Yep, I know… it’s been a while.
I’ve just spent the last 3 weeks in California working on SUPKids and kinda dropped off the radar a little. Right now I’m 8 hours into a 10-hour flight back to London. My last day in Cali was a good one. Up early to go SUP at Venice Beach with someone I met last time I was in the US, and who is fast becoming a bestie, a mentor and a true inspiration to me. Followed by lunch in the shade and an afternoon of working/hanging out on Abbot Kinney (quite possibly one of the raddest streets you’ll ever walk down). I had major plans to work on this flight. A list as long as my arm of stuff to get done. It’s no secret that long-haul flights are my most productive time. Whilst everyone else is watching movies, I’m hustling. Haha except tonight.
I had a hunch that it would be an empty flight when I arrived at the gate, and so I played my normal long haul tactics when I got on the plane (haha I’ll share those travel hacks with you another time) and scored 3 seats.
I just woke up… haha… 8 hours sleep. No food, no movies … and no work. Huh, turns out I think I needed it.
Let me rewind a little to give you some context. The reason I came out to the US was for a super important event in California. The company who partner with me at SUPKids, Starboard, have a pretty big international dealers meeting once a year. Last year was in Spain, this year at a rad island resort in downtown San Diego. It’s an epic event. 4 days of presentations, board demos and hanging out with an awesome bunch of people.
I was a guest speaker at the event, and the last 8 weeks have been pretty insane in regards to workload and making sure everything was ready in time. And the week before the event, once I’d arrived in Cali was bordering on ridiculous. Think verrrry early starts and late finishes. Each day feeling the pressure rise and the ticking of the countdown clock in my head getting louder by the minute.
And so it came to the first day of the event. I woke up super early with a zillion things to do. I was staying in the raddest co-working/co-living space in Encinitas, and crept upstairs to crack on with some work. My head was spinning with all the stuff that needed to be done. I was trying to ignore just how tired I was. This event was a big deal for me, a really big deal.
And so, at about 6 am, as I was flicking through the training manual that I’d just printed off for a final check, I fell down the stairs.
Not just a couple. I slipped at the top and bounced my way down the entire staircase, landing in a heap at the bottom somehow still holding my laptop in the air, with the hundred or so pages of workbook scattered around me.
It hurt. A lot.
I sat there for a bit and wanted to cry. It was one of those moments when you really needed someone to rush in, scoop you up and tell you everything is going to be ok. Except everyone else in the house was fast asleep, and none of them would have quite understood where I was at anyhows.
So I messaged a bestie at home. She called immediately. She’s a fellow entrepreneur so her response meant a lot to me. She didn’t tell me to go back to bed, or that my workload was too much or that perhaps I had taken on too much (because let’s be honest, that is not what I needed to hear).
She told me to take some deep breaths. She told me, unequivocally, that I was going to get everything done. She said ‘Linz, you’ve got this. But right now, you need to go surfing’. I tried to justify the reasons why I thought I should just crack on with the work. And she gave me all the reasons why that was a shitty idea. So I put my laptop down, grabbed my wetsuit and headed for the beach.
The first duck dive felt so good. My back was killing me and I knew that surfing was probably not the smartest thing to be doing to my body, but at the same time, I knew it was the only place I wanted to be. I didn’t surf for long. Maybe 45 minutes. But as I walked back up the beach I felt like someone had pressed the reset button. I was ready to get back into the game.
The days that followed were intense. The Dealers Meeting went even better than expected. Everything was ready and everyone was stoked on it. The days were long and at some point on day 2 I realised that the work had only just begun. Everything up until this point had been development. Now it was go time.
And so I made a conscious decision.
To lean into it. To go all in. To give myself permission to clear the decks and just focus on this one thing. I realised that I’d reached maximum capacity. I’d worked so freaking hard to get here that I had no room to process anything other than what was going on in that moment.
It was a big lesson. Recognising that we all have a limited bandwidth. And that, when we reach it, we need to pay attention. I was lucky, I had a decent sized bruise on my back that I saw in the bathroom mirror every morning to remind me.
I set an intention each day as I woke up. This and only this. Show up and do this one thing really freaking well.
And so I did. And that, my friends, is why you haven’t heard from me. That is why I haven’t been posting a bazillion things on Facebook, and why I’ve been a little slower than normal getting back to emails. Because although multi-tasking definitely has its place, there are times when you need 100% of your energy on one thing.
Building a business takes focus. Sure, it’s important to have a good idea and to have the smarts to pull it off, but ultimately, it comes down to hard work. It comes down to your willingness to recognise when it’s time to get laser focused and go all in.
We’re all different. We’ve all got different capacities when it comes to the workload that we can handle. Pay attention to yours.