110. Defining Enough
Do you ever feel like you're constantly chasing "enough" in your interior design business? In today's society, we're conditioned to believe that more is always better. But what if I told you that defining enough is the key to unlocking a more streamlined, efficient, and fulfilling business?
As we come to the close of another year and begin thinking about goal setting for 2025, knowing what enough means for you is vital for creating the kind of life and business you truly want. And in this episode, I dive deep into the concept of enough and how it impacts every aspect of your interior design business.
Join me this week as I explore how to identify when you need to define enough, the different ways to approach it, and the transformative power of making that decision for yourself. From setting financial goals to managing your time and team, knowing what enough means for you is crucial for success, and I guide you through this process today.
My annual goal-setting workshop, Create Your 2025 Roadmap, is coming to you soon! Mark your calendars for January 9th and 16th 2025, and click here to register.
If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why defining enough is crucial for your interior design business success.
What happens when you don’t define enough for yourself.
How to identify when you need to define enough in various aspects of your business.
The different approaches to defining enough.
How to make the powerful decision of what enough means for you right now.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you love what you’re learning on the show, and want to learn how I can support you, click here to learn more about coaching.
Click here for the latest workshops and free resources.
Follow me on Instagram!
Sign up to my Monday Mindset email list to get bite-sized insights on topics that you can use to set your week up for success!
Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter
Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 110. I’m going to be diving deep into the topic of defining enough for you and your interior design business today. Exactly what is enough? How do you decide? Who gets to decide? And so much more. Whether you're struggling to define enough in terms of hours worked, money made, clients served, or even just the overall size of your business, this episode is going to help you clarify it all.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are having an incredible week. Today I’m really excited about the topic that I’m bringing to you, which is defining enough. And this comes up in so many things that I coach on, everything from how much you post on social media, to what you should do to set your financial goals, to support you have in your business, to time management. It’s such an important topic and I’m really excited to dive into it.
Before we do, I do want to give a podcast reviewer a shout out. We’ve had some new reviews coming in, which I thank you all so, so much. I can not tell you how much that helps me spread the word about the podcast.
The one that I want to share today is from Studio Strongwater, and their review is titled coffee, gym, dog walk and Desi, which I absolutely love. That is often how my morning goes except I work out at home. But I love to listen to podcasts and go on walks and have my morning routine. And I love that I am part of yours.
What Studio Strongwater shared is, “Desi’s combination of smart, concise, and poignant advice has become an essential part of my week. I’ve listened to many coaches, guides, thought leaders, and have yet to come across someone who has synthesized lessons of time management, client management, and self-care so holistically. Her delivery is calm, relatable, and refreshing. Each week I always find at least one nugget to apply to my work and life, which has helped me grow both personally and professionally.”
So thank you Studio Strongwater for submitting that review. Thank you to all of you who have submitted that review. And if you haven’t, I would so, so appreciate it if you'd just take a moment and put a little note wherever you listen and let me know what you’re loving about the show.
Okay, so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to be talking about defining enough for yourself in your interior design business. Like I said, this has been coming up a ton in coaching. It consistently comes up. It comes up for me in my own work as well.
And I’ve been thinking about this a lot just as we come into the close of another year, and we’re starting to think about goals for 2025, what you want your business to look like, what I want my business to look like, what I offer, what my schedule is going to be like. So now is just a great time to talk about this topic enough with the yearly planning and goal setting on the horizon. I’m also going to be sharing a way for us to work on this together at the end of the episode. So make sure that you stay tuned for that.
Before we even talk about how we define enough and how we go about that, we have to first talk about how you need to know if defining enough is something that you should do and why this even comes up in coaching or where it might be coming up for you personally. And you might even not know that defining enough is the solution.
Where this comes up when I’m working with my clients is it’s often because the designer is noticing challenges in their business, in their personal life, in their ways of being, or the ways that they’re feeling consistently that just don’t feel good. Maybe they’re feeling stressed or anxious, noticing a lot of urgency in their day, and they start feeling like they’re overworking. They’re burned out or overwhelmed. It always feels like they’re behind or they’re not far enough along in some way.
Often this comes up with a financial conversation where they’re feeling like they’re underpaid or in team support where they’re feeling under supported or the goals are kind of always moving. Like they’re never allowing themselves to arrive and celebrate what they’ve created. And it’s all because they haven’t defined what is enough.
So if those things are resonating with you, it’s likely that this is something that you’re going to really want to take into consideration. All of these signs and symptoms that I just described really start to manifest themselves from the belief that it’s not enough or it’s never enough.
So sometimes you might have the awareness that you do have that thought or belief looping in your mind. And you might say to me, I’m always just having that thought, “it’s never enough.” So sometimes this is true. And also what could be true is that this belief is a subconscious driver of what you’re doing and what you’re aiming to accomplish.
If you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re someone that I’ve worked with, you’re probably a little bit type A, you’re a high achiever, you like to accomplish, you like to be productive, and you might not even know that that belief of it’s never enough is driving you because you truly believe that it’s never enough, that more is better, or that you always could be pushing yourself harder.
And so you might kind of have this idea of, oh, I tell myself it’s never enough, but also like in the back of your head you’re believing that that’s somehow serving you or that it’s pushing you forward or helping you achieve your goals. And so you might not be aware of the impact that that belief is actually having in your day to day and in your overall goals in the business, or just your personal life as well.
We live in a society where more and bigger is largely defined as better. It’s the water we all swim in. And when we’re all swimming in that belief, or that societal norm, it’s hard to spot it at times. I’m actually reading this book right now called Scarcity Brain and there was a really interesting example that the author gave at the beginning.
And he’s talking about building a Lego bridge with his son. And they’re building this bridge, there’s the two sides, they’re putting in supports to stabilize the bridge going across. And what they realize as they’re building this is that the bridge is a little bit wonky. And they identify that the bridge is wonky because one side of the right pillar is actually a different height than the height of the left pillar.
What’s so interesting is that the author, he goes about trying to find some more Lego pieces and wanting to build up one side of the support to even things out. And he notices that his son takes a different approach. And his son actually just pops a few of the Legos off of the other side to even things out.
So what’s interesting about this is the author automatically went to more and it didn’t even occur to him that they could take the Legos away. And taking the Legos away actually created a much more solid structure because the bridge didn’t get higher, which of course made it a little bit more unstable with the height rising.
I think this is just such a great example of how often when we’re thinking about solving challenges, we’re thinking it’s because it hasn’t been enough. We haven’t done enough. We haven’t put enough resources in. And that’s not to say that adding is not a solution, because sometimes it is the solution that we need. But what I want to highlight is often we forget to subtract or consider subtraction as a part of our efforts.
If you look up the definition of enough, if you just Google it, it says it’s just as many or as much as required, as required to get the job done or to meet some need. And when we think about it this way, problems arise in your design business, whether that is actual tangible challenges that are resulting or just problems with your mental and emotional wellbeing of feeling like you can never turn off, you’re always spinning. These arise when we don’t define what is required to meet your goals and objectives. And of course, this is taking your capacity into consideration.
If you don’t define what enough is, you never know what you’re measuring against. You don’t know if you in fact need more or less, what approach you should take. And you never know where your business is standing in relation to enough. It’s hard to know where you are on the goal continuum to reaching a goal or progressing a project forward or developing yourself in some way. You just don’t know because you haven’t defined enough.
And that puts you in a place of uncertainty and the brain hates uncertainty. And that’s going to cause a lot of mental drama. And that’s very stressful. And in not defining enough and knowing where you stand, our brains are also going to likely assume that we’re not as far along as we are. They’re going to assume that the gap between where we are and where we want to be is a lot farther than it may actually be in reality.
And then that place of scarcity, lack, feeling behind, it’s just an awful place to be. And it gets us into that frantic action, frantic thinking cycle that causes so many just internal challenges and also creates a lot of scattered action and a lot of starts and stops in our business and prevents us from really being focused. And what happens is you just end up chasing enough without defining it. It’s just a race you’re never going to win.
Which brings us to the question of how do you know what is enough? Or how do you go about defining enough for yourself? Hopefully you see how this can really impact you both day to day and in the long-term trajectory of your business.
So the first thing that I want you to think about when you’re considering defining enough is you have to define enough of what? If we come back to that belief that it's not enough, what is it? We have to know, first of all, what are we even measuring?
Is it the hours worked, the number of projects you have at a time or over the course of a year, the size of your company, the amount of money you bring into the business as revenue, or the amount of money that you pay yourself on a monthly basis, the number of employees, square footage of a space that you maybe want to rent? We have to know what it is.
And then once you’re clear on what category of enough you’re talking about, you want to ask yourself enough according to who? Check in with yourself if you’ve adopted someone else’s version, or even just your perception of their version or an assumption you’ve made of what is enough. This could be maybe a specific person you’re thinking of, another designer you follow on Instagram or someone that is a colleague in your area, or it could be maybe just a more vague other group of people that you consider to be of influence to you in some way.
Once you have explored those two aspects of enough, then it’s time to make a decision because defining enough actually just means making a decision. Enough is a decision, one that you get to make as a designer CEO. You want to be the one in charge of what you’re deciding to care about and how you’re going to measure it.
Sometimes determining enough is a math equation. A great example of this is just how much money you want to make next year. You have expenses you want to cover, employees you want to pay, a certain amount of money you’re planning to contribute to your personal funds, maybe investments you want to make. That’s all math, right? We can think about how much revenue the company needs to bring in, how many projects that would equate to, and then of course, all those other things that I just mentioned. That’s how you can create an enough number.
And when we’re talking about an enough number for a financial enough, I do want to clarify that enough can be a place of abundance. Sometimes my brain wants to associate enough with like scraping by, bare minimum. And if you’re thinking about that right now, just like kind of how my brain goes to that, know that enough doesn’t have to be squeaking by.
There can be ways that you can look at what’s your enough number as like, okay, this is the baseline. And then I know we’re good, I feel confident. And then maybe it’s like a good, better, best situation where you set your financial goals. Just know, keep in mind if a little bit of scarcity or like toning down your desires is showing up here, enough is a decision.
So if you want to decide to have a bigger enough number because of those investments you want to make, maybe you want to contribute more to your personal funds this year, whatever it is, that’s amazing. But you still just want to decide what that is so you know what you’re measuring.
Sometimes enough can also be an experimental guess. An example that comes to mind here is marketing. We can have an idea of what enough marketing is. I’m putting that in air quotes, enough marketing. Enough meaning how much marketing is needed to bring in the types and number of projects you want to create for the year to reach that enough number you just calculated.
When enough is more of an experimental guess, it’s not going to be an exact science, but you get to decide how many of those marketing touch points you’re going to create in the year and feel amazing about that enough. It could be deciding how many new relationships you establish, maybe how many times per month you’re posting on social media, or maybe even a number of events you go to in a quarter.
Your experimental guess can of course be based on past data that maybe you have about your marketing, or it could be an experimental guess where you’re trying something new in the business and you’re setting a baseline for yourself so that you know, yep, this is what I’m committing to and this level of commitment that I’ve got feels good for me right now. It’s doable. And I’m going to celebrate that I’ve done enough.
The last one here I’m going to call out is that sometimes enough might be based on a feeling. What comes to mind here for an example is what is enough meetings in a week? I know for myself, if I hit a certain number of Zoom calls in a day or cumulatively over the week, I’m just zapped. So while another person could thrive off more meetings or another person might be depleted by less meetings than my version of enough, it really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that I know what it feels like when I’m approaching enough. So I can plan for my week and how I structure my schedule. For you, if you know what enough feels like, like let’s say maybe you need at least one day in the office, no meetings, no appointments to dig into focused work, maybe feel like you don’t have to get dressed quite the way you would when you see a client, set your schedule accordingly. That is a great level of enough to make a decision about.
Set your team up to support this, set your project deadlines or site schedules around your definition of enough. What is key here to remember is that if you don’t decide what enough is for you, someone else is going to decide it for you based on their version of enough and their preferences. This can be challenging to do at first if you’ve never considered what is enough for you, or if you’re in the habit of looking to others to create or define what you should be doing.
I was recently reading a fiction book called Butter and I want to read you a little quote here because I thought this was so fascinating. The book Butter is a novel about a young journalist, Rica, and her relationship with this food blogger turned convicted murderer. And this isn’t really the type of book that I would normally pick up, but my book club read it and actually I found it quite entertaining.
But what happens in this book is there’s two friends discussing cooking and they’re referencing recipes where the recipe actually says to use a good amount in quotations. But when I read this, I’m like, oh, there is so much more than a recipe being addressed here.
So here’s what the book says. One of the characters is saying, “We live in an age where knowing what a good amount is gets you a bad rap. A good amount? Rico reached out and drew the sugar pot closer to her, sprinkling half a teaspoon into her cup.
You know how in recipes it’ll say sugar to taste or a good amount of salt and so on? A friend of mine who edits cookbooks for a living said that they’ve started having complaints about recipes that leave things to the individual’s discretion. She thinks it’s because people are increasingly worried about making mistakes or losing faith in their own judgment. They don’t know what a good amount looks like for them. When in fact, cooking is about trial and error. That’s hard to hear. I think I’m probably that type too.”
What I found so fascinating about that paragraph is that for so many business owners, and I think women business owners in particular, it can feel safer and easier to assume that someone else knows better than you do, or you’re afraid to decide for yourself because you don’t want to get it wrong. Let me clarify that there’s so much to learn from people who’ve been there before you, who are experts, who are maybe having things or doing things in a way that you would love to have for yourself and you can learn from that. Of course, that can be valuable.
And I also want you to remember that building a business where you really enjoy being in the business requires you to step into your own leadership and, of course, make decisions for yourself. And that is for sure deciding what enough is for you.
As you’re listening to this and as you let the concept of defining enough marinate some more this week, I want you to call to mind an area of your interior design business where you’re not clear on what enough is and where you might be making decisions and taking actions from a place of it’s not enough, or it’s never enough.
With that awareness, then I want you to explore what needs to happen in order for you to powerfully make a decision around what is your definition of enough, and then make that decision. Decide what is enough and trust yourself to define enough for now. Whether that’s a mathematical decision and experimental guests or a feeling-based knowing, you can decide what is enough for you right now.
This concept of enough truly impacts every aspect of your business in that it sets baselines, determines caps, and it’s yet another way you can filter decisions that you make in your business around what you do, what you don’t do, how you do it, when you do it.
An enough business, if you ask me, is that streamlined, efficient business that allows you to operate at your best with your needs as the owner being met financially, with your team, creative fulfillment. And that’s really what we all want. And it starts with knowing what enough is for you specifically right now.
More isn’t necessarily better. Less isn’t necessarily better. But enough, that really is the best. And your enough can definitely change based on the season you’re in, what your vision for the company is in the coming year. Enough evolves, and that’s why it’s best to regularly evaluate what enough means to you.
I want to invite you to use this concept as you consider your goals for your interior design business next year. And also want to invite you to do this work with me and a group of like-minded interior design peers. I’m going to be hosting my goal-setting workshop yet again this coming year. It’s a client favorite and it’s called Create Your 2025 Roadmap.
It’s a two-part coaching workshop. It’s interactive and it includes a guided goal planning session and then also a follow-up group coaching call. We’re going to be meeting on Thursday, January 9th, from 10:30am to 12:30pm Central. And then again on Thursday, January 16th, 11am to 12pm Central.
In our planning session, you’re going to be creating a personal and professional vision for the coming year. This is a great time to look at what is enough in the various aspects of your personal and professional life. And I’m going to be guiding you through this goal-setting process where you’re setting some very specific goals that are going to help you in defining enough.
And then one week later, we’re going to come together for a group coaching call where you can bring your questions. You can work through obstacles that maybe you’re identifying or work on prioritization, and you can get coached on any of the worries or doubts that you’re feeling about the years to come and get my personalized feedback.
And of course, the benefit of being in a group is that you get to learn from your peers. You get to hear what’s coming up for them and take away your own a-has. And that can be whether you want to raise your hand for coaching, or you want to kind of sit back and observe. Both are such valuable experiences.
Create Your 2025 Roadmap is going to only be $87 and all the sessions are going to be hosted on Zoom and will be recorded. So there will be a replay that gets sent out for both of the sessions. So if you can’t join us live for one or both, you definitely have the option to still join us and even send in your questions ahead of time for me to answer.
Like I said, this has been a client favorite for many years now, and you really will be amazed what you can achieve when you follow this goal setting process that I’m going to be walking you through. The link to join us will be in the show notes, or you can go to DesiCreswell.com/resources and we’ll have the workshop linked on that page as well.
That is what I have for you today. I will be back next week with a brand new episode. I’m going to be sharing some of the key steps you need to take to set yourself up for success next year, when I talk to you next Wednesday. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are having an incredible week. Today I’m really excited about the topic that I’m bringing to you, which is defining enough. And this comes up in so many things that I coach on, everything from how much you post on social media, to what you should do to set your financial goals, to support you have in your business, to time management. It’s such an important topic and I’m really excited to dive into it.
Before we do, I do want to give a podcast reviewer a shout out. We’ve had some new reviews coming in, which I thank you all so, so much. I can not tell you how much that helps me spread the word about the podcast.
The one that I want to share today is from Studio Strongwater, and their review is titled coffee, gym, dog walk and Desi, which I absolutely love. That is often how my morning goes except I work out at home. But I love to listen to podcasts and go on walks and have my morning routine. And I love that I am part of yours.
What Studio Strongwater shared is, “Desi’s combination of smart, concise, and poignant advice has become an essential part of my week. I’ve listened to many coaches, guides, thought leaders, and have yet to come across someone who has synthesized lessons of time management, client management, and self-care so holistically. Her delivery is calm, relatable, and refreshing. Each week I always find at least one nugget to apply to my work and life, which has helped me grow both personally and professionally.”
So thank you Studio Strongwater for submitting that review. Thank you to all of you who have submitted that review. And if you haven’t, I would so, so appreciate it if you'd just take a moment and put a little note wherever you listen and let me know what you’re loving about the show.
Okay, so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to be talking about defining enough for yourself in your interior design business. Like I said, this has been coming up a ton in coaching. It consistently comes up. It comes up for me in my own work as well.
And I’ve been thinking about this a lot just as we come into the close of another year, and we’re starting to think about goals for 2025, what you want your business to look like, what I want my business to look like, what I offer, what my schedule is going to be like. So now is just a great time to talk about this topic enough with the yearly planning and goal setting on the horizon. I’m also going to be sharing a way for us to work on this together at the end of the episode. So make sure that you stay tuned for that.
Before we even talk about how we define enough and how we go about that, we have to first talk about how you need to know if defining enough is something that you should do and why this even comes up in coaching or where it might be coming up for you personally. And you might even not know that defining enough is the solution.
Where this comes up when I’m working with my clients is it’s often because the designer is noticing challenges in their business, in their personal life, in their ways of being, or the ways that they’re feeling consistently that just don’t feel good. Maybe they’re feeling stressed or anxious, noticing a lot of urgency in their day, and they start feeling like they’re overworking. They’re burned out or overwhelmed. It always feels like they’re behind or they’re not far enough along in some way.
Often this comes up with a financial conversation where they’re feeling like they’re underpaid or in team support where they’re feeling under supported or the goals are kind of always moving. Like they’re never allowing themselves to arrive and celebrate what they’ve created. And it’s all because they haven’t defined what is enough.
So if those things are resonating with you, it’s likely that this is something that you’re going to really want to take into consideration. All of these signs and symptoms that I just described really start to manifest themselves from the belief that it’s not enough or it’s never enough.
So sometimes you might have the awareness that you do have that thought or belief looping in your mind. And you might say to me, I’m always just having that thought, “it’s never enough.” So sometimes this is true. And also what could be true is that this belief is a subconscious driver of what you’re doing and what you’re aiming to accomplish.
If you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re someone that I’ve worked with, you’re probably a little bit type A, you’re a high achiever, you like to accomplish, you like to be productive, and you might not even know that that belief of it’s never enough is driving you because you truly believe that it’s never enough, that more is better, or that you always could be pushing yourself harder.
And so you might kind of have this idea of, oh, I tell myself it’s never enough, but also like in the back of your head you’re believing that that’s somehow serving you or that it’s pushing you forward or helping you achieve your goals. And so you might not be aware of the impact that that belief is actually having in your day to day and in your overall goals in the business, or just your personal life as well.
We live in a society where more and bigger is largely defined as better. It’s the water we all swim in. And when we’re all swimming in that belief, or that societal norm, it’s hard to spot it at times. I’m actually reading this book right now called Scarcity Brain and there was a really interesting example that the author gave at the beginning.
And he’s talking about building a Lego bridge with his son. And they’re building this bridge, there’s the two sides, they’re putting in supports to stabilize the bridge going across. And what they realize as they’re building this is that the bridge is a little bit wonky. And they identify that the bridge is wonky because one side of the right pillar is actually a different height than the height of the left pillar.
What’s so interesting is that the author, he goes about trying to find some more Lego pieces and wanting to build up one side of the support to even things out. And he notices that his son takes a different approach. And his son actually just pops a few of the Legos off of the other side to even things out.
So what’s interesting about this is the author automatically went to more and it didn’t even occur to him that they could take the Legos away. And taking the Legos away actually created a much more solid structure because the bridge didn’t get higher, which of course made it a little bit more unstable with the height rising.
I think this is just such a great example of how often when we’re thinking about solving challenges, we’re thinking it’s because it hasn’t been enough. We haven’t done enough. We haven’t put enough resources in. And that’s not to say that adding is not a solution, because sometimes it is the solution that we need. But what I want to highlight is often we forget to subtract or consider subtraction as a part of our efforts.
If you look up the definition of enough, if you just Google it, it says it’s just as many or as much as required, as required to get the job done or to meet some need. And when we think about it this way, problems arise in your design business, whether that is actual tangible challenges that are resulting or just problems with your mental and emotional wellbeing of feeling like you can never turn off, you’re always spinning. These arise when we don’t define what is required to meet your goals and objectives. And of course, this is taking your capacity into consideration.
If you don’t define what enough is, you never know what you’re measuring against. You don’t know if you in fact need more or less, what approach you should take. And you never know where your business is standing in relation to enough. It’s hard to know where you are on the goal continuum to reaching a goal or progressing a project forward or developing yourself in some way. You just don’t know because you haven’t defined enough.
And that puts you in a place of uncertainty and the brain hates uncertainty. And that’s going to cause a lot of mental drama. And that’s very stressful. And in not defining enough and knowing where you stand, our brains are also going to likely assume that we’re not as far along as we are. They’re going to assume that the gap between where we are and where we want to be is a lot farther than it may actually be in reality.
And then that place of scarcity, lack, feeling behind, it’s just an awful place to be. And it gets us into that frantic action, frantic thinking cycle that causes so many just internal challenges and also creates a lot of scattered action and a lot of starts and stops in our business and prevents us from really being focused. And what happens is you just end up chasing enough without defining it. It’s just a race you’re never going to win.
Which brings us to the question of how do you know what is enough? Or how do you go about defining enough for yourself? Hopefully you see how this can really impact you both day to day and in the long-term trajectory of your business.
So the first thing that I want you to think about when you’re considering defining enough is you have to define enough of what? If we come back to that belief that it's not enough, what is it? We have to know, first of all, what are we even measuring?
Is it the hours worked, the number of projects you have at a time or over the course of a year, the size of your company, the amount of money you bring into the business as revenue, or the amount of money that you pay yourself on a monthly basis, the number of employees, square footage of a space that you maybe want to rent? We have to know what it is.
And then once you’re clear on what category of enough you’re talking about, you want to ask yourself enough according to who? Check in with yourself if you’ve adopted someone else’s version, or even just your perception of their version or an assumption you’ve made of what is enough. This could be maybe a specific person you’re thinking of, another designer you follow on Instagram or someone that is a colleague in your area, or it could be maybe just a more vague other group of people that you consider to be of influence to you in some way.
Once you have explored those two aspects of enough, then it’s time to make a decision because defining enough actually just means making a decision. Enough is a decision, one that you get to make as a designer CEO. You want to be the one in charge of what you’re deciding to care about and how you’re going to measure it.
Sometimes determining enough is a math equation. A great example of this is just how much money you want to make next year. You have expenses you want to cover, employees you want to pay, a certain amount of money you’re planning to contribute to your personal funds, maybe investments you want to make. That’s all math, right? We can think about how much revenue the company needs to bring in, how many projects that would equate to, and then of course, all those other things that I just mentioned. That’s how you can create an enough number.
And when we’re talking about an enough number for a financial enough, I do want to clarify that enough can be a place of abundance. Sometimes my brain wants to associate enough with like scraping by, bare minimum. And if you’re thinking about that right now, just like kind of how my brain goes to that, know that enough doesn’t have to be squeaking by.
There can be ways that you can look at what’s your enough number as like, okay, this is the baseline. And then I know we’re good, I feel confident. And then maybe it’s like a good, better, best situation where you set your financial goals. Just know, keep in mind if a little bit of scarcity or like toning down your desires is showing up here, enough is a decision.
So if you want to decide to have a bigger enough number because of those investments you want to make, maybe you want to contribute more to your personal funds this year, whatever it is, that’s amazing. But you still just want to decide what that is so you know what you’re measuring.
Sometimes enough can also be an experimental guess. An example that comes to mind here is marketing. We can have an idea of what enough marketing is. I’m putting that in air quotes, enough marketing. Enough meaning how much marketing is needed to bring in the types and number of projects you want to create for the year to reach that enough number you just calculated.
When enough is more of an experimental guess, it’s not going to be an exact science, but you get to decide how many of those marketing touch points you’re going to create in the year and feel amazing about that enough. It could be deciding how many new relationships you establish, maybe how many times per month you’re posting on social media, or maybe even a number of events you go to in a quarter.
Your experimental guess can of course be based on past data that maybe you have about your marketing, or it could be an experimental guess where you’re trying something new in the business and you’re setting a baseline for yourself so that you know, yep, this is what I’m committing to and this level of commitment that I’ve got feels good for me right now. It’s doable. And I’m going to celebrate that I’ve done enough.
The last one here I’m going to call out is that sometimes enough might be based on a feeling. What comes to mind here for an example is what is enough meetings in a week? I know for myself, if I hit a certain number of Zoom calls in a day or cumulatively over the week, I’m just zapped. So while another person could thrive off more meetings or another person might be depleted by less meetings than my version of enough, it really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that I know what it feels like when I’m approaching enough. So I can plan for my week and how I structure my schedule. For you, if you know what enough feels like, like let’s say maybe you need at least one day in the office, no meetings, no appointments to dig into focused work, maybe feel like you don’t have to get dressed quite the way you would when you see a client, set your schedule accordingly. That is a great level of enough to make a decision about.
Set your team up to support this, set your project deadlines or site schedules around your definition of enough. What is key here to remember is that if you don’t decide what enough is for you, someone else is going to decide it for you based on their version of enough and their preferences. This can be challenging to do at first if you’ve never considered what is enough for you, or if you’re in the habit of looking to others to create or define what you should be doing.
I was recently reading a fiction book called Butter and I want to read you a little quote here because I thought this was so fascinating. The book Butter is a novel about a young journalist, Rica, and her relationship with this food blogger turned convicted murderer. And this isn’t really the type of book that I would normally pick up, but my book club read it and actually I found it quite entertaining.
But what happens in this book is there’s two friends discussing cooking and they’re referencing recipes where the recipe actually says to use a good amount in quotations. But when I read this, I’m like, oh, there is so much more than a recipe being addressed here.
So here’s what the book says. One of the characters is saying, “We live in an age where knowing what a good amount is gets you a bad rap. A good amount? Rico reached out and drew the sugar pot closer to her, sprinkling half a teaspoon into her cup.
You know how in recipes it’ll say sugar to taste or a good amount of salt and so on? A friend of mine who edits cookbooks for a living said that they’ve started having complaints about recipes that leave things to the individual’s discretion. She thinks it’s because people are increasingly worried about making mistakes or losing faith in their own judgment. They don’t know what a good amount looks like for them. When in fact, cooking is about trial and error. That’s hard to hear. I think I’m probably that type too.”
What I found so fascinating about that paragraph is that for so many business owners, and I think women business owners in particular, it can feel safer and easier to assume that someone else knows better than you do, or you’re afraid to decide for yourself because you don’t want to get it wrong. Let me clarify that there’s so much to learn from people who’ve been there before you, who are experts, who are maybe having things or doing things in a way that you would love to have for yourself and you can learn from that. Of course, that can be valuable.
And I also want you to remember that building a business where you really enjoy being in the business requires you to step into your own leadership and, of course, make decisions for yourself. And that is for sure deciding what enough is for you.
As you’re listening to this and as you let the concept of defining enough marinate some more this week, I want you to call to mind an area of your interior design business where you’re not clear on what enough is and where you might be making decisions and taking actions from a place of it’s not enough, or it’s never enough.
With that awareness, then I want you to explore what needs to happen in order for you to powerfully make a decision around what is your definition of enough, and then make that decision. Decide what is enough and trust yourself to define enough for now. Whether that’s a mathematical decision and experimental guests or a feeling-based knowing, you can decide what is enough for you right now.
This concept of enough truly impacts every aspect of your business in that it sets baselines, determines caps, and it’s yet another way you can filter decisions that you make in your business around what you do, what you don’t do, how you do it, when you do it.
An enough business, if you ask me, is that streamlined, efficient business that allows you to operate at your best with your needs as the owner being met financially, with your team, creative fulfillment. And that’s really what we all want. And it starts with knowing what enough is for you specifically right now.
More isn’t necessarily better. Less isn’t necessarily better. But enough, that really is the best. And your enough can definitely change based on the season you’re in, what your vision for the company is in the coming year. Enough evolves, and that’s why it’s best to regularly evaluate what enough means to you.
I want to invite you to use this concept as you consider your goals for your interior design business next year. And also want to invite you to do this work with me and a group of like-minded interior design peers. I’m going to be hosting my goal-setting workshop yet again this coming year. It’s a client favorite and it’s called Create Your 2025 Roadmap.
It’s a two-part coaching workshop. It’s interactive and it includes a guided goal planning session and then also a follow-up group coaching call. We’re going to be meeting on Thursday, January 9th, from 10:30am to 12:30pm Central. And then again on Thursday, January 16th, 11am to 12pm Central.
In our planning session, you’re going to be creating a personal and professional vision for the coming year. This is a great time to look at what is enough in the various aspects of your personal and professional life. And I’m going to be guiding you through this goal-setting process where you’re setting some very specific goals that are going to help you in defining enough.
And then one week later, we’re going to come together for a group coaching call where you can bring your questions. You can work through obstacles that maybe you’re identifying or work on prioritization, and you can get coached on any of the worries or doubts that you’re feeling about the years to come and get my personalized feedback.
And of course, the benefit of being in a group is that you get to learn from your peers. You get to hear what’s coming up for them and take away your own a-has. And that can be whether you want to raise your hand for coaching, or you want to kind of sit back and observe. Both are such valuable experiences.
Create Your 2025 Roadmap is going to only be $87 and all the sessions are going to be hosted on Zoom and will be recorded. So there will be a replay that gets sent out for both of the sessions. So if you can’t join us live for one or both, you definitely have the option to still join us and even send in your questions ahead of time for me to answer.
Like I said, this has been a client favorite for many years now, and you really will be amazed what you can achieve when you follow this goal setting process that I’m going to be walking you through. The link to join us will be in the show notes, or you can go to DesiCreswell.com/resources and we’ll have the workshop linked on that page as well.
That is what I have for you today. I will be back next week with a brand new episode. I’m going to be sharing some of the key steps you need to take to set yourself up for success next year, when I talk to you next Wednesday. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Next
Next