EP75: [REPLAY] The Controversy of Commitment: Why "All In" is a Huge Red Flag

Wanna know what makes for a toxic work culture? The demand to be "all-in".

In this replay episode, I pull back the curtain on a job opportunity late last year that exposed the toxic reality of being "all in" in today's business world.

From the thrill of finding what seemed like the perfect job to the gut-wrenching disappointment of having the offer yanked away because I dared to have personal interests, this story reveals the harsh truths about modern work culture. I tackle the absurd demands for total commitment, the havoc it wreaks on work-life balance, and the broader implications for both employees and entrepreneurs.

Join me as I cut through the BS and explore what it truly means to balance professional goals with personal integrity and well-being.

Chapters

• 0:00 Job Application Experience
• 9:11 Navigating Job Offer Discussions
• 15:30 Rescinded Job Offer Disappointment
• 27:39 Healthy Commitment in Business

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Can you believe we're already halfway through July, like where is this year going? Anyway, welcome back. This week I have a replay of an episode that was actually really hard for me to record because I was fresh off an experience that really left a bad taste in my mouth. We're going to dive into an experience I had while hunting for jobs, and it was very recent it was actually earlier this year and it really brought me face to face with some of the harsher realities about what employers demand in the business world, particularly when they use words like all in or total commitment, and it really reminded me of how pervasive and sometimes toxic that expectation of being all in can really be. Here's my experience. Here's a replay of episode 55. I hope you enjoy it and I'll talk to you on the other side.

Speaker 1: 1:00

Welcome to the Business Blasphemy Podcast, where we question the sacred truths of the online business space and the reverence with which they're held. I'm your host, sarah Kahn, speaker, strategic consultant and BS-busting badass. Join me each week as we challenge the norms, trends and overall bullshit status quo of entrepreneurship to uncover what it really takes to build the business that you want to build in a way that honors you, your life and your vision for what's possible, and maybe piss off a few gurus along the way. So if you're ready to commit business blasphemy, let's do it. Hello, hello, blasphemers, it's story time. All right, sit back and buckle up. I'm going to tell you a story, and I want to preface this whole thing by saying that it's taken me some time to get to this point and I'm pretty regulated around the entire situation, so I'm able to look at it a bit more objectively, which I think is really important. You want to always share things like this from the scar and not the wound, but I'm also human and so, yeah, I'm still a little stung by everything. There's still a little bit of salt in that wound, but hopefully it doesn't detract from what I really want to share, which will make sense after I go through the story.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Okay, so I make it no secret that I have been on the hunt for a full-time or part-time, remote job to help supplement my business income and, you know, if I'm honest, to really help me get back to networking and connecting with people in real life, like being part of a team on a regular basis, because entrepreneurship is lonely sometimes, you know. So, yes, a remote job, but having a team of people that I can be in constant contact with, and I am in a privileged position I having a team of people that I can be in constant contact with and I am in a privileged position I realize that of being able to be pretty discerning about what I apply for, and the truth is, about 90% of what's out there right now doesn't really fit with what I want to do or fit the lifestyle that I want to have. Having said that, the search hasn't been entirely successful. Now rewind a few months. Out of the blue, no fewer than three people in my sphere, in my space, sent me independently a job ad for a coaching company that they all said I would be absolutely perfect for, and I'm not going to lie, the job was actually really freaking perfect. Not only was it a job with a coaching company that was here in Canada, something that I've traditionally struggled with, because most remote jobs particularly employee jobs right, that you can do remotely are US-based jobs and, as a result of being a Canadian, I'm not always able to submit an application because I'm not a resident of the US. It was also doing work that really aligned with what I wanted to do and what I was already doing, so strategy coaching around business growth, leadership development, and there was the bonus aspect of being able to leverage my 14 years of experience as a teacher, because there was a strong curriculum development and program success component.

Speaker 1: 4:06

So I applied for the job and the job application in and of itself was actually pretty involved. I obviously had to send my resume, which meant I had to go through that and make sure it was updated, because I'm not that person that sends a generic application or resume to everybody, right? I make sure that my resume is up to scratch. It hits on all the right points. I put together a cover letter which honestly I fucking hate doing because cover letters are just stupid and I had to do a video answering three questions that they put in the job ad, explaining why I was the best candidate for the job. So, doing the research, writing the script, making sure that I rehearsed it all of that stuff goes into it. So already I've invested quite a bit of time into applying for this job and putting the application together, and I didn't mind because it was literally the ideal job.

Speaker 1: 4:57

The audience even that this company works with was pretty much exactly the audience that I work with now Ex-corporate women, women leaving the traditional workspace. They want to develop a business in a strategic and thoughtful and pragmatic way. I mean, honestly, I probably couldn't have designed a better job opportunity if I tried, and I was genuinely excited for the first time in a very long time. So I submit the application and almost two weeks go by before I hear anything back. I make it to the first stage, which is a big deal, because if you've been applying for jobs, you know that sometimes you just never hear back. So making it to the first stage was actually kind of a big deal. The first stage was having a conversation, an initial conversation, with the CEO and honestly, we had an incredible chat. I mean we really hit it off. It felt very much like a conversation with a friend, so I was pretty excited about my prospects.

Speaker 1: 5:53

I did make it to the stage after that, the next stage and that was putting together a video tutorial that showcased my teaching ability and also how good I was at designing support content. So I had to put together like a support tool that went along with the video that broke down the steps of the tutorial. And now usually I don't like doing assignments as part of the job application process, because my experience particularly in the corporate space anyway has been that they'll invite you to an interview, you'll get to do the assignment and it helps you showcase whatever your strategy, strategy ability here, there, whatever and then you do the assignment, they steal your idea and they never hire you. But this assignment was actually really cleverly put together. They asked me to do a tutorial on how I cook my favorite meal, so it was giving me a chance to showcase the experience and the expertise, like the skillset that they wanted to see, which was my ability to teach and explain in a way that was easy to understand. But the subject matter could not then be used in any way, shape or form in the business space. So, yeah, it was actually really cleverly done. Now the feedback on my submission absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1: 7:03

This moved me to the next stage, which is now a conversation with team members that I'd be working with closely. Again went really well. I really felt like we hit it off, and I'm one of those hypervigilant people. That's like always monitoring facial expressions and body language and if you know, a conversation is awkward or people are forcing themselves, I'm pretty attuned to that. So when I say that we hit it off. I'm not coming from a space of hoping that that was the case, and I mean it obviously went well, because I was invited to the next phase, which was now another conversation with the CEO and the CFO, and that went really really well. And then I was invited to another conversation lots of conversation to the CEO. So this other conversation, which was now really talking more about the position specifically and by this point I'd made it to the top three candidates and the CEO said she was going to make some decisions over the weekend this was on a Friday and then she would get back to me early the following week.

Speaker 1: 8:00

Now, before I get to what happened the following week, I want to let you know about a few things that we talked about. Okay, during these multiple times, these multiple conversations with the CEO and with the team, we got to talking a lot about my work, a lot about the work that I've been doing for the last few years. We went really in depth into my business experience, my corporate experience. We talked about my experience as an entrepreneur, as an independent consultant. We talked about why I started my consultancy. We talked about I recently had here locally and one that I was going to be going to in Orlando in the next month, which, if you've been listening to the podcast, I never got to do because I got COVID and it was great because all of these things that I shared, they were reflected back to me as these are huge assets in your favor and you're going to be bringing so much experience and knowledge and just perspectives to our team and that's going to make you excel in this particular role, if you get it.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Now, the other thing I want to make very, very clear is they were very transparent at the outset. Okay, the job ad made it very clear that if I was to get this position as a full-time employee, I would be prohibited from engaging in any kind of work that related directly to the core function of the business. So basically, what this means is that if I got the job, I had to be okay with not doing any more coaching or consulting on my own, because it would be in direct conflict to what I'd be doing for the company. That was spelled out like. That was made very clear in the job ad. So I'd already considered it very carefully before I even applied for the job. Now, yes, at first maybe it was like a cursory kind of yeah, I think I'd be okay with it.

Speaker 1: 9:55

But the further I got into the process, the more of a reality it became, the more internal work I found myself having to do. You know, like asking myself at each stage am I actually okay with putting a pin in my business or even burning it down entirely? You know this business that I've been working on for six years. Would I be okay doing that to take this job? And the truth of it is that the more research I did on the business, on the company, on the founder, the more conversations I had, the more I was actually starting to come online with the idea, emotionally, mentally, because the work that I'd be doing with them was so aligned with the work that I wanted to do. It didn't really feel like a hard decision or a bad decision. So I want to be very clear that I was actually willing to put my business on hold or stop it altogether if things worked out in this role.

Speaker 1: 10:51

So, knowing that and having had all these conversations, the podcast and my speaking did come up several times, right, because I wanted to make sure that the CEO would be okay with me continuing those two things, even if I burnt my business down because they weren't technically in conflict with what the business did, I wasn't going to be coaching or consulting on my podcast. The podcast is not a revenue generation tool and you know it wasn't like I was an independent contractor soliciting work. This is more for me, thought leadership, it's sharing ideas, having people on to share ideas. So it's a very different thing. But I wanted the clarity, I didn't want to just make the assumption, and so I asked like would you consider this to be a violation of that particular rule? I asked this on our conversations. We had email follow-ups around it and she was very clear that no, that would not be the case. She was actually okay with me continuing my podcast, and one of the last conversations we had she even said that it would be cool if on my podcast and maybe even in some of the speaking work that I was doing, if I could talk about working with the company, because I could bring those people over to work with us and if I did, I'd even get you know referral bonuses, and I thought this is fantastic, and so she would consider both of those things speaking and my podcast an asset that I'd be bringing to the business. So, all in all, we had really in-depth conversations. Because the fact that I was going to have to give up my business to work with them, I wanted to make sure that everything else they were in alignment with. I didn't want there to be any misunderstandings. I didn't want there to be any reason that I might be fired later on, especially if I was like burning my business down. So I made it clear to ask about these things upfront. They were very clear in their responses, both verbally and in writing. Okay, now fast forward to the last conversation we had that Friday afternoon. Now I'm waiting for them to get back to me.

Speaker 1: 12:42

The following week. Monday rolls around. The CEO reaches out to me Monday morning, weirdly through Instagram and not through the regular channels that we've already been communicating through up to this point, which I don't know. I guess should have been a red flag in hindsight, but wasn't really, because she explained it. As you know, she wanted to talk to me about the job and wanted to keep the details of the offer private from her assistant and other team members that had access to her email. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but anyway, she asked if I had time to meet later that afternoon and I said, yeah, absolutely, I'm on the school run around that time of day, but I can totally go a little bit early and talk to you from the car. She's like awesome. So I left early, got in the car just before my daughter got let out of school and, yeah, basically she offered me the job and I gotta be honest, I was so fucking exciting like every cell in my body lit up right.

Speaker 1: 13:37

First of all, it was a super, super long process to get to this point. But also, after about six weeks of really having had this job at the forefront of my mind on an almost daily basis, I was very aware of what it meant to have this job. And so, when the offer was made, that internal switch of like, yeah, I'm going to have to let go of my business, and then my brain starts turning and thinking about all the things I have to do. Now you know, slowly shut down my business, who I need to speak to, clients I need to let know Like that whole process started in the back of my brain. So we're on this call on this Monday afternoon it's around 2.30. We're talking about compensation. We're talking about benefits. We're getting clear on the number of hours I'd be working each week, how many of those hours would be spent on calls, versus how many clients I would be taking on.

Speaker 1: 14:34

We talked about the onboarding process and what that looked like. We really went into a lot of detail about what was going to be my new reality and I was like this is fantastic. She asked me how I felt about shutting my business down and I said you know what? Because I'm still going to be doing something that's very closely aligned with my own personal mission and my own personal values. I think I'll be okay. And then we also started talking about the speaking opportunity that I had in Orlando, which was coming up in a few weeks, and she was like that sounds really awesome. Is that something that you enjoy doing? I'm like yeah, like we've talked about this, I, you know I do like speaking and it's something that I plan to continue. And you know she's a speaker as well. This woman does a lot of speaking gigs. She has a very high profile. So she understood that and she was like great, go pick up your daughter. I'll send you the contract and other details through email in the next little bit and then we can jump on a call if you have any other questions, but otherwise, welcome aboard.

Speaker 1: 15:30

So I pick up my kid and now I'm like voice messaging people because I couldn't wait to get home. I'm voice messaging like my husband and my best friend and letting them know I got this job and I'm super excited and I'm making all these plans in my head for how things are going to shake down this year, right, and I get home and we do the dinner and the bath and the blah, put the kids to bed and I noticed there's still no email. So I'm like to my husband. I'm like do you think I should follow up? Do you think I should text her? Like she said she was going to send me this stuff? And he's like no, she probably got busy, she'll email you tomorrow. I'm like next morning. I get ready, I check my email and there is an email from her sent at 7.30 in the morning. The subject line says important change of heart. Yeah, you can probably see where this is going, right.

Speaker 1: 16:24

I open up the email and it's a very long and convoluted explanation about how she's now had second thoughts. After all this time. She's now had second thoughts because I want to continue doing my podcast and potentially still entertain future speaking opportunities. Now, quick reminder we have already talked about this ad nauseum for the last six weeks. This was not something that I dropped on her when she made the job offer. So basically, her email is to tell me that the fact that I want to do things outside of working for her business is a giant red flag and that that mentality was a lack of maturity on my part. Her email used terms like mind share and all in commitment those are in quotes, by the way and that my desire to have things outside of her business signaled a lack of commitment with the role and our internal culture Again in quotes. Apparently, having a life and pursuits in my own time was and again I'm going to quote signaling a lack of fit. End quote. So, essentially, she pulled the offer. That was it. She pulled the fucking offer. After all of that Now I did email back a reply obviously clearly stated how I was disappointed and that, given the lengthy process and the number of conversations that we'd had already, you know, I would appreciate the opportunity to talk with her about why this was suddenly an issue.

Speaker 1: 17:59

And if it was really an issue, you know, could we maybe talk through not doing the podcast and what that would look like. I mean, obviously in my brain I'm like A. She low-balled me on the salary and I thought that was just room for negotiation. But if she wanted me to quit doing other stuff and she was willing to compensate me for it, I was not going to be unreasonable about it Left the ball in her court, didn't hear from her. A few hours later, her assistant responds to me and says you know it's a priority and they'll get back to me, but they never did In between there. Okay, like, like backing up a little bit.

Speaker 1: 18:32

After I sent that response email saying like I'm disappointed, can we talk about this? I reached out to a couple of friends to kind of like vent my spleen Cause I was really, really, really upset. I mean, I want you to think about this for a second. I spent the last month and a half mentally and emotionally preparing myself to shut down my business and that was a big fucking decision. And for me to get to a mental and emotional space where I was going to be okay doing that, that took a lot of internal work and a lot of energy and emotional currency. And, as I'm telling this to one of my friends, she goes wait, wait a second, what? What was the title of the job? And so I told her again the title of the job, because it was actually a weirdly specific title and not something you would find in most job ads, like it wasn't business coach, it was very specific. So I told her the title and she's like Sarah.

Speaker 1: 19:29

I opened my Facebook this morning and one of my followers had posted 15 hours ago 15 hours ago that they were offered a job with that exact title for a woman-owned company. So now my brain is churning and I'm like what, wait, wait a second, who is this person? So now my brain is churning and I'm like what, wait, wait a second, who is this person? So it was a mutual contact. I went onto Instagram and I like looked at their Facebook and I checked out and I was like really, you know that I don't know if you've ever had that feeling of like, wait, something happened, I'm missing something, right?

Speaker 1: 20:03

I spent a couple of hours really thinking about do I reach out to her, do I not? And I was like you know what? I really? I really want to reach out to them because I saw their post on Instagram and I was like holy shit, that's the exact job title I was basically offered. So I reached out because of my internal paranoia and I said like I don't mean to be weird or creepy, but I saw your post and I just I really need to know who the company is. Now, to her credit, she didn't immediately divulge the name of the company. She was like asking me questions to kind of gauge what was going on, and I was blunt with her and I told her exactly what had happened and I just I wanted to, I wanted to know. And she did come clean and say this is who offered me the job.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Long story short, what appears to have happened is that I was offered the job and within an hour or two she was offered the job after me, and then the next morning the CEO just like hold my job offer, no, talking about it, no question, nothing, just boop, sorry, not sorry. Take that as you will. I'm not here to talk about CEOs behaving badly. That's definitely a conversation for another day. That requires a lot more time. You can do what you want with that information and, frankly, if you are a CEO or a founder, you can also do whatever you want as a CEO and founder, right Like you, can do what you want. But I'm not going to lie.

Speaker 1: 21:28

That whole situation and the way it was handled felt skeezy, unethical and just plain shitty, especially given the time that the whole process took and the amount of time that I invested in it. So now I'm left with all of this emotional turmoil that I didn't even realize was emotional turmoil. Obviously, I was really angry at first and then it turned into other stuff and blah, blah, blah. It's taken me many weeks to get to the point where I can even talk about this in a regulated way, and I'm definitely more regulated around the experience now, which is why I can talk about it. But I am still salty, which I think is reasonable because I'm a human and it's only been a few weeks. But the reason I was feeling all of this turmoil is because I felt a huge betrayal around it and thank you to my friend Shula who actually put words to this, because we were talking about this last week. It felt hugely disrespectful. Again, I had gotten to a point where I was willing to shut down something that's been very important to me for the last six years of my life. So let me ask you a question, my dear listener how much more all-in does a person need to be? And that's really the conversation I want to have today and why you needed this story to understand where I was coming from, needed this story to understand where I was coming from.

Speaker 1: 22:56

Now, the concept of being all in in business and in entrepreneurship is something that can tend to be a little bit polarizing. I mean, I can't tell you the number of businesses that I've worked with, either personally, directly, or have seen indirectly, where the expectation is that someone is quote, unquote, all in. If you look at the dictionary definition of all in, it's basically being completely committed to, or very much in favor of, something, and it's that first part that I want to bring your attention to. Completely committed. Now, commitment is something that actually leaves a lot of room for interpretation, I think, right, like from a business perspective, you see a lot of that kind of mentality, that rhetoric, with relation to founders and business owners who, for the sake of this we're just going to call CEOs, okay. You see a lot of CEOs that say, if you're not willing to go all in in a business, then a business isn't worth building. So this is from, like the CEO's perspective. Right, like, if you're going to start a business, you're not willing to go all in, don't even bother, and you'll hear a lot of coaches say that, that you've got to be all in if you want to be successful or if you want to have the kind of impact or staying power that you know you need to be all in as an entrepreneur, and to some extent, I can understand that.

Speaker 1: 24:07

Having a business is not a simple thing, is not an easy thing. It does require a great deal of commitment, but I see this term being used more and more with respect to people who are working in the business too. Right, like full-time employees, freelancers, independent contractors. I've seen business owners get angry when team members can't spend or won't spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week, working for their specific business, because they have other clients to take care of. They have their own business that they want to grow. I've seen business owners who get really, really angry when their team members are not able to jump at their beck and call, and those behaviors are seen as like not being all in, not being invested, not being committed to the business.

Speaker 1: 24:52

I asked my Facebook and Instagram followers, like I usually do when I have questions like this, like what's your immediate response? Like, what impression do you have immediately? That gut sort of feeling when you hear the term all in related to business? And, as I expected, you know, it was a very polarizing series of responses. Some people said it feels cringy, especially as an independent contractor, but sometimes it can also signal camaraderie or togetherness or the excitement of being part of something. Another follower said it sounded like NLP guru junk and they're like nope, no, thank you. Another follower said it gives a touch of shame vibes. Someone said it smacks of not really understanding that people have different levels of privilege and that, honestly, in this economy the idea of being all in can actually be really triggering because we're not all coming from the same place.

Speaker 1: 25:53

Use the term to shame people into buying things that they're maybe not ready to buy or it's not the right time for them or they can't financially afford it comfortably. I also got a lot of vomit emojis in the responses from my followers and then you know you've got people on the other side of the spectrum too who were like I get excited when I hear that because it's a big decision. It signals a big decision made and one that I can devote myself to and stop second guessing myself around. There was also the response that it's a different way of looking at your goals or assessing someone's priority level. There was essentially a lot of polarized discourse around it.

Speaker 1: 26:22

People either found it to be a fantastic thing to be all in or it was cringy, shame-inducing and a word I really found interesting weaponized, but really I think the majority of people agree that these days, when it's used, it is tended to infer up until now that you just haven't been dedicated enough or working hard enough on something and that that can induce feelings of shame or failure, and that's not really the kind of journey you want to take somebody on, right? I think it also begs the question of how does the person using the term actually interpret all in, because it is a very subjective term. But what does it actually mean? Do you want me to give up anything and everything that is part of my identity so that I can assimilate into whatever Borg ecosystem you've developed? I don't know if you're a Star Trek fan, but hopefully that reference made sense. Does it mean giving you my blood, sweat, tears and my left leg? Does it mean giving you whatever my capacity is to give to you and only you. Like, what exactly do you mean when you say all in? Where are the boundaries of where I start and where I end? Now, going back to this particular job, I can honestly say that me being willing to burn down my business, like if that wasn't all in enough, I honestly don't know what the fuck is.

Speaker 1: 27:39

And I think this points to a global systemic issue, not only in the job market, but in the entrepreneurial space, because you see it so often. You see so much of this behavior from business owners and founders and CEOs, but you also see it so often. You see so much of this behavior from business owners and founders and CEOs, but you also see it in corporations. You need to come in early, stay late, skip your lunch, volunteer for all the things, be a yes person, go to the company retreats it's exhausting. And you see it in entrepreneurship, with examples that I've already given. I mean, a few episodes ago, I talked about work-life balance and how I don't believe that it really exists, and this is one of the reasons why, because most heads of business talk a really good game and then shit on you if you're not devoting every waking moment of life and thought to their business, and I think that's what this comes down to. It's their business right Telling me well, you can't keep your podcast, why not?

Speaker 1: 28:38

Well, you can't do speaking engagements on your own time? Really, why not? You can't do this, you can't do that? Why not? Because when most people say all in, they mean you are not fully invested. If you want to have outside pursuits in your own time, if you want to have outside interests in your own time, god, the number of business owners I've seen get pissed off because their team members have their own businesses is staggering. It's this idea that you're not fully invested if you want to have a life outside my business or other clients or other offers, or have your kids in the room or take time off or not work on a fucking Sunday because your CEO couldn't get their shit together in the six days that preceded it.

Speaker 1: 29:23

And hat tip to my friend Anne for the following. But yeah, bitch, that's right. I'm not fully invested in you, your product or your business. I'm partially invested at this number of hours for this dollar amount. And why is that a problem? Because it shouldn't be. If you're paying me to do a job, you're paying me to do a job, end of story. And if I decide to spend the rest of my life doing anything else, that I choose to do, that's my business, not your business. You already got me for your business, and that is why the term all in will always be a red flag for me. At the very least, it should be the start of a very important conversation about what this relationship is going to look like and what the expectations are. And, honestly, the irony of someone saying that I have a lack of commitment and that that was a red flag, when really it's the expectation that I would have no outside interests or pursuits that didn't directly relate back to their business, was an even bigger red flag. And so, going forward, I think that when you see the terminology like this in job ads or on coaching calls, or you hear people say it, or sharing concepts or ideas that in order to be effective in what you're doing for someone else's business, or even your own, that you literally have to eat, breathe and sleep the business, that is entirely wrong and I've already said this.

Speaker 1: 30:50

This mentality can lead to work-life disharmony, dysregulation, and we know that this type of mentality is problematic, because this is when things like burnout start right. This is when you start to feel resentful, even if you like the thing. This is when you start to feel that all-encompassing sense of stress and it becomes harder and harder to look at things objectively, to problem solve, to make decisions. I mean, we talk about the dangers of burnout and the impact that it has on mental health. We talk about the impact of this thing on the person, but what about business sustainability? You can't have a team of people who are so myopic in their view, like what they see and what they do, because they're so committed to your business, only that it prevents them from growing in other spaces, which can actually, you know, increase not only how well your business operates but their ability for personal growth and the opportunities that both of you can ultimately have as a result.

Speaker 1: 31:48

And I know some people, when I asked, said that the only person who should be all in in a business is the CEO. Yeah, I agree with that to a point, but I think it can be equally dangerous for a business owner or a founder to be that all in as well for the same reasons mental health, isolation, not being able to see opportunities for growth, being isolated from your network, missing out on industry trends. There are so many reasons why that level of commitment, that level of intense commitment, can actually be a negative thing. But I will say that of all the people on the roster, yeah, the CEO should actually be the most committed to the business, because it's their business at the end of the day. But that doesn't mean that all parties involved can't find some sort of harmony. There have to be healthier. Alternatives to being all in Boundaries are absolutely critical, and for me, some of those alternatives are things like strategic commitment versus all-in commitment, and what I mean by that is commitment to things like values of an organization, the mission of a business, because those things are going to get buy-in far more deeply and in a far more aligned way than just I'm going to give you every ounce of my being and you can do with me what you like.

Speaker 1: 33:07

I think a lot of business owners seem to think that commitment comes from. You've got to be solely focused on me and the business and what I need versus this is my mission, my vision here are my values. My team members can relate to those and they feel aligned with those and I can get buy-in now because they believe not only in those things, but in the same outcomes that I'm striving for. They believe not only in those things, but in the same outcomes that I'm striving for. That helps you emphasize strategic focus and the ability to prioritize what's important versus trying to prioritize everything. Make sure that the pursuit of success doesn't come at the expense of your well-being or your relationships, and that's critical because a variety of experiences and exposures are going to allow you to bring together different perspectives which bring fresh insights and solutions to problems that you might not have considered. It'll prevent things like tunnel vision. It'll prevent a really common risk that a lot of CEOs have, which is being too absorbed in a single path or a single approach. It helps from an emotional, mental health standpoint yes, we've talked about that, but it is so critically important. It helps with problem solving, innovation, accountability. You can share knowledge and resources and when things don't work out, having a broader focus versus a myopic focus can help cultivate resilience Resilience in the face of things like setbacks or even perceived you know perceived failures, right? This is absolutely critical, especially when you're an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1: 34:39

Now, before I end, I want to say when you see the term all in in the future, don't necessarily run for the hills. Yes, it should be a red flag, but it should be one that warrants the start of a conversation. It should be a trigger for you to advocate for yourself, ask questions like what does all in look like to a business owner? And if they avoid the question and don't really want to answer it, then yeah, run for the hills. But you can ask other questions like what do you do for fun outside your business? What do team members do outside of the business when they're not working? Things like that. You can get a lot of information from things like that.

Speaker 1: 35:13

And this is why it's so important to know yourself and your values and your goals and what kind of capacity you have and the kind of lifestyle you want to live, know the things and how you want to structure your life so that you have room for both work and play. Because being clear on all of that makes your decision-making process easier and you get to decide what you want life to look like before someone else tells you what it should look like. And it's important because so many of us entered the working world at such a young age when no one told us that it was okay to have a life that was in harmony, where everything supported everything else. Like, we are stuck in this capitalist culture that prioritizes profit over people and loyalty that is bought rather than earned. And, especially as women, we are raised in our careers as feeling like we have to make a choice Either you're totally committed to your career or you're not. There's no gray area, there's no understanding the realities of life, and I get that this may be again a privileged stance and that not everyone is in the position to turn down a job or hold out for something you know. Quote unquote better right, I get it, but we can start to have conversations around what should be the norm. We're allowed to start having conversations that shift the narrative and as entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to ensure that we are not creating a capitalist corporate clone when we start our businesses and employ other people.

Speaker 1: 36:39

Because we are well into year two of this podcast and I have proven week after week, time after time and with guest after guest, that you can have success without all the fucking bs that they keep telling us is normal, and it has to start with questioning the status quo. So here's what I want you to do this week I want you to come hang out with me on Instagram. Tell me what you thought about this topic, because I would love to hear from you, because it is so important to have your side of the story heard too. All right, have a fantastic week. I'll talk to you soon. Bye with others, head over to businessblasphemypodcastcom to connect with us and learn more. Thanks for listening and remember you can have success without the BS.