Kris Plachy: Hello and welcome to my birthday week. I'm excited to kick this week off with you. Let's get started talking about my new year.

Hello, how are you? Welcome to Leadership Is Feminine. I'm Kris Plachy. I am honored that you're here with me today. This is releasing the week of my birthday. My birthday's December 3rd. Hey, shout out to all the Sags out there. Y'all know who you are. I'm also, full disclosure, recording this with a nasty case of the Covid. And so I might be a little , I might be a little loopy.

And so I wanted to talk with you though, because I guess twofold, there's been a lot of things that have been happening in my personal space that have been incredibly illustrative of what I want my life to look like going into 2023, and I always assume that I'm not alone, and that there's other people who likely share some of my thinking. And so I thought, why not? Let's do this together. And so

these will be kind of a, a few little chunks of my insights and musings that I do believe string together. But we'll see if that's true by the time I'm done. My team might listen to this and say, "Yeah, uh, Plachy, this was weird", or "Dude, that was good".

So because my birthday is at the end of the calendar year, I've always kind of taken my birthday as the same time as sort of the new year because it's in December and why not? It's my new year and so happy New Year to me. And I started this actually about 10 years ago and I actually made a new year plan. It was a little workbook I made and, some of my clients used it. And so this is sort of an ongoing exercise for me. It seems to sort of naturally start to happen towards the latter part of the fall, I start to kind of get really reflective and like I said, I've had some serious reflections in both my personal life and in my business life that are sort of colliding and showing me some very similar overlap.

I guess I'll start by first saying that I was recently with my girlfriend Brooke, who many of you know, and we were sitting on her couch and she was talking to me about this book that she's reading called Necessary Endings by, Henry Cloud. And I was, she was just reading me pages from it and I was like, "Oh my God, this is so good".

And it's for business leaders. It's not really a personal book, but I was like, "I have to buy this immediately". So I went into my Amazon to buy it and I had bought it in 2013. I bought it. And I thought, "Oh, that's really interesting that I bought this so long ago". I didn't remember it at all. I'm sure that happens to a lot of us, but like how a book appears when you need it.

And you know what I say to my clients a lot and what I try and live by is we really have to be willing to let it all go, to burn it all down. And it's the only way we can really know if what we're doing is what we really want. I read a quote this morning that said, let it all go and see what remains. And I think it's also true for who, right? Who remains. And so I've been in business now, I'm in 10 and a half years. I've been doing what I'm doing now for the last four. And I'm a creative. And so as a creative, I feel quite drawn to grow creatively.

The biggest anchor to a creator is the belief that we have to sustain something for others so they stay happy, safe, comfortable, whatever. And it's even more cumbersome when you are in a healing creative role, which I believe that I am, because I don't ever wanna cause injury, pain, disappointment, to anyone. I wanna heal people not upset them. And yet that creates an anchor. And so I would imagine that there's others out there listening to this who are in leadership roles, who are creative, whose creativity calls to them, but they feel quite obligated to things they've already built. It's a dance.

And so the thing that I like about this Necessary Endings, and I'm incredibly oversimplifying, but I love the way he writes. He's a wonderful writer. He's written many books, actually, Henry Cloud, that if you like my podcast, I would imagine you would like him. In fact, I would love to talk to him. Maybe I'll see if I can interview him. But he likens, you know, business, and life, to a rosebush. And he talks about that there are four phases of a rose. And again, I'm not very good and my covid brain is not working very well. But you know, basically there's growing, kind of being, there's dying and there's dead. That's very oversimplified, but the way that you build, or the way that you grow a gorgeous rosebush is through extreme pruning. You have to, because otherwise, if left to its own devices, what does a rose bush do? It just turns into a snarly gnarley mess and it's not beautiful and the roses that grow do not get the full advantage of healthy stems and sunlight and nourishment.

And so you end up with this, sure, maybe very large rosebush, but it's a mess. And that's what I think a lot of people do in business. It's very hard to prune. And if you've ever pruned a rosebush, which I used to do when I had a different house, I had rose bushes. I was always like, "Oh God, is this the right one? Is this the right one to prune off? Oh, right." Because it's a science and an art.

Our businesses are the same, you guys. We grow and I know that I find myself sometimes like, "Holy heck. There's lots of stems here. Oh yeah, but this stem has a rose on it. Do we cut it when the rose is like there? Do you cut that?" And the very real truth is you do, you have to cut it if you want the other roses to grow into what this rose bush could be.

So I offer you this because I can see this in my business and I can see this in my life. This is sort of a random and very dumb example, but I think it's a good one. I love things. I've always loved things. We just moved and it was incredibly cathartic cuz we got rid of so much. And yet, the other day we were leading a guest expert call in the lab. Our guest expert was Angela Kim, who is just one of my dear dearest, dearest clients. And she's incredibly amazing. Her book, Radical Radiance is beautiful, and her skincare line Save Her Beauty is gorgeous. Shameless plug, no affiliate code, just, it's gorgeous, all natural, beautiful.

But she came on and she was wearing this beautiful necklace. It's a Tiffany smile necklace, which I've always just loved. And I commented on it and she was kind of surprised I knew what it was. And I said, "Yeah, I love that. That's so beautiful." And she told me the story of how she got it, and that was that. And the other day, I was in my closet and saw on my necklace tree that I had a Tiffany smile necklace that I had completely forgotten I had. And that's not because I have a bad memory. It's because I have too much crap, too much. And a life of 52, almost 53 years, even in my best day, I still am accumulating too many things and everything that we have. As soon as I realized, I'm like, oh, if I have more stuff, which most of my jewelry is costume jewelry. It's not Tiffany smile necklaces. There's too much, and I'm sort of aware.

So I'm doing a retreat in Hawaii, the ninth through the 12th, and if that's something you're interested in, I would certainly invite you to email us so you can learn more. You can still join us. You would need to become a part of the, How To CEO program that's starting in February, but we would absolutely love to have you. I'm doing a New Year's theme for Hawaii in January. It's not something I've done before. I've never done a retreat in January in Hawaii. But I'm pulling some oldies but goodies back out that I had done in the past, and I'm really, really, really excited about it.

And one of the things that we're doing is what I'm calling the Pre-23 checklist as we go into 2023. I know that there are very real parts of all of our lives and of all of our businesses that we need to take a good look at, that we need to be very honest with ourselves about. And so I'm gonna be asking the women who come with me in January to do that work, to start truly off clean, dialed, purposeful, and not everybody's ready to do that. I know that we're all different parts of our lives, but I can see, as I've mentioned before, we sold our house. Our last two kids are graduating high school this year. We don't even know where we're gonna live come July of next year. So much is in the air and I'm excited about it, like it doesn't scare me, but it is odd. And so I'm definitely this place where I'm really, really evaluating everything.

So back to the rosebush, because one of the things that he says that I think is so beautiful about the rosebush is that in order to grow a rosebush, to its beautiful potential, you have to know the goal. And in this case you have to know the goal. What does a beautiful rose look like? Cause you have to know what you're creating to prune properly. And then I read, something else. I've been just sort of accumulating all of this interesting information and I read this question that I loved, which is, I actually don't even know if I read this. I think I made this up, but I was off something else. Anyway, we talk about expectations all the time of other people. So when we're talking about a business, if I were using the analogy of a rose bush, I would ask you, in order to have an exceptional employee, you have to define what that is. In order to have an exceptional product, you have to define what that is, you have to define the rose.

But I wrote down, what are the expectations I have of myself? And that's a different question than I've ever asked myself before. I've asked myself what do I want? What do I like? Who do I wanna be? How do I wanna act? But what are my expectations of myself and as I go into my new year, I think it's a really great question.

What are the expectations I have of myself? I've been thinking a lot about leadership and why I love what I do. And I had an exchange with Michelle on my team last week that was very heartwarming to me. She doesn't know this, she'll hear this on the podcast. I sent her a Slack message and we've brought a new member of the team on, and it matters to me that, Michelle and I have done a lot of incredible work together and it, she matters to me. And her role is important to me and it matters to me that it's important to her . And so I asked her on the heels of bringing in someone else to please take a minute and think about, what does she love and what does she love about her current role?

And she wrote back and her first line was, "Thank you for being a leader who asks." And that was very heartwarming to me because it comes naturally for me to do that. And it breaks my heart a little that that's not true for most people. They don't work for people who do that. And I know Michelle knows I can't write a job that she will love a hundred percent of the time. I know she knows that. I mean, that's not a reasonable expectation for any of us. I don't love my job a hundred percent of the time. But I will always do what I can to find the footing there that brings more joy.

So it got me thinking about why do I love what I do? And it got me also realizing that there's a lot of people who don't love what they do. Sure. You love your vision and you love what you've been called to do, and you love your work, but you don't love leading. And I certainly would love to help you love leading and find a love to lead, because when you love what you do, when you lead, you're better. And you're not only better for, for your team, you're better for you. And you know how we all say, you've gotta love yourself before anyone else can love you, or you can love yourself before you can love anyone else. I actually think that's very true, self-worth, self-love. And I think it's very true in leadership. I think you have to find how to love who you are as a leader, and then that way we can find how to love being in the role as a leader, and we can love the people that work for us.

There's too many people who resent people who they're supposed to be hiring to work with and for them. People know if you resent them. People can feel it. I had this exchange with a woman on an email and she sent me this. I invited people to reply and she did, and she was complaining that she can't find anybody who doesn't call in sick or doesn't come in late. And I wrote back a very healthy response that I did not have to do, but nonetheless I did and made a comment about, we're certainly seeing at a certain wage, like usually about $30 an hour, we're definitely seeing some challenges right now. People's expectations and it wasn't meant to be black and white. It was just sort of in general when you work in retail, which she does.

And her reply was, "I pay my people this much," and it was a reply and I just knew right then. I'm like, "Oh, well no wonder people aren't coming to work." if that's how you interact with people, if that's your first approach is to be defensive. I don't even know what it was. I guess she was defensive. Honestly, I don't know cause it was all in writing. But people, it's so insightful when you don't like people that work for you, you're not fun to work for.

What do they say? 94% of emotion is communicated through body language. So even if you're telling yourself, "No, no, I really like them, I just wish they would just do their job." No, love. They know you don't. They know that you're annoyed. So what does this have to do with everything else I've been talking about?

It has everything to do with the fact that we're going into a new year. Women have never had more opportunity than they do right now. The world is your oyster. But if it's getting unruly, if the business grew faster than you thought it would, if there are parts of your business that you are clinging to tightly that have expired, that are time, that are wilting on the vine, are you willing to let them go?

Are you willing to prune the parts of your business that are no longer serving you or the business even if everybody else still thinks they are. Or if you are clinging to them, and are you willing to ask yourself what you expect of who you are going into this next? What are the expectations you have of yourself?

And if you're going to stay in a position that expects you to lead, are you willing to invest in your own story about who you are as a woman who leads? Would you entertain that you could love leading? Would you entertain that? You could love your team, even if they don't do their job. Would you entertain that 2023 could be less of everything to create space for more of the right things. I wonder what you think. Let me know.

Hey, entrepreneur, you started that gorgeous business of yours to do some really good in the world. You probably didn't start your business to manage people. But here you are having to figure out how to manage people to get work done, and maybe it's not going so well.

So head on over to krisplachy.com/howtoceo, and let's talk about how we can help you learn how to lead, manage, hire, fire, and all the things so that you can build a team that expands on your amazing dream.