The Pause After the Push

Aicila: [00:00:00] Hi, welcome to Business as Unusual. Today I'm gonna talk about the part after the push. No one is coming to rescue you from your business. I saw something recently, I don't even remember where, some corner of the internet that said.

If no one's coming to rescue you, no one's coming to stop you either. And I've been sitting with both halves of that ever since because I would say most of us have internalized the first part, we know we're the captain. What, what we can be less honest about is that we're also the crew.

When the ship is moving at warp speed, when there is a deadline or a launch or a project that has a clear finish line, we run on something that feels a lot like fuel, but isn't exactly sustainable. And that's what I wanna talk about today, not the sprint, the part after the sprint, specifically, why the reset doesn't happen automatically and what it costs.

When you skip it. So I'm in a sprint right now, with big project, with a [00:01:00] compressed timeline. The kind of schedule where you look up and it's 7:00 PM and you haven't really eaten a real meal. And I will say there's something about that mode that has its own charge for me.

And at the forward pull with the tunnel vision, the way everything narrows to just what's next, what's blocking, what needs to happen today? I don't hate it. I actually think sprints are kind of fun. And they're real legitimate things that are sometimes the only way to get certain things done. And something I come back to frequently is part of why this particular stretch of intensity doesn't feel ominous to me, is that I know when it ends, there's a date, a specific hard stop, and I've built what happens after that into the plan. And that's the other piece that I think is really important to realize that last part. Because what happens when you don't. And i've seen this, I've done this. Most of us have done this, is the urgency from one push [00:02:00] quietly migrates into the next project or just into your business, into your way of doing things.

You finish the sprint, technically. You cross the finish line, but you never actually downshift. And so the next thing you touch also feels like an emergency. And the thing after that. Until everything feels like a fire and you can't remember what it felt like to just work, that's a crisis loop, and it's usually invisible until it isn't.

By the time you notice it frequently, you've been running in emergency mode for a while. And there are some real costs to that. It's not an abstract concept. Momentum energy is one of the first things to go. And momentum is your ability to start to finish and to feel the satisfaction of completion. When everything is urgent, nothing feels like progress.

You're always behind. You're always catching up. That forward motion that used to feel good starts to feel like you're just staying ahead of something bad. That doesn't feel like momentum. It feels like running in place.

Creative [00:03:00] energy often is the next thing that goes. Urgency is a tunnel, and creativity really needs space, lateral space, room to wander, the ability to sit with a problem before you jump to a solution. When you're in permanent crisis mode, that space disappears. Everything becomes triage. And you start noticing that your solutions feel thin, your ideas feel recycled, and the work that used to energize you starts to feel like output

you're just grinding through. Connection energy is a often a quiet casualty, sometimes the quietest. When you're in survival mode, people become tasks and conversations can become line items. You may be physically present, but you're not actually there. You're already three steps ahead in your own head. And the relationships that are supposed to sustain you- clients, collaborators, community- start to feel more like weight instead of fuel. And often this crisis loop will deplete all three of them often around the same time, usually without you realizing it's happening.[00:04:00]

And this is one of the reasons I started mapping the energy equation out for other people. Because no one else can really solve this or rescue you from it. So you have to understand how to use what you have more effectively. That becomes a really critical skill. And one of the things the energy equation makes visible is the reset is not automatic, and that recovery is not a passive state. Your nervous system will keep running the same pattern until you interrupt it on purpose. So what does that actually look like? A few things that are concrete enough to actually use.

First thing is have a hard stop date with a designated transition. Not just the project ends Friday, but the project ends Friday and Monday i'm not launching into the next thing. There's a day or even just a morning that exists to decompress and take stock. It doesn't have to be long.

It does have to be intentional. And if it's not a project that's got you going, if you're just in the loop, if you notice yourself going from crisis to crisis. The other thing that [00:05:00] I will do is take I will give myself a hard stop of saying, I can't be in crisis after this day, so I'll sort of arbitrarily create that.

The second is naming the transition out loud. This may sound small and it is not. When you say to yourself, your collaborator or just in your own planning, that phase is done, this is what's next. You're creating a cognitive marker. You're telling your brain the emergency is over. Without that marker, your brain doesn't know. It keeps running the old program.

The third is an energy check before you pick up the next thing. Not what's the most urgent thing on my list, but what energy type do I actually have available right now and what kind of work does that match? Sometimes the answer is that you need a low stakes task that gives you a completion hit. Sometimes you need a couple days that are light on output and heavy on thinking. The point is, you're making a deliberate choice instead of just reacting to whatever's loudest. None of this is complicated. It's deliberately doing the thing that doesn't happen by default.

And I wanna name [00:06:00] this really directly because I think it matters. Sprints are not the enemy. Intensity is not the enemy. They're stretches of work that require more than your average week, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of lie.

The problem is when the intensity becomes the baseline. When you stop being able to distinguish between an actual emergency and just Tuesday. When the urgency doesn't have a reason anymore, it's the ambient temperature of your business.

That's something you really need to pay attention to. And Right. Really understand, this is not a productivity problem. It feels like it sometimes. It's a resource management problem. It has a very specific signature. You're tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. You're busy in a way that doesn't feel like progress, and you started to forget what it felt like when the work had some ease in it.

If that's where you are, the sprint isn't the thing to fix. The reset is, so here's a question I'll leave you with, uh, the same one I sit with myself. Where in your business have you finished a sprint but kept carrying the urgency? And what did that cost you? And and that does not rhetorical [00:07:00] actually think about it. Because the answer often will point directly to the energy type that got sacrificed and where you need to start your reset.

If you want a more structured way to look at this, the Energy Equation Snapshot is a free assessment at bicurean.com/energysnapshot. It takes a couple minutes and it gives you a clear picture of where your three energy types are actually are right now, not where you think they are, not where you wish they were, where they are.

Thanks for being here. This is business as unusual. I'm Mala and I'll see you next time.

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