Leading by example by doing less

You’re here because you're a leader who's incredibly driven and highly ambitious, but have you ever thought about what your life might need to look like when you’re hit with the unexpected and literally forced to slow down?

?? Perhaps you’d beat yourself up and feel like a failure for not performing at your usual pace.

?? Maybe you’d tell yourself that you can indeed keep going and do it all because that's the way it's always been and that's the way it'll always be.

?? Or perhaps you’re shaking your head in disbelief because slowing down is never going to be a viable option for you.

Being forced to slow down

If you’re wondering how I know exactly what's going through someone's head when they're forced to slow down, it’s because I’ve been there. Many a-time.

In early 2020, I went through yet another long and painful miscarriage which meant I had to slow down for my health and mental wellbeing.

Fast forward a couple of months and covid hit which strongarmed me to instantly drop non-important, non-urgent responsibilities in order to pick up home-schooling instead.

And, as I write this, both Adam (my other half of 12+ years) and our eight-year-old daughter, Freya, have Covid and are home, unwell, and I’m needing to split my time/energy differently again.

The Minimum Effective Dose (MED)

I understand that the Minimum Effective Dose (sometimes also called the Minimum Viable Dose or Minimum Effective Load) is something Timothy Ferris talked about in one of his books.

In short, the concept is around defining the smallest dose of something that will produce the desired outcome.

And although his book was about health, we can easily take the word “dose” and think of it as effort or output.

Then we apply this bare minimum to our professional and personal lives when our time and energy is squeezed between the usual day-to-day responsibilities due to deadlines, health, emergencies, holidays, and everything in between.

How it works

MED is about figuring out the minimum amount of effort to scrape by for a short amount of time. If you do anything over and above that minimum, then great - that's a bonus. But otherwise, you're doing just enough to keep your head above water. Nothing more.

In a nutshell, it's paring everything back and keeping your priorities super simple by doing less.

Dan Meredith, serial entrepreneur and best-selling author spoke about MED, and said: "Obstacles come up, and failure will happen if they aren't addressed. Sometimes life throws you a curveball out of nowhere that you couldn't have planned. Others – they had a decent chance of occurring. The beauty of that is if you know these things have a good chance of happening, you can take action ahead of time to either prevent them or have a plan of action in place for when they do."

When life gives you lemons

In an ideal world, I'll get up around 5am (yes, I am one of those people - don't hate me) to work out, do a bit of work on my own business, stick the washing on, tidy up, and enjoy a coffee or two before the family wakes up.

Then when I return to the desk after the school run, third coffee in hand, I feel fully energised and ready for the day ahead without any other niggling distractions.

But when life gives me lemons, my days look nothing like that.?

Today, in particular, I’m tired. None of us Tretis-Caseys are sleeping well with all the coughing going on in the house at night. The dog is unsettled because Adam isn’t around much so he's walking up and down the stairs at night. I'm sleeping in the spare room to give Adam some space which is out of our usual routine. And I ended up snoozing the alarm several times this morning when it went off.

And although I'm 100% healthy and well, I'm also incredibly aware that if I am going to get ill, it's probably going to happen in the next few days.

As I type this right now, I recognise that my MED for my business development this week is this very newsletter, and I'm crossing it off my list ASAP.?

I'm not interested in presenteeism.

I'm not interested in being busy for the sake of it.

What I am interested in is leading by example by doing less and highlighting that sometimes slowing down is non-negotiable.

IF (big if) the rest of the week goes downhill, at least this is done. My full focus while in Work Mode will be on my coaching and client deliverables, and I won't need to waste energy on trying to muster up marketing creativity when I've already planned to channel my energy into my client work.

If I do anything else on my socials over the coming days - bonus.?

If I have time to do a Live in my Facebook group - ace.?

And if I don’t? Well, I’m not going to beat myself up because my approach is agile enough that I saw my expectations for this week would need to be adjusted, so I identified my MED and took action.

As a high-achiever, it could be very easy for me to feel like a failure for not being able to keep up with my optimal pace and not posting on Instagram 10 times or snoozing the 5am alarm or skipping three days of hoovering or forgetting about a day of foam rolling. But because I already knew what the MED needed to look like in my world during trickier times, that made it easier for me to embrace it, sink into it… and, well, accept it without any of the accompanying feelings of failure or guilt.

Reflection

I guarantee you’ll need to think about your MED at some point, so you might as well take two minutes to come up with a plan now - and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments if that's useful to you.

• What could your MED look like - professionally and also personally?
• How will you know when you need to use it?
• What could get in the way of you using it?
• What would happen if you didn’t use your MED when you needed it and carried on as normal?
• Who can you turn to for support with this? Clue - read on for some help here. ??

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