Jo is looking out the window of a cafe
I once packed five client reports into my suitcase for a trip to Hawaii.
I was meeting my sister there. She lives overseas, so this wasn’t a weekend catch up, it was a rare trip, the kind you plan around for months. And there I was, sitting by the pool with my laptop open, half in the conversation, half somewhere else entirely.
There was a period in my business where, almost without fail, a particular customer would call me on a Friday, right before I was due to take any significant time off. Urgent. Couldn’t wait. Needed me specifically.
I always answered.
Not because the work genuinely couldn’t wait. Because underneath it was a fear I hadn’t looked at properly. This customer was influential. She referred well, and often. If I held a boundary and she didn’t like it, I was convinced she’d stop referring, and worse, that she’d actively steer other people away from my practice.
From there, my mind did what minds do when they’re frightened. It didn’t stop at “I might lose a client.” It went straight to broke. In debt. Practice gone. All from one Friday phone call I hadn’t even answered yet.
You may be noticing a pattern here. In the blog I wrote recently, I talked about how genuine rest starts with one clear decision, not a big overhaul. The same principle was sitting underneath this fear too. I wasn’t actually protecting my business by staying available. I was avoiding a decision I hadn’t trusted myself to make.
What changed wasn’t confidence. It was clarity about three specific things: what actually needed to be delegated, who was the right person to delegate it to, and how much time that person or system needed before they, and I, could trust it.
That last part matters more than people expect. You can hand something off in a day. Trust takes longer. It needs a few rounds of the system actually working, of someone else making a good call without you, before the fear quietens down.
Now I have Debbie. She’s exceptional, and after years of working alongside me, she simply knows what I need and, just as importantly, what I don’t need her to bring to me. When I’m away for four weeks, I genuinely don’t expect to hear from her.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. The business didn’t get smaller once I stepped back. It got sturdier. Referrals kept coming. Nothing collapsed. This part of my business didn’t depend on me entirely. What I didn’t do, was work out the other parts that still did, that continued to keep me trapped.
This is worth naming, clearly, because fear rarely announces itself as fear. It shows up dressed as loyalty to your clients, or diligence, or just being a good business owner. But if you look closely, it’s often something narrower: a fear that you haven’t yet built something that can hold steady without you standing directly underneath it.
So here’s my question for you. What’s the one thing you’re still holding onto, that someone else could learn to do well, if you gave them the time and the trust to learn it?
If working through that, what to hand off, to whom, and how to build the trust to actually let go, is something you want support with, that’s exactly the kind of work I do with clients one to one. You can book a session here: https://JoMuirhead.as.me/Session ($500 AUD, paid at booking, no discovery call needed first).