Ep. 31. A NEW YEAR RESET: Step into Founder Peak Performance

Hello and welcome to the new year. If you are listening to this live, we are at the beginning of 2025. Can you believe it? This last year has been so [00:01:00] incredible for me and it’s been really wonderful too spend the last two weeks basically doing nothing, just staying locally with my two kids and my husband and taking some time to reflect on everything that the last year has taught me. I’m really evaluating both my life and my business and all of my personal priorities. Evaluation, as you know, is a big part of what we do at the do business better school because of how it is so important for your business growth and growth in a sustainable consistent way. My end of year CEO day and my beginning of year CEO practices involve not only evaluation, but also form of a reset. Today’s episode is about giving you an inside look at what I do every end of year and beginning of year, so that you can [00:02:00] follow some of these CEO practices for yourself to really clean out closet, move through any struggles or founder failures that you might have had last year, to mine all of those for as much learning as you can. To start this year feeling extremely excited and reset for your goals ahead. So let’s dive in. It’s impossible to have a refreshed and, re motivation for your year if you are still stuck in a baggage from last year or you haven’t fully processed everything that last year gave to you. You don’t have an understanding of how you want to bring those forward. So the first thing that’s really important is to get a lay of the land for what last year really brought you. One of the things that I love to do for myself and also that I like to [00:03:00] do with my one-on-one clients when we’re evaluating the year, is to pick three words that represent the year. This can be as simple as your lived experience of it. So maybe that stress or struggle or overwhelm or growth or excitement. It could be a lesson that you learned or just an area of the business that you really paid attention to. So there’s really no rules for what kind of words that you choose as long as they’re very meaningful to you and they help you to then further dissect everything that you learned in those areas. My words for 2024 where IP, launchpad and honesty. Those probably sound really random to you, but they mean so much to me. My 2024 was [00:04:00] about taking my intellectual property and my concepts to the next level. Creating a really intuitive, next level curriculum for my students built on the last eight years of the work I’ve been doing. To create that foundation, that launch pad for the next version of the do business better school. It was also about honesty. Honesty about what I really wanted my business to look like and honesty about the roadblocks that are holding me back and a commitment, to be honest with myself about what it actually takes in order to go to the next level, both in my personal life and in my business. I have taken so much more responsibility in 2024 than the year prior, and I’m just so full of gratitude and pride for that. So you want to pick. Similar types of words that help you to process: what last year gave to you? So that you can [00:05:00] then dissect it and mine all of the lessons learned within those words. Once you have your three words, you want to ask yourself some really great questions like: what lessons did I learn for this word? What held me back in this area? How am I really proud of how I showed up? What are the things that I want to take forward? Those character traits, that work ethic, that wisdom that I can take from how I showed up in this area, or didn’t show up in this area and bring it forward with me. Trust USB microphone-8: The next step for your reset is to use one of my words, honesty, and look at what all the roadblocks are to get really really honest with yourself about where you are now, what the vision is and the things that are in the way that are within your [00:06:00] control. As human beings, it is just so easy to fall into the victim mentality. I’m a human too. I´m no different. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your circumstances are the reason for your results. Your circumstances are their reason for our actions. The reason for the way you’re thinking and your current emotional experience. It’s just not true. We always have control over what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling and what we choose to do, the actions we choose in order to navigate our current circumstances. We really need to look on an annual basis, at the next level that we want to create for our business, and look at what we need to do and the shifts we need to make. The most powerful thing that you can do is not necessarily to go straight to the business strategy, although, you know, that’s important. It’s [00:07:00] better to start with who you need to be in, how you need to show up. So much of the accelerator culture, entrepreneurial culture, is about finding the right answer and finding the right solution and finding the magic ticket to success. We never look at who the founder is being, how they’re showing up, and the skillsets that they’re bringing to the table. That is about honesty. It is about getting real with yourself. Taking responsibility and really showing up in the way that you need to. Now, this brings me to a really important part of this conversation because a lot of founders, because of what they have learned in culture, and especially in startup culture, they think that this means ramping up more stress and more action taking. Doing more. That’s actually the opposite of what I’m talking about. So much of [00:08:00] you being the founder that you need to be, the CEO that you need to be, is about learning to use your business brain at its highest level. With your most strategic parts of your brain. It’s about finding founder peak performance so that you bring high level thoughts and feelings and actions to the business in order to create the results that you want. It’s not just working more hours or struggling more, in order to reach a success. 2025 is not the year to ramp up your stress and try to overcompensate. It’s also not about taking it easy and holding back because you don’t want to burn out and don’t want to overdo it. That’s swinging too far in the other direction because you don’t have the CEO skills in order to really go for your dreams. [00:09:00] 2025 for me, and the invitation that I want to give to you today, is about redefining what success is for you by going for the dream. Going for the goal. And learning how to increase your capacity, your resilience and your performance as a founder so that you can step into it. But here’s the trick: with a sense of groundedness. Calm. A sense of fun and flow and play. So that you access the most strategic parts of your brain, which as you know, from what you’ve learned on this podcast, are not accessible to you when you are in fight flight or freeze. To be able to go for your dreams without compromise. Without compromising the personal life and the wellbeing that I know you want to protect. A lot of you are using the circumstance to say, you know what? I can’t go after my goal because of [00:10:00] this family thing. Or I can’t go after this goal because of the timing. Instead, I want you to step into the goal and to manipulate it so that you can do it without the overwhelm. Without the procrastination. Without the confusion. Complexity. Second guessing yourself. Without the sense of urgency and frustration and irritation. Without getting angry or being hard on yourself or having that tough inner critic and those shaming thoughts. All of these symptoms that I just described are not related to how big you’re going in your business. It’s not related to the vision. It’s not related to being a founder at all, other than it’s just a sign that you are outside of your window of tolerance and what your nervous system can hold at the moment. [00:11:00] Once you learn to regulate your nervous system and calm into what I call the peak performance zone, all of these symptoms go away. You will find that you don’t get overwhelmed. You don’t procrastinate. You can slow down and get more strategic and intentional, you can make decisions faster. You stop second guessing yourself. You can evaluate more objectively without all the drama and the inner critic, because you are regulated and in that peak performance zone. This is a CEO skill set that you form because of nervous system education and resources that you use throughout your day in order to build a more flexible and resilient, nervous system. Instead of just getting stuck in some of these fight flight freeze states. Now you might be saying, Kari, what the heck are you talking about? I know I I’m maybe talking about something [00:12:00] outside of your current knowledge area. You’ve probably heard of fight flight and freeze. We learn about that in biology class. But I’m talking about true understanding of the nervous system states and how to use them in your business to grow your business. To be able to go toward the goal with more ease than you’re experiencing now. That’s why I’m really excited, because for the last several months, remember I told you I was working on my IP and the curriculum, I have been taking several certifications and really refining my toolkit and developing a 21 day nervous system reset course for founders. It is live right now and I am so excited to offer it to the world for the first time. I invite you to join me now. It is open for a limited time outside of my simply sustainable program. It’s [00:13:00] probably going to go into the vault into that program and only accessible within that program very soon. It’s also at a discounted price right now. Now is the time for you to learn how to be a more high-performing founder. It’s a time to learn how to be more resilient and to have a bigger capacity so that you can step into that big dream of yours, that big, next level of your business. It’s a time to learn how to get rid of all of those annoying symptoms, right? Like overwhelm and frustration and, and a fast pace and urgency and all those things that create burnout. The burnout is not coming from the goal. The burnout is not coming from your business. It’s being generated by you. That’s the best news ever because we can solve for that. The beautiful thing about this reset is that, the same tools that regulate your nervous system, they turn on your highest level thinking. They give you full [00:14:00] access to your prefrontal cortex. They get some really cool parts of your brain back online, like your rectangular activating system and your default mode network, things you’ll learn about in this 21 day reset that help you to problem solve more efficiently, connect the dots, create innovate, solve problems. All of these parts of your brain work really well when you’re regulated. This program will give you a full overview of all a nine of the nervous system states, what they look like, what they feel like and teach you exactly how to shift in just three to five minutes back into founder peak performance zone, which is a combination of the stillness ventral vehicle and play states. I am really passionate about the place state, and this course will teach you all about it and how to access it so that you can grow your business with more fun and ease and flow that I know you [00:15:00] want. I invite you to join me. You can go to the do business, better school.com forward slash reset, and you’ll get all the information and the link to join and I hope that you will dive in with me during the next 21 days of January. You have eight weeks access to the program, if you just want to grab the deal now, you don’t necessarily have to carve out time over the next 21 days. You can take it at your pace and it’s only taking about 20 minutes a day. So there’s just no reason not to do it. You can do it, you know, in the evening. After your kids are in bed and you don’t necessarily have to carve out time out of your workday in order to get this fundamental founder education. So I know I just went on a bit of a tangent because I’m so passionate about this reset program, but let’s bring it full circle. We began this episode by talking about how important it is for you to reflect on and process last year and to mine it for value. Mine [00:16:00] it for lessons learned once you’ve done that. You’re ready to look ahead to 2025. To pick three words that you want to take with you into the next year. I want you to pick words that represent the CEO that you need to be, how you need to show up the CEO skillsets that you need to learn. So that you can take your success into your hands, to be in the driver’s seat, and to focus on what you can control, which is what you and your brain are bringing to the table. Not necessarily the strategy or the thing that you need to outsource. Of course, that’s going to be part of your plan, but I want you to ground yourself in three words that are about who you are as the founder. That is, from what I have found the most powerful way to set your intentions at the beginning of the year. You might think about some of those symptoms [00:17:00] that I talked about today. Overwhelm, procrastination, confusion, complexity, slow decision making, guessing yourself, urgency, fast paced frustration. All of these things are roadblocks. That will keep you from reaching your goals in a sustainable way. You might want to make that an intention to solve for the new year. I invite you to check out the reset in order to get help overcoming those roadblocks, so you can step into the next version of your company. Lastly, I will say that I want you to really make your vision work for you. You can chunk down the vision. You don’t have to go big or go home. You can step into the next level of what you want to achieve in a very doable way. You can pick a goal that your nervous system can operate with. Without so much overwhelm. The key is to keep moving forward and to be proud of how you are moving forward each and every [00:18:00] day. That’s also something that we’ll talk about in the reset program about getting into the Goldilocks zone for your nervous system, so that you don’t actually decrease your resilience, you increase your resilience because if you go too big, too fast, too soon, you can actually get out of your window of tolerance and experience dysregulation. That does not build your capacity. Regardless of what the world is telling you, right? To just fake it till you make it, that can actually create less resilience and more symptoms as you go from year to year. I think that that’s why sometimes people who get into burnout never fully recover because they’ve just shrunk in their window of tolerance so much. This program is really about this goal setting mindset for you as well. And how to use your nervous system to create really smart goals. All right. I hope that this episode has been eyeopening for you on it has given you great set point for the year for [00:19:00] you to really set your intentions. To show up in a way that’ll make you proud at the end of 2025. I am looking forward to hearing everything you accomplish, but more importantly, how you evolve as a human by the end of the year. Have a beautiful 2025. I will see you in the 21 day nervous system reset. I’ll see you soon.