I need to be honest with you about something.

For a long time I thought I had boundaries. I’d say things like “I don’t work weekends” or “I’m not available after 6” — and I genuinely believed them. What I didn’t realize until later was that a boundary you don’t actually hold isn’t a boundary. It’s a preference. And the people around us learn very quickly which ones we mean and which ones we don’t.

This episode is a little convicting. I’ll warn you now.

We talk about what a fake boundary actually looks like in everyday life — and most of us will recognize ourselves in at least a few of them. We talk about why we can’t hold the ones we set, what that has to do with our Rest Archetype, and what a real boundary actually requires.

Lastly, we’ll talk about the 3 cs necessary to make sure your boundary isn’t just announced but implemented.

Many of us may not need to create more boundaries, we just need to be intentional about holding the ones we’ve already put in place.

Links

Continue the conversation on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in-brieanna-lightfoot-smith

Subscribe to my Substack: http://practicingthepause.substack.com

Take your free R.E.S.T. Assessment: http://restwell.space

Your calendar is lying to you. And you built the lie yourself.

Most of our calendars are aspirational documents — planned for who we wish we were, not who we actually are in this season. The gap between the calendar and real life is exactly where burnout lives.

In this episode, we’re naming the lies our calendars tell — back-to-back meetings with no breathing room, scheduling hard tasks at our lowest energy, treating empty space as available capacity — and replacing them with something more honest: capacity-aware planning.

You’ll walk away with a practical calendar audit, three things to add to your week right now, and a completely different way of thinking about what belongs on your schedule and what doesn’t.

A full calendar is not the same as a full life.

The Freedom & Flow Planner was built for exactly this — planning with your real capacity in mind, not your imagined one.

Links

Connect with me on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/brieanna-lightfoot-smith

Freedom & Flow Planner: http://brieannalightfootsmith.com/flow

Take the free R.E.S.T. Assessment: http://restwell.space

Today we have our first podcast guest of the season!

Elysha Johnson is the founder of Open Tabs, a holistic operations consultancy for ambitious founders who are outwardly successful and inwardly depleted. With over a decade of experience as an executive assistant and operations leader inside founder-led businesses, Elysha has spent years inside the chaos she now helps clients escape — watching capable people white-knuckle their way to success at the cost of their health, their peace, and eventually their capacity to keep going.

After burning out three separate times in her own career, Elysha rebuilt her approach to work that centers on wild productivity and radical rest. Her core belief is that rest is a key component to success, but that you can’t out-rest a design problem. Through her signature Genesis Journey partnership, she helps leaders redesign the operational systems in both their business and personal life, so they can rest and recover while still moving the needle forward.

She speaks and writes on sustainable productivity, working in alignment with one’s current season, and what founder-level burnout actually looks like.

Links mentioned in the episode:

Rest Assessment: http://restwell.space

Freedom and Flow Planner: http://brieannalightfootsmith.com/flow

Energy Audit: energyaudit.zite.so

Sacred Rest by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Stay connected with Elysha at http://lessopentabs.com