I Don't Believe in Balance. I Believe in Sprints.

Rochelle Marie Lawson had me on The Blissful Living Show to talk about resilience, innovation and staying well while building companies. Near the end she asked what advice I'd give an entrepreneur overwhelmed by the pressure of building something while keeping balance in their life.

I gave her an answer that runs against most of what gets said on wellness podcasts.

Balance is the wrong goal at the start

I believe in sprints. There are seasons for things, and when you're starting a business the idea of balance is working against you.

What I'd actually recommend is a conversation with the people closest to you. Tell them balance isn't going to be part of the equation for a while. That you've decided to do this thing, that it will ask more of you than you currently understand, and that you need them to support you through it.

Then set a runway. Twenty-four months, say. In that window you don't make every birthday, every graduation, every brunch. You don't neglect the people who matter, but you accept that you cannot have all of it.

And in exchange for what you've reclaimed — the time, the energy, the attention — you go at full speed, so that when you reach the end of the runway you've hit the goal and balance becomes possible again.

The version of this that fails is the one where you're vaguely busy forever and never name the period. Sprints end. That's what makes them survivable.

What I do protect

Two things stay fixed regardless.

I don't do business on Sundays. And every four months or so I take about a week out. Not full radio silence — I'll be honest, I still pick up the phone more than I should — but enough of a break in the monotony that I come back functional. Three or four of those a year.

The mornings matter more than either. I'm up early, before the traffic starts. I pray, meditate, read, work out, go over my goals, do some visualisation and some affirmations. It's an hour with nobody else in it.

And when I say goals, people assume I mean revenue. Most of them aren't. They're about family, fitness, health, the parts of life that quietly decay while you're busy building. Starting the day on those sets an intention that holds through whatever the day brings.

Protecting your attention is a job

Rochelle asked how entrepreneurs stay focused with everything competing for attention. The honest starting point is that these platforms employ very smart people whose actual job is to keep you scrolling. You are not in a fair fight.

So: my phone is on do not disturb most of the day, with a very short list of people who can get through. Meetings trigger it automatically. Clients call the office, because that's what the office is for.

I don't touch social media during the day. If you follow me, you'll notice most of what I post goes out at eight or nine in the evening, because that's when I do it — last thing, from bed. Email and texts get answered late.

None of that is discipline exactly. It's just refusing to let other people's priorities set my order of operations.

The part nobody can give you

She also asked about resilience, and I don't think I can teach that one.

What I can say is that it rests entirely on knowing why you're doing this. Not "I want a million dollars" or "I want the house" — those are objects. Why the house? Who's in it? What does the money actually protect?

In entrepreneurship, anything that can go wrong generally does. If your reason isn't deeper than a number, then the Instagram post wins. The new episode at eight wins. The brunch wins. There are a thousand available excuses and they're all reasonable.

If you can't articulate a why that survives a bad month, I'd genuinely question whether to start.

Bottle yourself, then automate it

On automation, the first place to look is repetitive tasks. Most missed opportunities aren't lost to competition; they're lost because nobody followed up. The confirmation that didn't go out. The check-in that never happened.

But the thing people get wrong is stripping themselves out in the process. Take the phrases you actually use, the way you actually talk, the specific things that sound like you — and put those inside the automated message. The customer still gets you. You just didn't have to stop what you were doing.

Nobody wants to feel they weren't important enough for a real message. And yet if you're going to reach a hundred or a hundred thousand people, not everyone gets a personal text. So build the personality in once, at the start, and let it run.

The technology has never been cheaper. What used to cost a fortune and a team of engineers now costs very little. The part that's still on you is making sure it sounds like a person.

A month of content in one day

That tension is where Content Cannon came from. I don't enjoy spending time on social media, but I know the business needs it. So I spent about six months testing whether it could be compressed into a single session.

It can. The method is being deliberate about the time: plan it, gather your topics in advance, set everything up so you can walk in and hit record. For most of our students it's two or three hours, not a whole day, and it produces a month of material.

Social media is a gift to entrepreneurs and also just another line on the list. Contain it, or it expands to fill everything.

Watch the full conversation

Find it on your platform of choice

• Watch on YouTube

• Listen on Spotify

Episode: Harnessing Resilience and Innovation for Personal and Business Success. The Blissful Living Show with Rochelle Marie Lawson, November 2024. Runtime 39 minutes.

Thanks to Rochelle for the conversation, and for letting me disagree with her about balance on her own show.

Content Cannon is available at ariaswebsterberry.com, and the automation side of all this is what we build at Ignite Funnels.