99. What’s Next (CEO Summer School Lessons)

Are you ready to take the lessons from CEO Summer School and apply them to your interior design business this fall?

We’ve covered a lot of ground over the past CEO Summer School episodes – from trading good for great to overcoming Someday Syndrome. Now it's time to reflect on which topic you want to delve deeper into and embody over the next month. In this episode, I guide you through choosing your focus and making it visible so you stay committed to your goals.

Whether you’ve knocked CEO Summer School out of the park or it hasn’t gone quite as you hoped or planned, join me this week as I show you what’s next. In this final episode of the series, you’ll hear why making small shifts can compound into the kind of success you want, the importance of acknowledging how far you’ve come, and how to focus on the insights that resonated most with you.


CEO Summer School is my summer podcast series where we’ll explore the power of questions. Click here to join me in CEO Summer School!

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:

  • How to choose one key insight from CEO Summer School to focus on for the next month.

  • The importance of narrowing your focus to achieve success through small shifts.

  • Why showing appreciation for your past self is an essential skill to develop as a CEO.

  • How acknowledging your own growth creates a positive feedback loop.

  • How expressing self-gratitude will empower you to gain momentum in your business.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:


Full Episode Transcript:

Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 99, which is actually our seventh lesson in the CEO Summer School series. It’s the last one in the series and we’re bringing it home today. We’re going to be talking about where do you go from here? We’ve covered a lot of ground, and whether you’ve been following along with every single episode in the series or catching this podcast for the first time ever, or maybe just in a while, I have an important message for you as you move into this fall season with your interior design business and how you can take those CEO Summer School lessons with you to move forward.

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. We are here with the seventh lesson of the CEO Summer School series. This is the last lesson in the series and we’re wrapping it up before we go back to regularly scheduled episodes with a new one releasing every week.

If you’re just finding the podcast or are listening in the future, you can still get all of the bonus guides that pair with the CEO Summer School lessons. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/summerschool. You’ll get instant access to all of the one-sheet reflection guides that pair with each of these lessons. So you can go back and work through CEO Summer School at your own pace and apply what I’m sharing directly to your own interior design business.

Before we dive into what I want to share with you on lesson seven, I want to return back to episode 97, which was the last episode released in the CEO Summer School series and it was titled You At Your Best. I received an incredibly insightful email from Heidi Johnson of All The Pretty Houses and I wanted to share a little bit about what she wrote because I think it would be so helpful to all of you who are here with me today on the podcast as well.

Heidi said that she’s a designer and a residential builder and that she designs and then builds her projects, which I think is pretty cool. In that episode, if you listen to it or want to go back to it, I was really addressing the mindset of being at your best. But for Heidi, this sparked a more tactical reflection point and she started asking herself what jobs or parts of jobs she really wanted to be doing going forward.

And what she said was that the realization was that it’s time to completely remove herself from the actual construction part of the project and delegate that to the very capable construction team she said she’s built and just manage that. She said she enjoys building and she’s proven she can do it, but it’s the designing and project managing that really lights her fire, not the building aspect.

So her insight was really that there are all of these aspects of her work that she’s fantastic with and she’s built an incredible company, it sounds like, around these different skill sets. And also what she’s recognizing is that when she is at her best, it’s important for her to guard her capacity to make sure she’s spending her energy somewhere where it’s most likely to bring a positive result for her, whether that’s in her state of mind, her life balance, instead of just slogging through because she could do it and has the capability to do it.

I wanted to bring Heidi’s note to the podcast because I think this is a really excellent tangent to what I was sharing in episode 97, in that we can look at what are the things that we love to do. As Heidi shared, it’s not really about like we’re never going to do anything that isn’t in our total zone of genius or isn’t something that we don’t like to do because let’s face it, as business owners, sometimes we have to do the hard thing. We have to be the person who’s wearing all the hats for a period of time.

And as we evolve as business owners and start to learn what works for ourselves, for our business, for our goals, for our clients, we can start to be more strategic about how we spend our time. And I think the piece of that that she shared that was so, so important that I want to bring home for all of you is what do you need to guard in terms of your own capacity to make sure that you are spending your energy and emotional bandwidth and your time and your resources in a way that really helps you show up at your best? Because when you’re at your best, your business is going to be at its best. Your clients are going to have the best experience.

With that, I want to just encourage you to do as Heidi did and take whatever concepts I share here and run with it in your own brain and see what some of these things spark because there’s, of course, what I’m sharing and then there’s the wisdom that opens up within your own brain and your own body as you receive whatever message it is that I’m sharing that week.

And of course, just like Heidi did, I love to hear about it. So if you ever feel like sharing what is coming up for you with these episodes, you can always feel free to send me a DM on Instagram @DesiCreswell or reply to one of my emails.

Today, what I want to talk to you about is where you go from here. After this period of reflection and tuning inward in CEO Summer School, what next? What do we do? There’s two points that I really want you to take away from today’s episode in terms of what is next following this series for you. The first one being making a clear, focused decision on what you want your next steps to be, and we’ll talk about how to do that. The second piece of this is expressing gratitude and appreciation to past you before you move forward.

We’ll talk about both of these in depth and how you can apply both of those concepts to anything in your business, and also if you’ve been following along with the series, how you apply it to the series specifically. As I mentioned in the introduction, we have covered a lot of ground over these sessions and touched on many aspects of you as the human behind the business and of course on the business itself.

Whether you’ve been listening to the podcast only or you’ve been diligently filling out the reflection guides or somewhere in between, I know that you’ve had some insights and a-has and new ways of looking at yourself and your interior design business. That is incredible and it’s exactly why I wanted to create this series for you and honestly this podcast as a whole.

If you’ve been following along with the reflection guides, I do always have those pieces where I am asking you to integrate this more, move it forward in your life and in your business, and of course then the next step is taking where you’ve dipped into a topic that really resonated and making it a primary focus for a period of time.

What I really want you to do is reflect on these past episodes, maybe scroll back through the podcast feed, page through the guides and pick one topic that you really want to focus on for the next month.

As a recap, the topics we’ve covered are trading good for great, willingness to do the hard things, identifying business blind spots, getting yourself out from a rock and a hard place, someday syndrome and you being at your best. So reflect on those topics and see what is resonating with you. What feels like it lands? And of course if something else feels like it’s really landing, you could choose to focus on that as well.

What I encourage you to do is relisten to the episode that resonated most and decide what it would look like to focus on that area for yourself personally or in the business for a month. It could be taking incremental action that’s going to compound. It could be making a decision and acting on it. It could be starting a reflection practice of your own to continue on that internal insight.

When you’re thinking about what you want to focus on for the coming month, do not overthink this. There is no right or wrong answer, I really want you to trust your gut instinct on where you want to put your attention. That in and of itself is a powerful skill to develop, so whatever pops into your brain, just go with it. This is also a good opportunity to look for shoulds. So if you’re thinking I should focus on that one topic but this other one’s really calling to me, practice releasing that should and going with what you know to be true.

Once you’ve decided, I want you to make your decision visible. Schedule time for yourself on your calendar, you can put it on a post-it note on your desk to remind you of maybe a powerful belief you want to hold about yourself or your business or a little reminder about how you’re going to check in on something.

Whatever it is, I want you to make it easy to bring yourself back into focus and commit to touching base with your intention for this month and I want it to be throughout the month. So we don’t want to just have an intention for the month and then totally forget about the intention. We want to remind ourselves throughout the month that we have intentionality behind this focus and bring it back into our awareness consistently.

There’s that saying that energy flows where attention goes, well, it’s true. So show yourself what can happen when you make a decision and stay focused on a small shift for a period of time and how that really can compound. And I’m talking about a small shift here.

This is something I’m always working with on my clients and it’s because I work with these very smart, capable, achievement-oriented people, right? So I totally get it, hi, it’s me too, but we often want to give ourselves this huge mountain to climb and then of course we’re exhausted by just packing for that hiking trip. So really do yourself a favor and make this a very small shift and allow that to compound. Allow yourself to be successful with whatever you choose and I promise you, you will get farther that way.

Of course, I know the other challenge here, if you’re like my clients, which I’m sure that you are if you’re listening to this episode, and I know a lot of my clients do listen to the podcast as well. There’s always that challenge of I’ve got this idea, I want to make this my focus but how do I actually narrow it down a little bit more and really follow through and make a plan?

So I want to remind you of episode 49, which is titled Turn Ideas Into Action. So you could definitely reference that podcast episode to support you with some of this going forward.

As I’ve been doing in the past CEO Summer School episodes, I want to give you a question for you to reflect on. The question is, what topic resonated the most and how will you embody one specific insight from the lesson over the next four weeks? This is really a way to take what you’ve already done and compound whatever it is that you’ve started.

So that’s the first piece of where do you go from here with CEO Summer School. The second piece I really, really want to bring home for you today is the importance of showing appreciation for yourself in this process. For the record, you can have appreciation for yourself at any point, no matter how much you’ve done.

Even if you didn’t do CEO Summer School exactly as you had planned, in the timeframe, in the quantity, whatever it is. Maybe you signed up and did some of the reflection guides, maybe not any of them, maybe somewhere in between. No matter what, there’s an opportunity to have appreciation for yourself.

There was a lot of you, at least one part of you that said, I am doing this for me and my business. You’ve been working in your interior design business for the last three months. And I guarantee there are things that you did to be proud of. So I want you to take a moment to acknowledge that. It could be just in the business as a whole, it could be with something that happened or came to the surface through CEO Summer School.

Whatever it is, this is an essential skill that you can continue to develop of acknowledging yourself and appreciating yourself. Because as the CEO of your business, it’s possible no one else is going to show that appreciation for you. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. And even if they do, often what we find is that people do a subpar job or they don’t express appreciation in the way that you want to receive it or maybe enthusiastically enough, or they do give you a big old pat on the back and then you go and deflect it or minimize the accomplishment.

If you’re feeling seen here, I get it, this is something I’ve worked through myself. But what I know is we all want appreciation, validation and recognition. That goes back to our core human desires. And it can be really hard to receive compliments or an expression of thanks or receive enough of those things to make up for any kind of imposter syndrome or shaky confidence that you’re experiencing.

It’s also really easy to just keep plowing through whatever it is that you’re doing and the success that you’re creating and not even take a moment to look back and say, “Oh my gosh, I’ve come really far and that’s pretty amazing.” That’s why it’s so important to learn, to show appreciation for who you have become, what you’ve accomplished and recognize your own growth.

It’s a practice in seeing yourself for how far you’ve come, the ways that you have grown, the ways the business has grown, all of these things are important and it doesn’t just feel good, you will see an impact in how you take action. When we’re feeling the more positive range of emotion, we take more effective action, we’re willing to be more bold in our action, we’re willing to stretch ourselves further than we’ve stretched ourselves in the past.

So not only does appreciation feel good, or I should say it’s going to feel probably pretty awkward and weird at first. But as you get used to it, it’ll start to feel good. And then it’s going to really positively impact your experience in the business and the results you’re able to create in your business as well.

The other reason this practice is so important is because it helps you break away from using everyone else’s opinion to determine how you feel about yourself. Our brains, the way that they’re wired, they’re just more inclined to see the gaps, the things we messed up on and be frankly a negative Nelly. So you have to train yourself to see your own gains.

And when you do, you start to create a positive feedback loop that you can leverage to gain momentum and to continue to move forward even when things are hard because business is sometimes hard. Sometimes you have setbacks, sometimes things go away, you didn’t really want them to go and you feel disappointed. And so the more that we can create our own positive emotion and create a cycle of seeing ourselves, what we’ve done and finding the appreciation independent of what other people say, the actual results that are produced, the more empowered you will be as the business owner.

With that, that’s going to bring me to the second question I have for you today. And that is, what do you want to appreciate about yourself or your efforts over the last three months? Again, it could be related to the CEO Summer School Series or something else you’re feeling called to recognize.

With those two pieces, we are going to conclude CEO Summer School. If you’re already enrolled in the series, go check your email, print the reflection guide and answer these two questions for yourselves plus the bonus question.

If you aren’t already enrolled in CEO Summer School, subscribe to the show and go to desiid.com/summerschool. You can enter your email and you’ll get instant access to the guide for today’s episode and all the other reflection guides as well. There’s never a time that is too late to start.

I would absolutely love to hear from you what you have enjoyed most about the series, how it’s impacted you or any other thoughts that you want to share. You can reply to one of my emails, send me a DM on Instagram @DesiCreswell or leave a review wherever you listen to the podcast. I would love to see this show hit 100 reviews, so you leaving a quick note about how the podcast has supported you would be so appreciated.

Before we sign off one last announcement, be sure to get your name on the waitlist for one-on-one coaching. I have some announcements coming out soon and the wait list will be the first to hear those details. So you can go to desiid.com/privatecoachingwaitlist.

Next week, I will be back with an episode I’m very excited about. We’re going to be celebrating the 100th episode of the podcast. I cannot believe it’s here. And what I’m going to do is share some of the really important lessons I’ve learned since I got started with the interior design business CEO, and of course share how you can take those lessons and apply them to your own interior design business. Until next Wednesday, I am wishing you a beautiful week and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.

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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.

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98. How to Increase Your Confidence in Your Interior Design Business