One of the women we interviewed for the book, Alice Cheng who is a clothing designer and owns a fabulous boutique in Brooklyn called A.Cheng, shared that she reads the Sunday Business Section of  The New York Times  each week. She felt she learned a lot from this habit and at the least suggested that others read a weekly feature called “Corner Office.”   Each week, there is an interview with a CEO and often the interviewer asks a lot about leadership habits, experience and lessons. Since interviewing Alice, I have now made a habit of reading this section weekly.

This past week, there was an interview with Lisa Price who is the Founder of Carol’s Daughter – a natural beauty product company based in Brooklyn. I was introduced to the company many years ago when I received a gift from a friend who thought I would like the products but also loved that my mom’s name was Carol – thus making me “Carol’s Daughter.”  In the interview, Lisa talks a lot about learning to take things in the business less personally. She speaks about how as a manager and leader of the company, this was a difficult, sometimes painful but extremely important skill to develop. When asked how she learned to take things less personally, she responded insightfully, “My biggest obstacle is myself — being afraid, being nervous. So it’s hard sometimes to get past yourself, to just get over yourself.” I was struck by that statement as I often find myself thinking about how often we get in our own way. This of course happens in our personal life as well as in our businesses. We create drama, unnecessary obstacles, make work when in reality, there is often an easier or certainly less challenging path. Of course there are forces outside of ourselves that impact any situation, but ultimately, how we respond to a situation is something we do have a lot of control over. 

Recently, I was speaking with a business owner who was complaining that she was exhausted, overworked and feeling like she was going to burn out but at the same time, she was listing countless reasons as to why she was the only person who could do the work. I asked her more about the nature of the work at hand and started to divide them into buckets (administrative, creative, new business development). After I pointed out how they could each be categorized, she started to see that the creative aspects of the business were really where she needed to add value (which was challenging when she was feeling burned out) but that the administrative aspects were something she could delegate and for the moment, she could put the new business development on hold as her plate was full. She started to see the light, and more importantly, realized that she could get out of her own way.