Episode 489: How pausing can help your profits
We’ve all been there – feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or just burnt out from constantly pushing forward in our businesses.
But here’s a thought: What if slowing down for just a minute could actually help you move faster in the long run?
In this episode, Fiona Killackey is diving into the power of taking a pause. Yup, she's talking about hitting the pause button on your business – not as a sign of weakness, but as a way to reconnect with what really matters and make decisions that feel right.
Here’s what you’ll get from this episode:
Why pressing pause can help you find clarity when everything feels fuzzy
The surprising impact slowing down can have on your decision-making
Practical, easy ways to hit reset and get your spark back for your business
If you’ve been feeling like you’re running on empty, this one’s for you. Taking a pause isn’t about doing less; it’s about doing more of what actually moves you forward. Ready to take a breather and come back stronger? Let’s go!
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Hello and welcome to episode 489 of the My Daily Business Podcast.
Today, it's a quick tip episode. And whether you have a business, whether you're about to start one, whether you've just got an idea, or whether you are decades in, this is such an important thing to do.
Honestly, I’m saying that to myself as much as you because it’s something that I have had to learn, and relearn, and relearn again and again and again since starting my business.
Speaking about learning and business, if you're interested in group coaching or one-on-one coaching, they are both available now. You can head on over to mydailybusiness.com/shop to look at all the different things that we sell, including courses and one-on-one coaching.
If you're interested in group coaching, please go and apply now. You can find that at mydailybusiness.com/group-coaching.
That is just such an opportunity to work and learn with myself and other business owners, much like learning and working today into today’s short Quick Tip episode.
Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I run my business, and live and work and play.
That is, the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
Alright, let's get into today’s Quick Tip episode.
As I mentioned at the start, this is something that I have, you know, really had to learn myself and relearn, and relearn, and relearn. But I love it because it’s so incredibly powerful.
Now, today’s quick tip is really the power of the pause and really the profit of pausing. Why pausing in your business can be one of the most profitable things that you'll do.
And really, it’s about strategic pauses because they can allow you to really consider why you’re doing what you’re about to do, and the objectives and the results, and how you’re going to even track any of that.
Also, I'm going to talk about how to identify when you need to pause before making decisions. And I guess the difference between pausing and procrastination, because that often comes up. I know that myself. I will often say to myself, "Killackey, is this just procrastinating or are you actually really stopping to think about things?"
I guess I'd start off by saying, we all have those opportunities that come to us. It could be, you know, for some people, obviously, they'll have more opportunities because of some big audience or what they've been able to build.
But every one of us in business, or even in an employed role, will have these opportunities that land in your inbox or a DM or a text message or whatever.
Maybe it's a collaboration offer, maybe it's an offer to speak on a panel or a potential partnership. It could also be like a friendship. It could even be in your personal life where someone's like, "Oh, we should do this together," or "We should start doing this," or "Hey, let's start running," or whatever.
And you're like, "Yeah, yeah." And we just jump in with the yes. We jump in with yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yeah, of course, that sounds great. Without actually really thinking through the impact, checking if you have the actual time to do this, and also if this is part of what you're trying to focus on in your business and life this year or this month or whenever it's going to happen.
So I guess where I first learned how to do this thoroughly – which is not to say that I do it perfectly and I always remember to do it – but where I really honed, I think, a skill for doing that was when I was working as a journalist.
A long time ago, I studied journalism way back when at AH Uni. And I used to write for all sorts of publications across Australia, Japan, the UK, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates.
At one point, I was doing feature articles for the Sunday magazine in the United Arab Emirates National newspaper. And I'd often be writing feature articles across all different publications on fashion, lifestyle, and a lot on small business.
They would be two- to three-thousand-word articles, and you would have to do research and everything else. I created a template for every single article I ever wrote, which really is still something that I teach.
We actually have a course on it. If you want to get published in the media, we have a course on that, and you can find any of our courses at mydailybusiness.com/courses.
That really walks you through a template for how to craft an article or a blog piece, or now a podcast, or YouTube, or whatever. It’s very similar in that, you know, you're telling a story, you've got a narrative arc – like all of that.
And so I'd have this template for the feature articles and I'd have, you know, what are the three things that I'm trying to show or showcase, or, you know, that the person walks away knowing?
And then I'd have, this is the intro, this is para one, para two, as in paragraph one, paragraph two, et cetera, all the way down to the conclusion. I'd create that and then I'd write as much as I could to that.
It was really good because it broke things down into simple steps, which is, you know, my mantra for everything in life.
But what would happen is that if I didn't have, you know, a crushing deadline, I would write it all. I would get it to where I thought it needed to be to submit, and then I would leave it.
I would leave it for at least 24 hours. And that's the pause. I would pause and then I'd come back 24 hours, three days, whatever it was, and I'd read it.
The first read through, I used to also work as a proofreader for a lot of publishing houses. That initial read through, you see so many more mistakes than when you read it subsequent times.
So that pause allowed me to come back with fresh eyes and read it through and see the gaps, see what was missing, see what further research needed to happen.
I’d also see that I should have, you know, changed that quote from that person I interviewed to this other one that's a bit more impactful. Or how can I kind of get it to always be... I always wanted to kind of be almost like a circle where you start off with a point and then you finish wrapping it up.
You see that a lot in feature articles. You see it a lot in books, in movies, in films.
You know, that's very common that you have this like, or something at the start, this crisis, whatever it is, this tension, and then by the end, it’s sort of wrapped up.
And you have to have the... which goes to the whole narrative arc.
Anyway, if you're interested in learning more about that, then head out and do some coaching with me.
But that pause, that couple of days to not think about it, not look at it, not question it – that was incredible.
And the same thing happens in business. Pausing, really thinking about, "Can I pause?"
And I guess, let's look at some scenarios where this happens. Because you'll be like, “Yeah, I get it for writing an article, but I don’t get it otherwise.”
One is your content. I mean, any kind of content. And I've talked about article writing, but like I said, the same thing applies whether you're creating a YouTube video, whether you're creating a podcast, whether you're writing a whole book, whether you are, you know, working on a keynote speech.
That ability to get all your ideas down, think about it, think strategically, but then pause.
Another way that you might do this is like pricing reviews. I used to work at Amazon a long time ago. One of the biggest things that Amazon does is price match you a lot of the time.
I don’t know if they still do this or not, but this is like 12 years ago.
They used to constantly be seen as like, oh, they're the cheapest, they're not the cheapest. They have like a mechanism, some sort of technology.
And again, this is more than a decade ago. They've probably changed things, but they had technology that every 13 seconds, pretty much, or every 30 seconds, don't quote me on this, but a certain short frequency, they were constantly looking for price matches in the market.
And we would have like emergency meetings where John Lewis or a big department store had changed their URL overnight so that the price matching bot couldn't do it.
So for essentially they'd be cheaper for a short amount of time until Amazon was able to, like, literally we would be copying and pasting URLs into the back end of Amazon to make sure that they could still price match to these big competitors.
And so obviously that sort of done is done, you know, by Amazon. That's their whole shtick, like, you know, get it here and cheaper and blah, blah, blah.
But for a lot of people, we will see people putting out prices, whether they're putting them up or down. And we're like, oh, wow, their prices have gone up.
Oh, oh, we should just up our prices or, you know, more often their prices have gone down. Oh, how could we slash our prices or, oh, they've gone on sale, we should go on sale.
And it's like, really? No, no, no, we have to stop, we have to pause. What are our actual costs? What's our unique value proposition?
What is the long-term impact on your brand if you're just training people to know that you go on sale all the time?
And also, is it like, is their audience actually your ideal audience or is it just a little bit of crossover?
Another thing that I've seen people rush, this is like client proposals. As soon as somebody contacts you and says, oh, we would love to work with you, can you send us over a media kit? Can you send us over, whatever it is, if you don't have that already in place, which is the sort of stuff that we go through in group coaching, like to get all of this stuff ready.
It's tempting to go, ah, let me just get that together. And believe me, I've done this myself way back in the day as well.
But what you want to do is have something ready so that if that comes in, you can respond in a timely manner.
But also, you know, it doesn't cost anything to give it 24 hours to really review their needs, to research their industry challenges.
And mean. Now you've got tools like Poppy. I know I go on, I'm totally on the Poppy cult, but Poppy is the number one AI tool, I think, out there at the moment.
And if you are going to get Poppy, just know you can use Fiona as a discount code, but you know, you can use all sorts of chat, ebt, other AI tools, Poppy integrates, Chatgpt and Claude and Chatgpt, Minion, all the things.
Anyway, I digress. You can use an AI tool to help you so much with researching that proposal, like I was researching. Sorry, the client, considering how it best fits your business direction.
You know, then draft it, pause, then review with fresh eyes and give it the best possible chance.
Another place that I see people do this all the time is team expansion. You know, like grabbing like, "Oh, God, we better hire somebody for that."
Just because there's a gap or just because even right now, you know, I've been talking to some clients about them hiring an AI specialist, and it's really hard to find that because it's such a new thing.
And so it's like, okay, well, in the skill set you already have, is there somebody in there that's very interested in AI that can be the kind of AI champion in your company at the moment?
But I've seen so often where people will rush to hire because they're feeling overwhelmed, rather than thinking about, okay, have we actually documented our workflow so that if we do hire that person and they come in, they're actually set up?
Do we know what, you know, really needs delegating? What could be automated before we actually hire somebody? Also, if like, maybe it's just a change in your systems rather than a change in your staff that needs to be looked at to solve any problems.
But also, like, is there onboarding time? Is there the right time to bring them on? And maybe that's waiting six months until some new thing has come out because you know that you will not have their time dedicated to mentor that person to bring them up to speed.
So, you know, those are all sorts of examples.
But I guess this whole idea of pausing is to pause and ask yourself, does this next thing that I'm about to do align with my business goals?
Do I have the resources to do it properly? What's the actual like ROI? What's the return on investment, both financially, like how much money potentially, but also your time?
Like, is this going to give you time back? I'm all about the time. Everyone knows that I work three days a week. Yeah, I'm all about the time. Time, time, time.
So a pause doesn't have to be, speaking of time, really long. It could be an hour, it could be a day, it could be a weekend. But just about making that pause intentional.
And again, where the difference between procrastination or avoidance and this is that this is strategic thinking time. It's not avoiding time.
You're not like, "Oh, I know this has to get done, but I'm just going to shove it over there and not think about it."
It's like, I know this has to get done. What is the best way to do it?
And this could be a new offer, it could be a collaboration, it could be a different marketing platform, it could be a different system. But really ask yourself if taking 24 hours before responding to that, or scheduling a planning day or building in review time is actually going to cost you too much.
Most of the time, it isn't. It's actually going to help and benefit you. So thinking about how you can build these into your 12-month plan or your 90-day plan or whatever, it's like, okay, have I got time for monthly planning days? And have I scheduled myself out of the office or out? You know, at least on your calendar, have you got like annual business retreats, offsite strategies, quarterly strategy reviews, or just even a weekly reflection time?
That you go, that is my time on Wednesday mornings. I go to this cafe or I go to this Wi-Fi connected place. Or maybe it's not. Maybe you completely come off screens and you're like, my weekly reflection time is outside with a notebook in the bush. You know, whatever works for you.
But I guess this week I challenge you to identify a business decision that you're about to make and deliberately build in a strategic pause and then just see. Just see what insights emerge when you give yourself that thinking space.
So that is it for today's quick tip. As I said, please go on over and apply for group coaching. If you're interested in working with me for 12 months, you can head on over to mydailybusiness.com/group-coaching.
I also did mention a couple of courses today. We have a bunch of courses. We have courses on how to start a podcast. We have courses on, you know, figuring out your money. We have courses on how to get a book published. We have a lot of courses that are really, really helpful and practical.
If you love the podcast and you're like, oh, I always get something from that, you will also absolutely love the courses. So, if you want to head on over, you can just find them at mydailybusiness.com/courses. And as I said, one-on-one coaching is also available as well. You can find all of this stuff at mydailybusiness.com/shop.
Alright, thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Podcast for a range of tools to help you grow and start your business, including coaching programmes, courses and templates. Check out our shop at mydailybusiness.com and if you want to get in touch, you can do that by email at hello@mydailybusiness.com or you can hit us up on Instagram at mydailybusiness_. You can find us on TikTok at mydailybusiness or find me Fiona Killackey on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting.
