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What you’ll learn in this episode:
What if the thing that makes your business grow faster isn’t urgency, pressure, or pushing harder – but your calm energy?
In this episode of It’s Your Offer, I’m continuing the Summer Shorts Series with a conversation about one of the most powerful, and often overlooked, business growth tools: your emotional state as the founder.
We live in a culture that rewards urgency.
Move faster. Do more. Respond immediately. Stay ahead. Don’t fall behind. Adopt the next thing. Chase the shiny object. Keep pushing.
And somewhere along the way, many business owners started to believe that stress is a sign of commitment and overwhelm is simply the price of success.
But what if that is not true?
What if calm is not the opposite of ambition?
What if calm is actually what allows you to lead more powerfully, make better decisions, create more spaciousness, and grow your business with more ease?
In this episode, I’m sharing why calm has become one of my most powerful tools as a business owner, how your energy as the founder shapes the entire business, and why the strongest businesses are not led by frantic founders – they are led by intentional ones.
Because your business absorbs your energy.
Your team feels it. Your clients feel it. Your prospects feel it. Your content even carries it.
And when you learn how to lead from a more grounded place, everything gets clearer.
Your decisions improve. Your priorities sharpen. Your team settles. Your clients feel more deeply supported. And your business starts to feel like something you are intentionally leading instead of constantly reacting to.
In this episode, you will learn to:
- Why calm is one of the most powerful competitive advantages for business owners right now.
- How the emotional state of the founder shapes the energy, decisions, and outcomes of the entire business.
- Why urgency, overwhelm, and frantic energy can quietly sabotage your ability to think strategically.
- How I uncovered that I was operating in a constant state of over-engagement – and what that taught me about business, leadership, and energy.
- Why creating calm is not passive, but an intentional leadership practice that creates better decisions, stronger boundaries, clearer strategy, and more sustainable growth.
Mentioned in this episode:
Work/Connect with me:
Jessica Miller (00:01.24)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the It’s Your Offer Podcast. We are embarking on episode number four of our summer shorts series. If you’re just popping into this podcast now, you’re in for a treat. We started a series a few weeks ago that really focuses on a collection of shorter, straight-to-the-point, sort of like shot-in-the-arm episodes that give you clarity, perspective, and momentum as you move through the summer season.
If you’re new here, welcome. We’re so thrilled to have you. If you’ve been with us for a while and you’ve been following the Summer Shorts series, I’m really excited for today’s episode. And I think you’re gonna love it. I also want to put a plug in. If you happen to have missed the other episodes, they are totally worth going back and checking out. We cover a variety of different topics that came up as a result of our 250th episode. Yay! I can’t believe 250-plus episodes. It’s really amazing. But as part of that episode, we reflected on what we’ve learned about growing businesses easily and quickly and really bringing that cash in the door in a way that feels really great. Out of that episode came this series where we’re digging into the things that we just have discovered, which I have to tell you were very different than what I would have thought four years ago when we started the podcast. So we’re digging into that a little bit deeper in these episodes. So that one is totally worth checking out.
As are the other summer shorts series episodes. So you can either go check them out now or you can check them out after you listen to this one. They’re in no particular order. So they’re there for you. But I would highly recommend checking them out because all of these things I think are very important as we move into the summer season. But frankly, for any season, if you’re really trying to understand the things that matter the most in creating a business that grows but feels good, that feels joyful, that feels easy—these things are really the things that have bubbled to the surface. So today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics. I have to say, this one really hits home. Because if you have met me or if you have listened to any of these podcasts, you will know that what I’m gonna talk about in today’s episode is not my default mechanism. It’s not my default state, but it has become actually one of my most powerful superpowers. And that has really
Jessica Miller (02:19.33)
been fine-tuned, I would say, over the past six to eight months. And it was really by accident. And I will tell you a little bit about that story as we get into the podcast. But it has become one of my most powerful tools. And that is the power of calm. I believe that calm is a competitive advantage in leading a business with ease. Right now we live in a culture that rewards urgency.
I’m gonna say this again. We live in a culture that rewards urgency. AI has taken this over the top as far as urgency, speed, do it now, get the answer immediately. Like that quick, urgent consumption is at its absolute max, in my opinion. And side note, I am a fan of AI, but I also think it for many of us could be the biggest abyss or black hole that you could ever fall into.
That is for another story. But what I mean by that is I think it can be one of those things that really amps us up and feeds into this urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent place that we are feeling culturally. And when I mean that we live in a culture that rewards urgency, what I mean is that we are constantly hearing messages about moving faster, about doing more, responding immediately, adopting the next thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Stay ahead, keep pushing, don’t fall behind. Shiny object.
I mean, I could go on and on and on. Somewhere along the way, many business owners started to believe that being stressed is actually a sign of commitment. Does anyone else feel like that? Like if I’m really in it and like everything is sort of locked up and we’re like charge ahead, that means I’m really serious about my business. And as a result of that, the overwhelm that we feel is just the price of success. It starts to become this feeling that, hey, if I’m, you know, overcommitted, I’m doing it right.
And this like feeling that I have in my body and this energetic like buzzing times 10 is just like the way it’s supposed to be. But what I want to offer to you today is the thought of what if this was not true? What if actually this was not how it needed to be? Our brains are tricking us into thinking that this is how it is. And, you know, media and sort of the common, you know, threads that we
Jessica Miller (04:45.43)
see on the internet are like reinforcing this. But actually, this, like, working harder and overcommitment and overwhelm is actually not the growth lever. That working harder is not the thing that actually creates growth. What if it was actually the opposite? That the calmness is actually what creates growth. And not just growth, but efficiency and ease in the way that we are growing.
And in the way that we are making money and in the way that we are running our business. And the reason that I feel like this is super important and is a competitive advantage of ours, the calm is the competitive advantage, is that I have found that the emotional state of the founder of a company, the leader of the company, shapes the entire business. And I believe that we are now entering into a season where calm is becoming one of our most powerful tools and a competitive advantage over others and other things if we do this right. And I’m gonna break down why I think this, okay? And here’s why. Number one, your business as a founder, a CEO, a leader, it absorbs your energy. Human interaction is a pool, it is a field of energy. We gather energy from each other as humans.
This is what makes being human uniquely powerful. This is why when you go into a room with people, you can like feel the vibe. Has anyone ever felt like that? When you walk into a room, there is an energy to it. It is not fake. Your body literally emits energy. And founders really are the emotional thermostat of a business. You know, we always say it starts at the top. We’ve heard of that.
That is both in behavior and in energy too. Your teams feel your energy, your clients feel your energy, the people that you’re talking to on sales calls, your prospects feel your energy. And this is especially true in a room full of people, like physically in the real world. But have any of you ever been on a Zoom call and you’re like, huh? I’m like picking up the vibe of these other people, right? Body language, things like that. It is palpable when you start to tune into it.
Jessica Miller (07:07.404)
The key to this is your business starts to reflect these emotional patterns from you. So if we take this to the opposite side of the coin, when you are in reactive mode, when you are overwhelmed, when you are over-engaged, when you’re constantly switching priorities, when you live in the pool or the river of urgency, your business mirrors that behavior, mirrors that energy. Literally, all the way from the people around you to over the internet, I mean, it seeps literally into your content. People can pick it up, right? Content has a vibe. So businesses absorb this emotional pattern of their leaders. And it’s really important that we think about this vibe and this energy so that when we think about our mindset and our emotions and our energy, we don’t stop at this place where we think it’s just a personal thing.
You know, sometimes we’re like, okay, this is what’s going on with me inside my body, inside my world. And like that’s a personal thing, and like business is over here. But they’re not separate things. It is not just personal. It is actually a business issue as well. And it is something that you are emitting and controlling. Because your emotional state affects far more than just your mood and your personal experience, it’s important to note that it affects your ability to lead as well.
And that goes as far as the vibe that you are emitting and also the things that you are doing in your business that have an effect on the outcomes and the bottom line and the team. One of the places that a frantic brain and a frantic energetic state really influences is your decision-making power. Has anyone ever had this experience where something has happened and you’re, like, overwhelmed, or you, you know, are in a tizzy about something and you can’t think straight. Like legit, you cannot think straight. Or something is going on in your world, and you know, somebody asks you something, and you’re like, I can’t think about this right now. Like, I can’t, you know, I can’t do that. That’s what happens when we are in a place of urgency and reactivity, and we’re not dialed into this calm, grounded place. So when we’re in this place of what I’m gonna call, like, frantic and urgent,
Jessica Miller (09:31.183)
we are constantly reacting because our neurological system is in overwhelm. It’s an overload. What that affects is your strategic thinking. It suffers. Like I said, you cannot focus and think on these things if you’re in a frantic place. We make rash decisions. So we’re like, okay, I’m like in this urgent place. Okay, I gotta make this decision now. So we, like, make rushed decisions. Our priorities become very unclear because we’re in a place where we’re just trying to manage what is happening in the moment in our body. And everything just feels out of whack. Everything feels urgent. There is a sense of panic, literally, under our skin. And many founders spend so much time firefighting and in this place of urgency that they lose their ability to think strategically. They also lose their ability to calm down, like to come down into this grounded place.
Because their neurological system is hyped up so much that we start to think that that is the norm. Right? Every day starts to feel like that because not only are we used to that physically, but we have now constructed a business and an environment around that state of being. And it learns and it operates in that way. Your team picks it up, they start reacting, you know, everything starts getting out of whack. That urgency creates a tremendous amount of noise in our business.
The opposite of this is that calmness creates an environment where there is space, there is clarity, there is pause, there is the ability to discern and make good decisions, many of which can be made more quickly and more accurately because we have this environment of calmness that we are holding for our company. So clarity overall and calmness really help you make better decisions, stay focused, lead with confidence because you’re literally dialing down all that extraneous noise so that you can hear your own inner voice. And then you’re making the next decision intentionally, not out of a place of discomfort. When we are uncomfortable, we become very impulsive. Because what we’re trying to do, in fairness and in defense of ourselves, is to relieve like the pain, relieve the pressure.
Jessica Miller (11:53.517)
And so we start like spit-firing things in an attempt to bring ourselves back into a place of comfort instead of discomfort, which is what we feel like when we’re in that urgent, you know, panicky place. What transpires when people are in this place all the time, what I have found with founders is that they think they don’t have enough time. If only I had more time, more time to do these things, more time to make these decisions. Like I need more time because I’m in this place where I have to react. And so if I had more time, it would be better.
But really what they need is enough space and enough calmness to think clearly and to operate clearly and to allow those pieces of their business to fall into place in a place that is grounded. And we’ve all been in this place. It’s different for every person. It feels different in your body for every founder. But when we are grounded, when we are at ease, when we are clear, we feel it. And thus your body becomes a compass for this.
And it is really important that we take care of our bodies, we provide the space, we construct the business infrastructure so that we can allow ourselves to be in the state of calm. And it’s important for each one of you to know what that feels like in your body so you know when you’re there. The other thing I want to say is that calm is not a passive thing. I think sometimes we think we just, like, arrive in calm by accident. You know what I mean? Like either we wake up calm or we don’t. And it’s just kind of this like we’re like a bystander of it. But I want to tell you that calm is actually something that is very intentional. And it is something that you absolutely can fabricate for yourself. And it is powerful. And it’s one of the key components that I have seen for leaders who are running a business with ease and who are running a business that is intentionally growing, where they feel like they have a sense of control.
They have this sense of calm for themselves and how to create it locked in. And I learned this lesson in a very personal way. And I’ve shared this on the podcast before, but it really bears repeating. Back in December, I bought myself an Oura Ring for Christmas. And as I said earlier in the podcast, for those of you that know me, I have a lot of energy. I tend to be like sort of ambiverted. I’m, you know, pretty extroverted.
Jessica Miller (14:16.162)
And I love being in motion. It’s one of my favorite things. I love being productive. I like getting things done. But I was struggling. I was struggling energetically. So I got this Oura Ring because I thought that one of the biggest components of why I was feeling this way was my sleep. And so I bought the Oura Ring with the goal of improving my sleep.
And I wanted to actually—because you know I’m a data person—I wanted to collect the data. I wanted to know what was going on there. And I thought unpacking that would be my biggest insight. Well, my sleep was definitely an insight, but the bigger insight was that the Oura Ring, for many of you that don’t know, you know, it tracks all sorts of things. One of the things it tracked that I didn’t realize it tracked was what it calls like your stress. And so what that basically is doing is it’s taking a variety of different measures, whether it’s heart rate, heart rate variability, temperature, all sorts of things. And it’s plotting it on a graph that it calls your, you know, your stress meter, essentially. And it goes anywhere from like restored and recovered. It has like different levels. So restored and recovered is the lowest. And then it’s basically relaxed.
The next stage up is engaged, and then the next stage up is stressed. So at the lowest stage, like basically like neurologically quiet would be restored. Then the next one up is relaxed. The one after that is engaged. And then the highest one is stressed. And it gives you a graph of what this looks like for every single day you wear this Oura Ring. And it gives the graph different colors. So it will show you, like, you know, restored is blue. And then the next one up might be a different color blue. And then maybe that’s purple for engaged. And then
It’s pink for stress. And then it charts this on a bar chart and it shows you the whole week. Well, when I looked at my bar chart graph, the color pink, which represented stress, was all over this bar chart. There were some days that were totally pink. And of course they caveat this by saying, like, it’s not that all stress is bad. And I agree with that.
Jessica Miller (16:31.192)
But what I took this to understand was that I was in a state of over-engagement, that my neurological system was operating in the on—like, hugely on—level all the time. And I didn’t necessarily feel stressed, or I didn’t necessarily feel like overwhelmed in the sense that I would have, you know, labeled it as that. But my body was always on. And I started to figure out that the things around me were being affected by that. My sleep was being affected like by that, how my day went, my team went, my ability to think straight, my ability to remember things. I mean, it set off an entire cascade of awareness for me. And I started to really ask myself, like, how is this affecting my life? How is it affecting my business? Like, do I like feeling like this? Am I even aware that I am feeling like this? And yes, there was an intuitive piece.
That was telling me that there’s something off, but the data was so illuminating. It was so illuminating. And so the biggest lesson that I got from Oura was that it wasn’t about my sleep. My sleep was actually a byproduct of what was going on for me neurologically in this place where I was like in a state of overwhelm. I wasn’t staying in this state of calm. And it was about awareness for me. It was about understanding what was really going on or lack thereof, you know, not really getting it. So then I really got to this place where I was like, how do I actually want to be moving through my day? How do I want to experience this? And I decided to take that data and really double down on intentionally creating an environment where I was grounded, I was calm, and I was actually leading from a place of power.
And what I found is that in the places where I was doing that historically, that’s where I felt the clearest. That’s where I felt the most in flow. That’s where I made the most money. That’s where I helped my clients, you know, move through the things that they needed help with the most. But I wasn’t intentionally creating that. And once I started to do that, everything shifted for me. The way that I feel now, based on where I was in November of last year, is night and day.
Jessica Miller (18:56.992)
Even down to the decisions that I made around like, are there supplements that I need? Should I talk to a healthcare professional? You know, can I slow down enough to think through this and get what I need? Even that was huge. You know, raising your hand to get the help that you need, bringing the people into your business that you need to help you. I hired an amazing executive assistant. She is like a godsend. All of that came from this place of like, enough is enough. I am not operating from the place I want to. I need to be in a calm, grounded place.
And I need to operate from there. So I realized that success wasn’t an experience waiting for me in the future. It’s happening right now. And I get to choose how I experience my business today and my days today. And looking across the people that I’ve helped and the business owners that I really admire, they are grounded in this place 100%. They are bought into it. It is a priority for them. They take care of their body.
They keep their neurological system in check. They give themselves recovery. They balance it. This is not to say that there are not days where I have stress. This is not to say that there are not days where I am over-engaged. I will tell you, that happens all the time. However, what I have learned is how to compensate for that, how to recover. I think our bodies are built for all of the success and all the things that we want to do. But the key is we need to provide that balanced side of grounding ourselves and bringing our energy back and being intentional about what that looks like for us and how we want to do that? And I have found the same thing for my clients. A lot of the work that we do is holding the space for them with their experience of how it feels for them and what they want, and marrying that with their plan to create growth in the way that they want to create it. It is deeply personal and it’s also very much consistent across a lot of business owners. And so tying all this up with a bow, calm really creates better results. It allows you to think straight. It allows you to cut through the noise. One of my clients—I’m gonna call her Jane—was an executive coach. When she came to me for help with her business, she was making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. But she had so many things going on. She was successful on paper.
Jessica Miller (21:23.65)
But she was overwhelmed, she was reactive, she was feeling it. She was creating a lot of new offers. She was emotionally exhausted because she was constantly in a state of this frantic energy. And the awesome thing about her is like she is a bright light. She’s very extroverted. And that’s where her power is. But she was losing this opposite side of the coin of like, let’s clean this up, let’s simplify this, let’s take inventory on your energy.
And let’s make sure that we give you the time and the space where this is balanced within your business so that you can be on and do all those cool things and then also recover in the way that you need to and have things sort of organized and efficient. So you know where your money is coming from and you know who your clients are and how you’re gonna help them. And it’s very simple. It doesn’t feel like a whack-a-mole, both logistically and energetically, in your business. I will tell you that once we did that, she signed a $125,000 contract almost immediately. That clarity and that simplicity was huge for her. And it really had a huge impact on her experience, her clients, and all of the things in her business. The other thing that allowed her to do was to set boundaries around how much energy and time she was going to give to her business versus how much she was going to take for herself. And all of that really played into her being happier, more successful, and just enjoying the experience in a way that felt good for her consistently. So the confidence that came from that, the easier growth that she had, her better quality of life. And I think there was also a deepening of her connection with her clients because when we can dial down that noise, we really can see the people in our business and our potential prospects individually. We can think about them strategically. We can work through the pieces about how am I gonna best support them without it all being a blur of like frantic energy. And I think that was a big piece for her. So this idea of being overwhelmed and being in it and being, you know, like we said, overcommitted and it just feels like it’s so productive, that actually was not helping her grow. That was the thing that was actually slowing her down. And the calmness doesn’t reduce the performance. It actually makes it better. And this was the case for her too. So I want to leave you
Jessica Miller (23:48.311)
with this to think about. I want you to think about where this sense of urgency or stress is created most in your business? Where are you seeing that? Most of us can identify that feeling, like, okay, over in this quadrant, you know, this is happening, or I’m feeling this on a daily basis whenever I sit down at my desk. There is something under the surface there that is making you stressed. Where is that happening?
Like what is currently going on there? And where could you infuse some space and some intention into your week to allow you to take whatever that is, that stressed environment, that frantic energy, and give yourself a little space from it so that you can like see it clearly and manage it and bring it down to a place where you feel like you have control over it.
And there’s confidence in moving through it versus being in a constant state of reactivity. And I want to say there is no judgment in this. You know, the human condition is that we move through these phases all the time. I am not above it. I go through it every day. Sometimes when there’s a short deadline or something is happening where I need to—like, it’s go time—that energy actually helps me. Not all stress is bad. Being over-engaged or overfocused is not a bad thing. The key is we don’t want to be there.
All the time. We want to manage it and we want to dial it up when we need it. We do not want to be operating from it all the time. So this week I want you to uncover that. I want you to create a little space and then just choose one thing that would make your business feel a little bit lighter. Maybe you can remove something, you can delegate it, you can just simplify it, or you could just stop doing it altogether, right? These things are a choice. They don’t have to be part of what we’re doing on a daily basis. So, in summary, the strongest businesses I have seen are not led by frantic founders. They are led by the most intentional ones that choose calmness and being grounded as a superpower and a way for them to move through their business in a very intentional and a very powerful way. They protect their energy.
Jessica Miller (26:12.578)
They create space to think. They know that this calm, grounded place, when they take care of themselves, is actually a superpower and not a weakness. It is really what leadership looks like in its most powerful form. Because when you become calmer, when you are in your body, when you are grounded, you make better decisions; you have an impact on your team. All of that stuff trickles out. And you can intentionally decide the next place to go in a way that feels confident.
It feels specific and it feels powerful. And that’s because it is. So you lead more effectively, you grow more intentionally, and ultimately you build a business that supports your life instead of consuming it and instead of living in that, like I said, pink, stressed area of my Oura Ring that I didn’t even know I was in. This is also something that is available for all of us. You do not need to be a special snowflake. If you don’t have an Oura Ring, you don’t even need to have that right now.
I promise you, if you start taking note of this and you give yourself some space, you will be able to feel where this is happening and it will lead you to your next best step. Everyone, have a great week. I cannot wait to see you all next week for our last episode of the Summer Shorts series. Have a great day.
