171 If Your Life Is Chaotic, Your Business Will Be Too

Welcome 👋
This episode is super quick from me this week because I’ve got a message for you if you’re sitting on the fence about attending Clinic Growth Live. Whether you are or whether you are not, that’s the decision you’ve got to make.

If you’re not taking the action you know you need to take, this is going to resonate. And I’m going to tell you why that might be, and what you can do to fix it.

Episode Summary 🎧
I’m going to say something that might sting a little: if your life looks and feels chaotic right now, that’s exactly what your business is going to feel like too. Always. You cannot separate the two.

If things feel messy in your clinic, I’m willing to bet it’s not marketing, not sales, and probably not your team. It might be a you problem. Because you bring your energy, your habits, your structure (or lack of it), and your decision making into your clinic every single day.

I share a real example from my own week, where I could feel myself slipping into overwhelm and firefighting mode, jumping between tasks, being snappy, and basically running on mini eggs instead of carrot sticks. Nothing had actually gone wrong in the business, but I had no clear plan, no protected thinking time, and no structure to hold me.

Here’s the shift I want you to take away: chaos is not a time problem. Chaos is a leadership problem.

So I walk you through a simple framework you can use this week, using ChatGPT (or whatever AI tool you like) as a thinking partner to clear your mental load, spot where you are the bottleneck, and create a structured week with proper CEO time, boundaries, and clear priorities.

And yes, if you’re still undecided about Clinic Growth Live, take this as your sign. It’s time to step up as the CEO of your life and your business.

Key Takeaways ✅

• If your life feels chaotic, your business will feel chaotic too, you cannot separate them.
• You cannot build a calm, profitable clinic from a reactive, unstructured life.
• You do not need more time, you need better structure, clearer priorities, and stronger decision making.
• Chaos is a leadership problem, and leadership starts with how you run your life.
• Use AI as a thinking tool, not just for captions and quick wins.
• A simple weekly reset can take you from overwhelmed and scattered to clear, focused, and leading again.
• Structure creates freedom, not

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Katie Bell: This episode super quick from me this week because I have a message for you if you are sitting on the fence when it comes to attending clinic growth live and whether you are or whether you are not, and that's the decision that you've got to make.

[00:00:13] I want you to listen to this episode because it's gonna resonate with those of you who are not taking the action that you need to take and why you might not be, and what you can do to solve it.

[00:00:23] Welcome to the Treat Your Business podcast, the show for clinic owners who want real, honest advice and tried and [00:00:30] tested ways of doing things. I'm Katie Bell, and this is the new era of bigger insights and bolder conversations to help you grow a clinic and a life you love. Let's dive in.

[00:00:41] I'm gonna say something that might sting a little this week, and it's that if your life looks and feels chaotic right now, that's exactly what your business is going to feel like too. Not sometimes, not occasionally, but always. You can't separate [00:01:00] the two. So you bring your energy, you bring your habits, your lack of structure your decision making.

[00:01:07] Into your clinic every single day. And here's the truth, you cannot build a calm and a profitable, led clinic from a chaotic and reactive life. So if things feel a bit chaotic, little bit carnage in your business right now and a bit messy, then I'm gonna guess that your problem isn't marketing. It [00:01:30] isn't sales, it's probably not a team problem.

[00:01:32] It might be a you problem. So enjoy this week's episode because we are gonna dive into why this needs fixing if you want your clinic to grow. And when I say grow, that might mean money for you to take home more time. More time to do your hobbies more time with your family, more holidays. A feeling of success, confidence, whatever growth means to you.

[00:01:59] [00:02:00] If you want some difference in change in your clinic, we've gotta start looking at you first. Okay? Let me give you a real example. I've had many of these weeks recently. Where Alfie is not sleeping, obviously because he's a small baby, and team questions are coming in. I'm being pulled from pillar to post.

[00:02:21] Clients need decisions, messages, emails, everything feels like stacking up. I've got podcast episodes to record. I've got content to create. I've got a new program that I'm [00:02:30] designing and I could feel it in myself. Okay. That. And going back to that kind of overwhelm, that just firefighting jumping between things, starting tasks, not finishing them possibly a bit short and a bit snappy.

[00:02:46] Eating mini eggs rather than, carrot sticks. And just feeling like I'm racing from one thing to the next. And a part of that is because of the season of life that I'm in right now. And coming back from. Kind of maternity leave. I'm still [00:03:00] not fully back, but I have one day of childcare at the moment and I have two big businesses to run in that one day.

[00:03:06] So it can feel like you can quickly start reacting to everything instead of leading on anything. And for many of you, this is gonna feel, you're gonna be able to resonate with this in that you are, like you, you are overtired, you are short, you're snappy. Your exercise is being put to the wayside.

[00:03:24] January's has come and gone and we're back into old habits, and you feel like you're just jumping from one [00:03:30] thing to the next and you are not really getting anything done ever. This isn't a business problem, okay? This is actually like a me problem. Nothing had gone wrong in the business, but I had no clear plan for the week.

[00:03:44] I'd got no protected thinking time that has been eaten up. I'd got no structure to hold me because as a visionary, we need structure for our nature. So you quickly then become the bottleneck again. And this is what many clinic [00:04:00] owners don't realize, is that when your business feels chaotic, it is because you feel chaotic.

[00:04:07] Like you are just being pulled from pillar to post, from home in your business, in your clinic by your patients, and therefore we get stuck. We clinic owners, studio owners get stuck. They're trying to grow a business, they're trying to lead a team. They're thinking about recruitment or trying to hire, or they've got team and they need to be present for them.

[00:04:28] They need to increase their revenue, but they need to [00:04:30] make some more profit. And they're doing all this in between patients. They're in reactive mode and there's no real structure to their week. And then they say things like, Katie, I just need some more time. Like maybe I just need to get more clients.

[00:04:43] Maybe I just need to be better at marketing. And I'm gonna tell you that you don't need more time. We all have exactly the same amount of time. You need better structure. You need much more protected thinking time. You need [00:05:00] much clearer priorities, and you need better decision making because here's the shift, chaos isn't a time problem.

[00:05:09] Chaos is a leadership problem, and leadership starts with actually how you run your life and how you show up. We discussed this recently, a live strategy day with our elevate clients, with those who are in a business who they have got some team, they are still working clinically and they feel like they're very much trying to [00:05:30] juggle lots of different things.

[00:05:31] Their business is growing lots of things are changing, but they can often feel like they're out of control and that they're being run rather than they're running their life. This is where we have to put structure in place. And I think people massively underuse the likes of chat, GPT or Gemini or whatever it is that you are using.

[00:05:53] Because most people aren't using, or most people aren't using it for what it's really powerful for. They're [00:06:00] using it for like captions and emails and quick wins, and that's. Not how I use it. I use it as a thinking tool. So every single week it helps me plan my week. It helps me structure my thinking, it helps me solve problems faster.

[00:06:15] It helps me get out of my own head. So it's like having a mini kind of strategic per strategic person by your side. It's like having an integrator or a practice manager. It's like having a coach or a [00:06:30] sounding board on demand all the time. And this is really great, but it's only great when you sit down with intention.

[00:06:41] So if you are stressed and if you're firefighting it's not gonna work for you because what you give it is what you get out of it. So when you create space. It can be gold dust for you. It can take you from a unstructured, unplanned week chaotic thinking to [00:07:00] providing you with some clarity. So let me give you something that you can literally take away and you can use this week.

[00:07:07] Okay? And you can. Let's call it your CEO Reset framework, and you can do this in chat GPT in literally like 20 minutes. So here's what you could do. Set one open chat, GPT, and brain dump everything into it. You can write it or you can use the recording thing on it. I sometimes do this in the morning when I'm doing [00:07:30] my morning workout or I'm like on the treadmill or I'm walking the dog, I'm walking to get him to sleep.

[00:07:34] I say everything, here's everything that's currently on my mind in my clinic and in my life, and I just word vomit into it. Okay. It could be things that like I. Like last night I was in bed and I said to my husband, when are the sofas, the new sofas arriving? Shit, shit. The new sofas arriving next week. I need to sell the old sofas.[00:08:00]

[00:08:00] So I've got sell sofas on my list. I've got freaking electric baby chair thing that, look, I didn't even know why I've got it, but I just need to get rid of it. It's sat in the lounge, it's driving me mad. I need to get rid of that. I need to put that on. Facebook marketplace thing. You might be that you've got a bag of charity stuff that needs to go to the charity shop.

[00:08:17] It might be that you need to get something fixed. It might be that you need to enroll your child into nursery or into brownies or summer camp or. All the things that are in your head, okay? It could be that [00:08:30] I need to recruit a new member of staff and I need to fix this process that's going on in the business that nobody's actually following, and I need to ask about this.

[00:08:37] I need to organize the garden at work. And you just dump everything that is currently in your mind, okay? In terms of your clinic, your studio your life personally, professionally, your family, priorities, problems, opportunities, dump it. And you say, this is what's going on for me. Can you organize this into priorities, problems [00:09:00] and opportunities?

[00:09:02] So what it does is it clears your mental load, okay? It shows you what actually matters. So this is way better than just writing a to-do list 'cause you never actually do it and it stops this overwhelm spiral. Now then I would say to it, okay, based on this, where am I? The bottleneck. My business right now, what am I bottlenecking?

[00:09:25] Where am I holding things back? Because this is gonna show [00:09:30] you why or where you are holding onto things, why and where decisions are being delayed, where you are slowing the growth. And then I would say, okay, based on this and the things that are you could ask questions like. Now ask me some questions about what is really important from an energy, time and money point of view that I need to focus on this week.

[00:09:57] And Chatt PT will ask you a list of [00:10:00] questions that will then start to refine that list. And then you say, okay, great. Now turn this into a structured week for me as a clinic owner, including CEO time team time. Personal time, whatever other things that you need to put in there. Family time. This is currently what my diary looks like or these are the hours that I've, that I'm seeing patients clinically, however you want to, whatever information you wanna give, chat, GPT, and it will create structure for you.

[00:10:28] It will create boundaries, it will [00:10:30] create clarity of what you need to be working on. You can ask it. What are the top three most important things that I need to focus on this week to move my clinic forward? Not 20 things, three things, and suddenly you are going from overwhelm, reactive, scattered to, oh, okay, I'm clear.

[00:10:52] I'm focused, I'm leading. Again, I know exactly what I need to be working on, importantly when I'm working on it. So one of [00:11:00] the things I often say to chat GPT is. Okay, that looks great. But my best working times are here. Like I'm not a great person in the afternoon to, to do any content creation or or like creativity tasks because I'm much more creative first thing in the morning.

[00:11:16] You might also say, I don't wanna have to check my emails. So it was structure three times a week that I'm in my inbox dealing with things and when that needs to happen rather than. Opening your email inbox every single morning and [00:11:30] just firefighting and dealing with a load of shit, firing off a load of emails, and then shock horror people respond to emails.

[00:11:36] If you want less emails, send mass emails so you can start to use chat GPT to help give your week some more structure. I have a Sunday reset and I shared my process with all of our members at our live days, but this gets me really clear on how my week looks. Everything is in the schedule, like nothing is [00:12:00] random.

[00:12:00] I know when everything is happening and what needs to happen. For example, I'm just recording this podcast in nine minutes time. I have a allocated slot in my diary, which says walk the dog make lunch feed Alfie. So those are the three things that I have to do in my one hour lunch break today. So I have them scheduled in.

[00:12:23] Then at half past one I am back and I'm on I'm coaching or elevate members on a q and a one 30 till three. [00:12:30] Then I have a specific task that I'm doing between three and three 30, and then three 30 to four 30 have my accountant, and then four meeting, and then four 30 till five, I have a defrag half hour, which is where I basically just.

[00:12:42] Tie up all the loose ends from the day, all that shit that you've written down that you're never gonna do, and make sure that I've got that defrag time and then five o'clock day ends, because then I have between five and seven or evening routine that is I need to walk the dog again because my husband's at the football tonight.

[00:12:59] I need [00:13:00] to feed Alfie. I need to feed myself. I need to bath him and get him down to bed. And asleep by seven. And then I have structured time of things that I'm doing after seven o'clock seven till eight, mainly because my husband's away tonight. And so I can actually use that time to get some other stuff done.

[00:13:20] All that's our free time, so everything feels very structured, but I know exactly what I need to achieve today. I have my list in front of me and that's it. [00:13:30] It's just very clear priorities, so I don't start the day feeling overwhelmed. I'm certainly not reactive. I'm not on my WhatsApp, I'm not on my emails.

[00:13:38] They're not open. I'm not dealing with things all the time. I'm being pulled from pillar to post. I have specific times when they will get my attention. So if your clinic and your life feels really chaotic now, don't start with your marketing. Don't start trying to fix your team. Start with your life.

[00:13:57] Because structure creates freedom [00:14:00] not the other way round. And this is exactly. What we are going to be creating at Clinic Growth Live in a couple of weeks time, we're gonna look at how to stop winging it, how to lead properly, how to build a clinic that actually gives you time and money and Headspace back.

[00:14:16] So if you're listening to this and thinking, oh shit, I've still not made a decision whether I'm going or not, this is your final message. Take this as your sign. It is time to step up as the CEO of your life and of [00:14:30] your business. I'm gonna see you in the room. I can't wait to help you take your life and your business to a much more structured level.

[00:14:39] Thanks for listening to the Treat Your Business podcast. Hit subscribe now and keep joining me for bigger insights, older conversations to help you build a clinic and a life you [00:15:00] love.