How CEO’s can Put the Me in MEntal Health
Being the CEO of your practice can be overwhelming without having strong coping strategies in place.
So, in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, and our own “I Put the ME in MEntal Health” Campaign, we thought we would share some of our favorite unofficial rules and coping strategies we’ve developed to avoid burnout and excess stress.
Done is Better than Perfect - We live by this phrase, especially when perfect is highly subjective. For example - when is a marketing email “perfect?” Who decides? We could spend weeks changing a word here and there on a single email (ask me how I know). So instead, we simply check to see if it includes the key information and is free from typos and formatting errors, and then we hit send and move on. When we catch ourselves perseverating on making something “perfect” we will say out loud, “Done is Better Than Perfect!” It unlocks our brains like magic and allows us to call the task done and move on.
And the outcomes have reinforced this approach - we’ve had emails written and sent in a 20 minutes, and emails we’ve obsessed on for two days with the same response and interaction rates. Or social media videos that we spontaneously record and post get better engagement than the ones we script and spend hours editing to make them “perfect”.
The Work Will Always Be There - we know as well as anyone that there is ALWAYS more work to do. Early in our careers as entrepreneurs, we both fell into the trap of thinking working all the available hours was part of the job description. (Anyone else a victim of “hustle culture?”) But in reality, working all the hours of a day is unsustainable and unhealthy. Instead, we focus on prioritizing, delegating, and working smart to get as much done in a normal workday as we can. And we leave the rest for the next day.
Because we’ve learned that regardless of whether we work a 6 hour day, or a 12 hour day, there will still be more work to do tomorrow. But when we keep our work day to 6 (ish) hours, we are ready to face the next day refreshed and ready to dive back in. And THAT is sustainable.
Delegate, Delegate, Delegate. When we start a new project, the first thing we do is look at which pieces can be done by other people and then we delegate those pieces. When our To Do lists are growing faster than we can chip away at them, we stop and reevaluate the items on the list to see what can be done by someone else, and then we hand it off. When we’ve really been aggressive about delegating, we can have entire work days where our entire To Do list is checking-in on delegated projects or provide feedback on work that’s been completed. And those are amazing days because we’re able to operate fully within our CEO role of overseeing, planning, and leading, rather than getting into the weeds of doing all the things.
These may sound like simple hacks on the surface, but it took us decades of building and running companies independently, followed by years of working together as business partners, to get to this place. The benefit of having a business partner is that we can identify unhealthy behaviors in each other more easily than in ourselves. Once we do, we articulate the challenges, identify a solution, and hold each other accountable to making those changes.
If you’re wishing you had a partner or a community to help you build your own healthy habits or keep you accountable to living those habits, you might be a good fit for the CEO Clinicians Collective. (We’re now enrolling for our September cohort!)
