It was a nice full call this week, and the energy matched. I arrived fresh off of running an event the night before, but Hotseat calls always make me feel lighter. The check-ins flowed with more wins than excuses, awesome to see!

Themes that ran through the session: capacity, and how to protect it. Creative goal setting that actually fits the person doing it. And how to weigh a shiny opportunity when the tank is already running low. As always we traded the usual business theater for real conversation with one another - so let’s get into it.

Goal setting works when the process fits the person, not the template.

Simone shared her goal-setting process built around a letter to her future self, with prompts about where she wants to be and what she’d end up thanking herself for. It was creative, personal, and it actually got DONE. Which is more than most goal-setting templates can claim.

It inspired me enough to adapt a simpler version for my own work, and my team and I have already started using it. What I noticed: the win wasn't the method - it was the permission to redesign the method.

The line that stuck with me: we treat goals like a business plan when we should treat them like a task list - dynamic, organic, always changing.

Capacity is infrastructure. It requires maintenance, not heroics.

A recurring thread this week was what to do when the tank is low. Liz shared how she’s been using the flexibility of self-employment to take mini-breaks and give herself permission to not have to keep pushing all the time.

I shared a version of my own. After a difficult morning recently, I shifted some meetings around rather than white-knuckling through them. The schedule should serve the founder, not the other way around.

Where we landed: flexibility should not be a perk of self-employment that we feel guilty about using - it’s part of the operating model.

A shiny opportunity is a resource allocation question, not a simple question of yes or no.

Liz presented a genuinely tempting offer to the room: create a video course for a new platform, with passive income potential and professionally filmed content as the upside. The catch was a tight timeline landing on top of an already stretched schedule.

The conversation helped to reframe things and offer a variety of perspectives. One member suggested treating the time investment like a financial risk: would the hours still be acceptable if the project offered no return? I pushed on the trade-offs: burnout on one side, a new skill and reusable content on the other. Instead of a simple accept or decline option, the discussion led to a far less binary solution of trying to negotiate the timeline.

It connects to something a mentor once told me about scaling: consulting is capped by our own hours, but products like courses and newsletters can scale past personal capacity. However, the math only works if building them doesn't break the builder.

Automate the friction points, not the entire workflow.

Simone is currently working on automating her podcast production and distribution. The instinct with automation is to wire up the whole pipeline. The room's advice was slightly different: find the most time-consuming tasks and start there.

For Simone, that was finding and editing usable social media segments. The practical suggestions were specific: transcription-led tools to surface hookable snippets and generate social media copy, and exporting to a proper editor rather than fighting the recording platform's built-in tools.

What we're each doing in the next two weeks

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