of having somewhere she can actually go.
Both started because nothing else was going to work without it.
The part you can’t build alone
A third story, different again. Erica, a founder who’d lost momentum after a stretch of being pulled in too many directions, could feel herself starting to doubt whether any of it would work. She’d been part of an accelerator programme a while back that had helped, and her instinct was to look at what to repeat.
What she landed on was more useful than that. The structure of the programme, she could recreate on her own. The people couldn’t be recreated. That was the part that had actually been doing the work, and Erica hadn’t clocked it until it was gone. She’s since started building a small, local, in-person group of her own, because that has to be built, not found.
Structure you can prototype solo. Connection, it turns out, you can’t.
Where this leaves you
Recovery time. A room of your own, literal or otherwise. People around you who are actually building something similar. None of it is glamorous, and none of it will show up on a strategy slide.
But it’s the layer everything else sits on. Before the beta version, before the right-sized stretch, before you can hold two hard truths at once and keep going. First, the conditions that let you show up at all.
And getting those conditions right takes exactly the same iterative, unglamorous, one-adjustment-at-a-time approach as everything else does. That part, at least, is consistent.