Automation is emotional; Why letting go feels like loosing control

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Transcript

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Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander and Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you could expect real talk with industry friends, community connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now, let's get designing your own success. Today we have a solo episode, so it's just me speaking into the ether. But I wanted to chat today about automation and why letting go of tasks is so emotional. I can't tell you how many designers I've worked with and I have to push so hard for them to outsource or trust or release control. and I'm guilty of it as well in my own business. The first VA that I hired, I gave her my social media passwords and I was like, okay, off you go. This is what I need. And then within 24 hours I was watching her comment on people's like Kmart hacks and being like, love this girl, or This is stunning. And I was horrified'cause I was sitting at home, no shade to Kmart, but also a bit of shade to Kmart. And I was thinking. This is my high-end luxury interior design brand. I would absolutely never be advocating for what I call fish food furniture, which is the DIY Zo flakes. Anyway, I'm not getting into it. It was a whole thing and I was sweaty and shaky, and I remember sitting there being like, ah, this is a terrible idea. I should never have let her act on my behalf. I need to be the actual person who's orchestrating every decision in my business. And I just, I felt like maybe the social media side wasn't the great place for me to get started because I actually really like marketing and I like social media. And so I'd given her access to doing a part of my business that probably. Already lit me up enough that I shouldn't have gone immediately to outsource that part. I should have looked holistically at my whole business and thought, if I have a va, where is, where can I get her assistance so that I can be left to the tasks that I enjoy, like marketing and other things. So this is the unexpected truth with designers that no one really warns you about. Automation isn't just the logical next step or part of the strategy. It's actually about a bit of identity work and a bit of sort of internal growth that we need. So that we can show up and have the emotional capability to actually outsource some things and automate some things and take some things off our plate. So if you've ever felt that sort of weird lump in your throat while trying to delegate or systemize or hand off something, it's almost like a gr a, a micro grief, if you will, because when we hand off something that we used to have to do and that we used to do all the time as part of our role in our business, it's like saying goodbye to that thing and that you'll never have to do it again. And it sounds so silly saying it out loud that you'd be upset about that because of all of the late nights of going, Ugh, I just get frustrated. I can't, there aren't, 24 usable hours a day live. Tyler lied to me in Empire Records because that is not a truth. So if you are feeling sad about delegating something, it's not that you're broken, it's just that you are human and it means that you care. In this episode, I'm going to strip back the curtain and explore a little bit more about why it feels so hard to let go of tasks that we know we shouldn't even be doing anymore. AI exists. We all know that there are so many tasks in our business that we continue to stubbornly do because we're just not ready. We're not emotionally ready. We don't have the emotional maturity to understand that we shouldn't be doing this anymore. And I'm not throwing shade at everybody else without throwing some shade at myself too. I'm a Virgo. I am an eldest daughter with eldest daughter energy, quite neurotic and very controlling. So I include myself in this conversation, but I do wanna explore why stepping into true leadership starts with exploring that discomfort and deeply understanding the emotional undercurrent behind automation and the fear of becoming irrelevant in our business when our business runs without us. We are not really even sure what to do with ourselves, right? And we don't know how to move through all of that resistance and that control with confidence. We are still going, oh no, I feel like that because I'm the CEO of my business and we put labels on it that matter. Like leadership is really important, but leadership doesn't happen until you can think big picture. You can take risks and you understand that it's okay for other people to do things inside of your business. Automation isn't just about getting your time back. It's got a lot to do with getting yourself back too. I'm gonna give you a minute to think about that because as women specifically women in creative industries, we need permission to ask for a piece of ourselves back. Sad but true. There is a hidden grief of letting go. Automating a process can feel like we've let go of quality. It can feel like we're not providing enough value. If we're not feeling the stress of, oh my gosh, this takes so long. It's so hard. There's so much. Then you're like, oh, maybe I didn't. Provide enough value. When things get easy, we often get apologetic about that and we just shouldn't be. We're smarter. We work harder. We don't need to be sorry for that. We are charging for the transformation for the, I've spoken about this so many times. We're charging for the investment in personal development, the years of training to become a professional designer. We are charging for the way our eye curates items and what we know and the outcomes that we provide. Not how much time it takes to get there, but we still feel that emotional connection to letting go and automating things that we feel like we should be doing in order to. Justify our value, which is gross. I hate justification of anything. If you are providing the service and you are providing the result, that is it the whole conversation. There can also be a little bit of a sense of if I'm not doing it, does it even matter? What is even going on with this task in my business? If I'm not across it, I need to be across everything and we just don't there's also a sense that we've built our whole identity around being the one who holds it all together, and automation threatens that until it doesn't, until it liberates it. Naturally as CEOs, we feel like, okay, I am the Swiss Army knife of my business. I do all of the things I have since the start. And when we all started our business things were different. Things were harder depending on how long you've had your business. I designers who are 15, 20 years in the industry, and I can tell you the stories they tell me about their. Origin year are very different to even my origin year, which I still feel is so much harder than the origin years. I am crafting and creating and supporting with emerging designers inside of the framework where they get 15 AI assistants to do it all for them. They are taught automation from the beginning, and they're still busy every single day. I can promise you they don't sit around twiddling their thumbs because they have AI assistance, they have deep support, but they are still part of the process. So here's where I think the resistance really comes from. You are not lazy. We know that you are not bad at systems, you are not bad at technology. You are attached to doing things the hard way because it feels safer and it's more validating and we feel more involved. Busy work is busy work for a reason. Your calendar can lie to you so much. You've got this. Time blocked calendar. You've got all this stuff, so you're like, wow, I run a successful studio because I'm slammed and I feel successful because my calendar is full. But this show is called Designing Success because the way success looks to me is making an educated choice of, okay, how often do I wanna work? And you can just commit to that. You can just make that decision right now to say, I work four hours a day. And if that's all you have, you'd make it happen. I often talk about the difference, especially when I was hiring staff, between hiring a mother and hiring someone who hasn't had children yet. And I know that mom can get the week's worth of work done in her two days a week. Because she has to. She has no choice. And if she has multiple children, she has multiple skills. She has learned to just do it all, all at once. It's just, it's a phenomenal thing. Obviously we don't hire based on your status of wanting or having children or not, but I, in my experience, have seen that mothers are capable of doing things in a short period of time.'cause it's the only time that they have away from that family unit. So they're just gonna get it all done. So what I'm trying to say is they just only have that time, so they just have to make that time productive. And so if you were to make a decision right now, today in your business, Hey, I work four hours a day, four days a week, and that is it, we are going to then have to time block and prioritize and look at our productivity and audit our productivity and make sure in those four hours I am showing up at such a deep. Working level that it makes sense that I get it done. There's also a part of us that fears becoming irrelevant in our own business. So the more that we outsource, the more that we automate, the more we can strip back and feel quite raw okay, then what's left for me to do? Am I needed here? And you'll always be needed in your own business. I don't care how large your firm gets, you are definitely the core cog that makes the whole thing possible. But there is a fear of becoming irrelevant when we hand off tasks. The other myth that comes in when it comes to resistance from automation is the myth of, if I stop doing this, everything will fall apart. I'm calling BS on that completely. You are only going to stop doing something because you have managed to. Implement an automation where the task is still being done, but you are not having to show up and do it repeatedly for each client. And that is the whole point of actually assessing this identity work that we need to do and getting through this, breaking through that barrier so that when we're on the other side we can embrace leadership, which often does have discomfort at the beginning, but then we're able to go, okay, now I understand where that discomfort's coming from. I can explore some automations and just start with baby steps and put a few into place, and then get myself to a place where I'm getting more and more comfortable. So more and more things can be handed over. Here's the major difference between control and leadership. Control feels completely safe. It's our comfort zone. They call it the comfort zone for a reason. But it keeps you small. Could you stay in that same repeating, doing all the tasks, being the bottleneck is for want of a better word, and being like, yep, no, that's fine, because I need to be part of this. It needs to run. I need to be across everything and I need to be implementing everything. Leadership means understanding that you're building something bigger than you. And automation is the bridge between the two. So we wanna shift ourselves from being the worker bee to the queen bee. I say that all the time because I work with and I coach worker bees. Worker bees come to me to become queen bees. They will come and say, look, I just feel so overwhelmed all of the time. I know there's better systems. I know there's processes. I know there's automations. I know that AI can help me. I'm so busy being the worker bee in this hive. I have no idea. I don't even know if it's possible for a worker bee to turn into a queen bee. Aren't they just nominated the queen and then they're the queen? And so I know I've, taken the analogy and really run with it, but that's how I see it. Every single two week block of private coaching that I do, a worker bee arrives and a queen bee exits. And it's all about this mindset shift and all about working on this stuff and being brave and letting go of past stories and actually saying, you know what, no, I've decided that I'm only doing a four hour workday, and I'm looking into ways that I can achieve that by letting go of the stuff that keeps me small. All right. How do we start automating? Without losing our minds and without just suddenly going, oh, I do. I work two hours a week and I've off boarded everything. Like you can't rip the bandaid that hard. We do need to take baby steps. So the first step is going to be to identify the energy leaks, the things that you are doing that something or somebody else probably could be doing. Okay, look at your onboarding process. Is there a system for that and is it worth the amount? I also speak to a lot of worker bees are like, ah, it's just that my subscriptions, there's a lot of subscriptions, so I don't really wanna spend the extra$20 a month to explore an automated workflow system. Okay, that's fine, but by not exploring that, how much is that costing you because. At your hourly rate and the amount of things that you are doing that could be automated, it is going to cost you a lot more than$40 a month. For the math and math, I'm not buying it. And then I want you to get around the idea that AI exists to amplify your voice, not replace it. This is where my custom GPT shine because I have built an army of people. I'm just gonna call them people for the sake of this. I've talked about them a lot. They all have names, they have personalities. I work with them inside of one Chat, GPT thread, like a conversation, and I can call in anybody to do any task by tagging them at Clancy. Write an email about this or at Marius, check this one for keywords. Make it search engine optimized. At Otis. Turn this into an Instagram carousel, and then at Marius, take this Instagram carousel and make it a Pinterest caption. So repurposing all in the same conversation. I'm not going to try to teach you how to do that here in this podcast that is actually about automations, but it is so possible. It is so easy. And I'm gonna pop a little link in the show notes, which is about, I think it's about an eight minute video where you can watch me work with my virtual boardroom, watch how I do it on a day-to-day basis, and the penny will drop for you to like. Ah, okay. I get it. So we have a morning briefing, me and my army of invisible people that I have created. I know I sound like my cheese has slipped right off my cracker here inside the studio, but it works like I sit down, I'm like, this is what I need to do. Posey is my productivity audit assistant Posey are these the most important things in my day? Should I be. Focusing on something different. She knows my whole calendar for the rest of the week and she might say, Hey, yeah, actually I think you should do this because you are very heavy with meetings in the second half of the week. You've got a lot of podcast interviews scheduled or et cetera. So we work through what's best and then I brief it out to each of my assistants. So I will say, okay, cool. Thank you, Posey. We know what we're doing and everything. Is going to be the most productive way to work four hours a day, four days a week? And then I put the rest of my worker bees to work. I will then start telling them what they need to do. I have in the next 45 minutes, I need to achieve X Marius. You do this Henley, you do this Clancy, you do this cozy, you do this. And I just schedule it all and tell them all what I expect. And chat tip PT says, pulling the results all together in that one conversation while I'm off. Possibly recording this podcast. I've got, quick 30 Minute podcast while they're doing 30 minutes worth of work for me in three seconds. It genius and it take, it took a lot of trust. I'm putting my trust in a computer and this is why I am still the CEO of my business because nothing goes live without sign off. They might be doing the worker bee stuff, but the queen has the ultimate say and the queen will say very clearly and quickly give feedback to the worker bees if they are producing honey. That is not sweet enough. Another example of one of the GPT that I often use is Eden, who is all about processes, standard operating procedures and workflows. And sometimes I will just randomly in the afternoon, say, at Eden. Can you have a look at the conversations that we've had today and what are the operational leaks? What are the places that I can tighten up? How do I become a better CEO? How do I create processes that are easier and easier? So every single day I'm just looking to be 1% better. I think it's Steven Bartlett, diary of the CEO his book maybe that I read a long time ago talking about that 1% better. But it, I still use that in AI terms all of the time.'cause I'm always saying at the end of every conversation. What opportunities have I missed? How could I improve this? Is this the end of the line? Effectively? Is this the best you've got? Is this the best we can do? And if so, let's go. I'll go and take it to sign off. I'm gonna finish up with the idea that automation is actually a form of self-respect. We are not automating all this stuff to just bring on more clients and increase the hustle, and we're not automating all of these processes to necessarily work less. We're automating so we can live more. So yes, working less is a result of automations, but. The freedom and flexibility we use, we throw these words around all the time. But in the nine months since creating my virtual boardroom and all of my staff members, I do not work past two 30 because at two 30 I close the laptop and I walk my dog down to the school to pick up my kids or to go and have a coffee or to go and do something for me.'cause I've worked since 9:00 AM. And that's it for me, Monday, Tuesday. Thursday and Friday are my work days, nine 30 till two 30. Effectively, occasionally when there are big events or I'm running extracurricular things that I wanna create for you guys or I wanna do, I'll do that work late at night when my kids are asleep and I feel like it, this is really aligned with my values. It's led by my desire to work, not my need to work. So it's because I love what I do. I will be exploring AI tools and doing things, and I'll find something and I'll think, oh, I'm just gonna quickly make a carousel so I can share this with all of the designers tomorrow morning, for example. That's not because somebody pressured me to create content, it was because they had joy and desire to do it. The second form of self-respect that becomes evident is when your business runs without your constant input and you needing to be there and show up and do all the things. Then you get to show up where it matters most. You get to show up creatively. You get to show up within your family. You get to show up with a regulated nervous system. You get to show up and have capacity to strategize in your business. If that's the. You have capacity to actually look at strategy and look at the next step. Plan out the quarters. The amount of times people say to me, oh, thank you so much for rufuss. The free GPT, that's a 12 week planner. They planned in Q1. They have not planned Q2, we are in Q2. We are currently at time of recording, we are 16 days into Q2. It is April the 16th, but I know over 80% of you have not planned out Q2. But if you had space because other things had been automated, you could feel really in control of that. You could play with Rufuss, the free GPT, I'll put him in the show notes as well, and you can build out the next 12 weeks and learn how to do all of this. You could build out the next 12 weeks and achieve those goals by knowing what those goals are and hitting those daily tasks until you achieve them. Letting go isn't a loss. It shouldn't envelop you with grief. It's a declaration. It's saying I trust myself to build a business that does not rely on me being exhausted To succeed, I trust myself to design my own success. That's leadership. That is that CEO flip where you go, okay, nope. I trust the big picture. I know AI is gonna be part of this business from 2022 onwards, and it's time for me to step up, embrace it, learn it. Now, it's gonna be a bit messy at the start, but by the time I'm looking around and everyone else is legitimately working two hours a day, but staying on top of everything and just working on the things they love. I'm still going to be working a 12 hour day. If that closing line spoke to you, please, I have put a link in the show notes to meet every single one of my boardroom members. They are 99 US dollars plus GST each. You pay for them once they live in your chat, DBT, and they support you all day, every day. You can use them for all of the tasks. They can be part of your virtual boardroom, and they're just sitting there waiting for you to meet, learn, and live. Don't just take my word for it though. I am going to share a little collection of voice memos here of some of the reactions of some of my students and coaching clients when they first met my AI assistants, Oh my goodness. I have used your Instagram prompting today to, um, create an emergency mood board and shopping lists, et cetera. Oh, my effing God, I am just laughing my head off and just like cannot believe. What this chatty has been creating for me and time saving. Oh, oh my God. Life changing. Thank you so much for that hot tip of exactly the right prompts and words to put in, because oh my God, genius, Rhiannon genius. Thank you so much, It is insane. I cannot believe like how sophisticated it is. It blew my mind like it was a. I like he, it put up that I launched my business in August, 2023. So I just said it was August, 2024 and it comes straight back with the whole like, oh, so sorry about that. No worries. I'll fix that up now to, so that it says 2024, not 2023. Like I was like, it just knew. Oh my God. I'm mind blowing and the way that,'cause I just did a voice, um, recording straight into text and the way that it just pulled out. All the very best parts and said it so much better than I did and put it into this. Oh, I'm rambling'cause I'm just mind blown. It's crazy. Like he picked out my challenges and like my strengths. You know that part in your bread command And I'm going, how did you identify that? How did you know that? I didn't even say anything. It's like he was in my brain. No, it's fantastic. Good. Honestly, good on you. Amazing. oh my God, I am dying. This is incredible. Like you should see the response I just got. I'm dead. Like there's literally not one word that I have to change. Nothing. It's incredible. Okay. I'm gonna keep trying. I'm so excited right now. I just feel like in two minutes I just got my whole life back. I'm loving. I'm loving your bots. It makes my life so much easier. Um, so thank you. Thank you so much. I was wondering, like, once the framework ends, do we get to keep the bots? Bloody hell. I really hope so. Okay, I can definitely confirm that inside of the framework, when you are gifted 15 AI assistance, you get to keep them forever. And if you head to my website or the link in the show notes you will get the help every day, all day. It's not a subscription model, it's 99 US dollars plus GST, I think it's about 108 US dollars, and you're good to go forever. Just pop it on your tax deduction next year and get working. Stick around. Meet me back in next week. I have such a special interview with a US designer named Ariel. I have her book here in my studio. I followed her work for a really long time. She and I had such an incredible chat. I can't tell you, I cannot wait to edit it, to relive it, and to listen again when it goes live next Thursday. But until then, I hope you have a beautiful week. Bye for now. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you've found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. Just like you for your daily dose of design business tips, and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at Oleander and Finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www.oleanderandfinch.com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.