There was a time when I wore exhaustion on my sleeve like a badge of honor.
I had long days, packed calendars, and I was the particular kind of tired that only comes from running at full speed for far too long. I thought that was the price of doing things right. Maybe even proof that I was serious about the work I was doing. If I were busy enough, stressed enough, and needed enough, I must have been doing something that mattered.
I didn’t realize until much later that I had confused output with value. I had confused being needed with being successful. And that 60-hour work week I was so proud of was quietly costing me things I wasn’t even tracking.
Where it Started
Right out of college, I went to work. My work experience came from corporate environments where overwork was the culture. The people who got noticed were the ones who stayed late, responded to emails at 10 pm, and never seemed to have an empty plate. Ambition looked like sacrifice. The more you gave, the more seriously you were taken.
I absorbed all of that. And I believed it for the longest time. So, when I eventually left to build something of my own, I brought every bit of it with me.
In the early days of running my own business, I worked constantly. Leaving corporate wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I worked at a boutique real estate firm part-time, so my hours were no longer 9-5. Now, they were 9-3 and 4-9. I felt like I had to do double duty to build my business. Yes, I was in the building stage, but I truly didn’t know there was another way.
Working hard was how I showed up. It was how I proved to myself and everyone else that this was real, that I was serious, that the leap was worth it. And I truly felt like I had something to prove.
I remember when I left corporate and some of my colleagues asked me, “Are you gonna be ok?” I was shocked that this was their initial reaction to me leaving to build something of my own. So, I had a false sense of confidence. On the outside, I had it all together. But on the inside, I was treading water. What I didn’t realize was that the period of time I was living would just be a few seasons.
What it Actually Costs
I also didn’t realize there were a few things I wasn’t paying attention to.
Real rest, not just sleep, but the kind of downtime where your brain actually gets to wander without an agenda.
The conversations that got cut short because I was distracted.
The mornings I started were already behind before I’d even had coffee.
It was the slow erosion of the thing that made me want to start a business in the first place.
I wasn’t honest with myself either. I was saying I was busy, but wasn’t actually taking into account what I was actually doing during all those hours. Was I producing as much as I said I was? Heck no! A lot of it was busyness, reactive work, or tasks that felt urgent but weren’t important.
I was working a 60-hour week and spending maybe half of it on things that genuinely moved my business forward. The rest was noise I hadn’t built systems to filter out yet.
The Moment Something Shifted
It wasn’t one big dramatic wake-up call for me. It rarely is for anyone. For me, it was more like a slow accumulation of moments where I looked up and realized the life I was building looked nothing like what I had imagined when I started. In fact, it actually looked more like the corporate life I left.
I had built something that needed me constantly. That was the problem I’d been creating without realizing it. Every process lived in my head, every decision had to be made by me, and every gap in the business got filled by my time. Because there was no other infrastructure to catch it. I wasn’t running a business; I was running on a hamster wheel.
It all changed when I sought out therapy. Yes, that kind of therapy. It was the kind I desperately needed because a huge piece of me was missing. Little did I know that the therapist I chose would be the perfect one for me. She was a corporate dropout, like me, and went through a lot of the same experiences I did. And it was because of those experiences that she decided to work predominantly with business owners. Well, wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what I needed.
My coach Denise, who is now part of my crew, has helped me change so much—my mindset, the way I look at building a business, and even how we determine who our ideal clients are. The best part about her is that she didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear; she challenged it. She pushed me to the brink of honesty and made me take a deep dive into who I am, who I want to be, and where I’m going. Because of the work we’ve done together, she’s even a part of my crew now! You can check her out on our About page.
What I Chose Instead
I stopped treating hours as the measure of commitment. And I started asking better questions. Not questions like, “How much did I work today?” Rather, questions like, “Does the work I did today actually matter?”
I built systems so my business could run without everything flowing through me. My processes were documented so my crew could own them. Automations became the norm for the small recurring tasks, and many things stopped requiring my attention. I got honest about what actually needed to be done by me, and what I had been holding onto out of habit, fear, or just not knowing another way.
I started protecting the beginning and end of my day. Not because some productivity book told me to, but because I noticed that when I did, I was sharper. I was more present and actually more effective when I wasn’t running on empty from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed.
The business I was creating didn’t suffer. If anything, it got better. Because the hours I used to spend spinning in reactive busyness got redirected toward the things that actually grow something.
What I Know Now
Working a lot and working well are not the same thing. You can put in 60 hours and make very little real progress. You can put in 35 focused, well-supported hours and build something extraordinary.
The glorification of overwork is a story we’ve been told so many times that it started to feel like the truth. But it’s not a requirement; it’s a choice. And once you see it that way, you can make a different one.
I built BBS around the belief that there’s a calmer, more intentional way to run a business. Not because calm is easy, but because sustainable is smarter. You started this journey from a spark of an idea. And you kept going because you had a vision. Don’t let that vision die. Keep building something you actually want to keep running because you love it. Not something you earned by being exhausted all the time. You already earned it by starting.
