Redefining Hustle: Why Productivity Starts with Protecting Your Energy feat. Bob Mathers

In this episode of Taking Back Monday, Alyssa sits down with Bob Mathers—Customer Success coach, keynote speaker, and host of The Growth Mixtape—to talk about what happens when life forces you to rethink work. From personal wake-up calls to the everyday burnout creeping into modern careers, they unpack how to set boundaries, protect your energy, and find meaning in what you do (without losing yourself in the process).

Key Takeaways:

• Burnout isn’t just about being busy—it’s about being misaligned. You need to know when you do your best work and protect that energy at all costs.
• Customer Success is breaking under the pressure of vague expectations. It’s time to stop carrying the weight of everyone else’s work and redefine the role.
• Life doesn’t wait for the perfect time to teach you what matters. Sometimes it takes a crisis to realize what truly deserves your time and attention.

Key Moments:

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:26 Personal Stories of Overcoming Challenges
03:36 Work-Life Balance and Boundaries
07:38 Customer Success Insights
17:18 Productivity and Energy Management
23:36 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

It's time to say "goodbye" to the Sunday Scaries.

Connect with Alyssa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssanolte/
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Transcript

Alyssa Nolte: 0:00

Hey everyone. Welcome back to taking Back Monday. I am so excited that you decided to say goodbye to the Sunday scaries and hello to a new future of work, and I'm even more excited to introduce you to my new friend, Bob. Bob, welcome to the show.

Bob Mathers: 0:12

Thanks for having me, Alyssa. This is amazing.

Alyssa Nolte: 0:14

So we were kind of chatting before we got started talking about music and guitars and, and you know, working from home. But I wanna know, what is your origin story? How did you get here?

Bob Mathers: 0:27

That's a long story and I'll save you, uh, the gory details, but there was something that happened to me, uh, last year that I would say forged my current outlook on things and it was a very serious illness with my son. Um, who is I? Now 20. And they found a mass on his brain and it wasn't, um, cancerous, but it was, it did require emergency surgery and it could have been very serious and we could have lost him. And I don't know, Alyssa, whether you've had anything like that or your listeners have, but usually. It takes something traumatic or a, like a life event like that, or a diagnosis to force people out of their comfort zones and say like, seriously, is this all there is? And that's the most recent example of something that happened to me that really changed how I approach my work and my clients and my friendships and my relationships with everyone in my life.

Alyssa Nolte: 1:31

I think we all have varying degrees of traumatic events that really change the way we, we think about work. And, and I had a very similar situation. I had a, a newborn, I. And he basically like almost didn't make it. Thank God the doctors saved him and he is a alive and thriving, you know, 9-year-old little boy. But there was a couple of days there where it was very questionable of whether or not he would make it. And as a brand new parent, a first time parent and someone who was trying to build a business, I had this idea in my head that, you know, I would go on maternity leave for like six or so weeks, and then I would be back at it. And actually I think I had told people I'll be back in like two or three weeks and then I have an emergency C-section and a kid who almost doesn't make it and spends multiple weeks in the nicu. And I had a real change in perspective because my business, I loved it. I loved what I was building, but I had to be okay with saying. You know, work isn't my life. It's my family's, my life and what I'm doing right now is my life. So I think we've both had traumatic experiences with our kids. Some people's, um, trauma is a little less dramatic than what we have, but you know, we think about that, that bad boss or that great boss, right? That really changed how we placed our expectations.

Bob Mathers: 2:47

Yeah. And God, I can't imagine how scary that would've been, um, as the mother of a newborn. I think, you know, when things like that happen, I find, at least for me, the people I've talked to, you kinda live in this pocket that's like, oh my God, I. I'm just so grateful for everything in my life. I'm never gonna sweat the small things anymore. I'm really gonna be. Uh, intentional and focused on the things that really matter in my life. And that pocket usually collapses in two or three weeks. No matter how traumatic these events are. Our life has a way of snapping back into its original shape, and you're waking up at two in the morning worried about the same, useless shit that you were worried with before. And you said, I swore I wouldn't let this happen. And it happens every time.

Alyssa Nolte: 3:35

It does. I, I was consulting for a client, a big company, right? And everything was always on fire, but also everything also required like 72 layers of approvals to get through, and I, I had someone who. Um, she, she lived in the UK and she looked at us and she goes, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this work? Because we're not doctors. Nobody here will die if we don't get that email, that internal email through this comms process, like no one's gonna die. Someone's probably not even gonna read it and. This whole idea of hair on fire, everything's collapsing. It's just not sustainable in, in the way that we work, especially, I don't know about you. Like I work from home and I find myself in my office at nine o'clock at night. What am I doing here? And if I, you know, in the olden days, that wouldn't happen because I wouldn't have access to my files and I wouldn't have access to my, my technology. And you know, I'm an early adopter, so I love all things new. But some days I wonder, have we gone too far? With the advancements in our tech and the ability to be connected and always on,

Bob Mathers: 4:41

Yeah. And that's so interesting you say that because yeah, establishing those boundaries, they've just sort of eroded and it takes so much more effort to put those boundaries and to protect them because back in the days. You know, in the old days, um, you actually left work and your email was at work and you didn't have a phone. And, uh, and so whatever it was that was waiting for you the next day, nobody was emailing you.'cause no, everybody knew you weren't there and you had these boundaries. And now we have to create and hold those boundaries ourself, which takes a lot of discipline. And I struggle with it. I struggle with it too. And, uh.

Alyssa Nolte: 5:18

easy to just slip one time. You know, I'll, I'll just go send that Slack message really quick. I'll, I'll, I'll just reply to

Bob Mathers: 5:23

o'clock at night and you're upstairs working. Well, you know, your kids are downstairs or whatever. Man, it just, yeah, it happened so fast.

Alyssa Nolte: 5:31

Yeah, I had a, my, my, my daughter is, she's five now. Um, but I had one of those moments where I had like a, a real wake up call. She was in my office. It's. Right before bedtime, she's got her little toy laptop and she's like clocking away on her keyboard pretending to be working. And I said something to her and she goes, mother, I am in a meeting, so you need to be quiet. And I was like, oh Oh, no. You've heard that

Bob Mathers: 5:57

where did she get

Alyssa Nolte: 5:58

that. I don't know where she got that. Um, and she, she loves to take her laptop in the car and type away on our laptop. And I'm like, okay, this is obviously a learned behavior. And so now I'm having to make the choice of like. Do I go outta my way to make sure she unlearn that behavior? And, and part of me is like, well, I want her to see me as like, I'm a badass. I'm a, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm doing cool things. So part of me is like, Hey, it's kind of cool that she, you know, sees that I'm doing stuff, but she doesn't understand it in that context. She understands it, and mom wants me to stop talking because she's in a call.

Bob Mathers: 6:31

Yes, and the, I think about this all the time, Alyssa, because when I get frustrated with my kids, I. I, I recognize that it's not them I'm frustrated with. They ca they didn't come out with these habits. Um, I created them. They cr you know, they either got them from my genes or they learned them from me. And so my frustration isn't with them, it's with me saying, God, shouldn't I, should I have done something different? And so I think about that all the time.

Alyssa Nolte: 7:10

No, it's definitely hard and, and something that we struggle with as people who wanna be engaged parents, but also like, let's be honest, I love building my business. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I have so much fun when I'm at work. I love Mondays 'cause I love like what I'm doing. Um, so tell me a little bit about. About your business and and what gets you up on a Monday morning?

Bob Mathers: 7:33

Yeah, good segue. Coming back to Mondays, by the way. The, um, so my business, so I'm a customer success coach and a keynote speaker, so, and a, and a podcaster. So I guess those three pillars. Um, and so I've been working in customer success for, I've been working with customers my entire career, but in this thing we now call customer success for probably 10 years and about five years I went out on my own. Um. After a few years of being, you know, leader, a leader in customer success in a few different SaaS companies, and then started working with founders of, you know, startups, some of them are looking for their first customers, their first 10 customers, and some of them are a hundred million dollar companies trying to manage NRR and churn. So it's really the entire spectrum and, and then I'm. I'm pivoting. I'm doing more public speaking because I just feel like as I'm looking down the barrel of the last 10 years of my career, yes, I love customer success. You know, is anybody gonna hire a 60-year-old customer success coach? I'm skeptical, but I think they'd still pay to have me on stage and share what I've learned, not only from customer success, but from all the amazing people I've talked to on my podcast and try to make a bigger impact that way.

Alyssa Nolte: 8:53

Yeah, I love that. I, I have a lot of friends and customer success and, uh, while I don't consider myself someone who necessarily works directly, I have a lot of respect for the types of people that are willing to take on that role. Right. Because we talked about boundaries. Let's talk about customer success boundaries and keeping yourself from being just glorified customer support like. It's a really hard role to be in because you're trying to be the champion for your customer. You're trying to bring value, but you're also trying to drive revenue and and your business goals. That's a really hard position to be in. I can imagine it's very stressful for customer success.

Bob Mathers: 9:27

Man, I just, yeah. And I always say I do have a bit of a skewed perspective of the world.'cause nobody reaches out. To a customer success coach when they're killing it and everything is going great. So I

Alyssa Nolte: 9:38

No, you usually get all of the worst side of it.

Bob Mathers: 9:41

right? So sometimes when I'm on LinkedIn I'm like, God, I mean, I'm sure there are people that read my posts. I know there are.'cause they tell me, it's like, oh man, you're speaking right to me. But I'm sure there are people that are really killing it in customer success. Be like, man, this Bob, he is depressing man. He is really seeing the worst side of this profession. But uh, yeah, those. I do think it's a lot of people are really struggling and um, and you're right, it's a profession where the shit does tend to roll downhill and without really strong leadership and boundaries, you end up being the place where all the work happens that nobody else wants

Alyssa Nolte: 10:21

Right. And which I. That has to be a very difficult position. But I was just reading an article, um, about the, the peak stress, uh, curve has changed. So back when we had our email and we could only get our email at our office and not at home, um, you would tend to have your peak stress around 45 to 50. And people who were reporting on their stress were saying, you know, generally it's that midlife crisis concept. Right. Um, but now we're seeing peak stress is happening around 25 to 30 and so much earlier in life. We're seeing just this intense level of stress, and I see that in a lot of my customer success, manager friends, the people who are in those roles. It's just a role that you burn out on. You're seeing, you know, head counts getting cut and the role is evolving, and now AI is taking your job and, and there's so much stress. And oh, by the way, now you have a quota and now you have all of these things that you never really. Knew you were signing up for. So while you say, yeah, you're probably seeing all of the people who are in the worst cases, my guess is that there's a much larger proportion of people who are struggling than people who are really killing it.

Bob Mathers: 11:31

And there have been a lot of changes in SaaS in particular that have put that organization under a lot of pressure and have really exposed the fact that it never really matured the way that sales and marketing has. And it's always gotten away, frankly, with kind of a nebulous value proposition to the organization and even to customers and. It really came to a head when funding dried up, when, when the company's growth started to slow, when a lot of them really hit, um, challenges with the pandemic and it exposed them having to rationalize every dollar they spent in a way that they didn't really have to do before. So it used to be as a kind of a squiggly dotted line between. Customer success and the value that they provide compared to sales and marketing. Sales can, it's a straight line to new logos and new revenue marketing is SQLs or M qls, whatever you wanna measure. Customer success. Yeah, it's retention and it's net, you know, net retention, revenue, whatever you wanna, um, measure it by. But there's a lot of fingers in that pie

Alyssa Nolte: 12:48

Yeah, I would say a lot of people are sales is on, gets that credit sometimes

Bob Mathers: 12:52

Yeah. Yeah. And there's very little that, that customer success can actually control on its own without the the buy-in from everyone else.

Alyssa Nolte: 13:00

Yeah, I was having a, a conversation with someone else who, who said, um, I don't, I don't wanna be in sales. And I looked at her and I said, Hey, just so you know, everyone is either revenue generating or revenue responding, but no matter what, you're in a revenue role. So like you, you can't just say like, oh, I just wanna drive value, like. That's a revenue activity and it's okay. Like it's okay to, to want to, to not want to be in sales, the dirty part of it, right? But if you are driving value for your customer and just happen to be getting paid in return, that's, that's a win for everybody.

Bob Mathers: 13:33

Yeah, and even you just mentioned kind of that dirty part of sales. I think there's a, there's definitely a perception of what sales is like. I think very few people in CS have seen really thoughtful consultative salespeople, and if they did, they'd be like, oh my God, that's a. That's kind of what I thought customer success was. Um, but we have these stereotypes in our mind from popular culture or from movies and Glengarry Glen Ross and

Alyssa Nolte: 14:01

because they always be selling,

Bob Mathers: 14:02

Yeah, absolutely. And the truth is there's more truth in that than anyone would like to admit. I've worked in organizations like that and it is. It's an impossible situation for customer success to be in. And the truth is, it's a spectrum. It's everybody's on that spectrum, and there people are further to the Glen Gary, Glen Ross, end of the spectrum than most people like to admit. But if you're in customer success and that's all you've seen, sales is the last thing you ever want to do because. Most people go into customer success because they don't want the pressure and the, you know, what they perceive as

Alyssa Nolte: 14:36

The slime.

Bob Mathers: 14:37

They want to be in it for long-term relationships and nurturing it and you know, whether they wanna admit it. They don't wanna be held accountable to a number every quarter because that sales and they don't want any part of that.

Alyssa Nolte: 14:52

Well, and it's, it's a little bit like if my job is squishy. Yeah. Then if I do a good job, then it's because of me. And if, if something goes wrong, then it's not my fault because, you know, there's so many fingers in that pie. It can't possibly be my fault that this customer, you know, churned and putting a hard number on it means that, yeah, you get to celebrate your successes and point to say like, that was me. You also have to be accountable to your failures and say, okay, yeah, that was me too.

Bob Mathers: 15:20

Man, you're so right about that. Like yeah, it is ultimate accountability and say what you want about sales. Having a number and meeting it or not is the definition of accountability. And what that means is if you're a salesperson and you miss your number three quarters in a row, you're probably losing your job. There doesn't, it doesn't matter how good your story is, there's no squishy rationalization that. That's, that's the, that's the game,

Alyssa Nolte: 15:47

Yeah, and I mean, like, that's scary. A lot of people don't wanna have that, you know, that level of, of visibility into their into their work, their work capability. Yeah.

Bob Mathers: 15:56

then CS will kind of sit there and go, oh, I can't believe sales sold to these customers and said these outlandish things. It's like, yeah, you do the exact same thing. They, they're doing exactly what we're paying them to do. And if that the leadership says, go sell to these customers and hit this number at all costs, you do the same thing.

Alyssa Nolte: 16:14

Oh yeah. I mean, I, I can sit here all day and pretend like I am, you know, holier than thou when it comes to the sales people and, and their tactics. But I'm an entrepreneur. Like I, you know, I don't make money. We don't eat, right. So at the end of the day, like if it came down to it, yeah, I'd probably do it too.

Bob Mathers: 16:30

Yeah. Yeah. We've all, as entrepreneurs, we've all had business be like, I know I can do it. I don't really wanna do it. It's probably more work than I need, but I don't know when my next job is coming, so I better take it. And, and then you take it and be like, why did I do this? This is a

Alyssa Nolte: 16:49

that's a daily occurrence. It feels like. Sometimes. I think I should just put a, put a little mirror on the wall that I write on. Says it's not worth it. Don't do it

Bob Mathers: 16:58

It's that fear of, but it, what if this is the last one? What is the, is it the last time my phone ever rings?

Alyssa Nolte: 17:04

Right. That feast or famine is real for sure. So you, you work with customer success. You're, you're a coach. What is the the one thing that someone could do today to start improving their relationship with work when it comes to customer success?

Bob Mathers: 17:19

So here's something, this is definitely some recency bias be, but this is something that I've been obsessed with over the last week or two and I'd love to see if, hear if this resonates with you. So it, it's occurred to me even over the last year or so, that there are times of day when I have my best creative. Emotional energy. Um, and that means that there are times of day when I'm kind of running on empty, I can still be productive, but there's some types of work I just shouldn't be trying to do, and it kind of came to a head when I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. That means I've gotta come up with four or five original ideas every week, which. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it

Alyssa Nolte: 17:58

No, that's a lot of original content for sure.

Bob Mathers: 18:01

And so I was finding myself trying to write LinkedIn posts. I tried to write them a couple days in advance, but some days I would be, it would be four o'clock in the afternoon. I'm done. My meetings like, okay, crap, I don't have a post for tomorrow. Better start writing it. And I would, it would be like an hour and a half. And you know what? It's like you're just rereading and rewriting the same paragraph over and over and over again. And I would say, screw this and I'd. Go to bed and I'd get up in the morning and I'd finish it in five minutes. And so I started go, realizing that I'm a morning person. I get up in the morning, I do my exercise, I journal, I uh, do all the things you're supposed to do. And my best time is from like eight in the morning till noon. And then my energy tends to wane. Throughout the day. And so, and then I thought about, okay, so that's what my daily routine looks like. Then I did, then I went kind of Monday to Friday and said, yeah, I don't have my best energy on Mondays. It's, it's good, but it kind of peaks around Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So I did a heat map of my calendar and I broke every day into three blocks, like nine to 12, 12 to three, three to five, and I kind of red yellow greened that. Then I did the same thing Monday to Friday. You can envision what that looks like. And then I thought about the work that I need to do and I thought about, I started with my paying clients. What are the clients that, man, they've got cha Really, we have really challenging conversations. I really need to bring my A game. Okay. I put that as a. As a number one. There are some clients that, you know, they're more mature. We have good conversations, but I've been working together a long time. They don't require that kind of creative energy. They're a number two. And then there's work that I can kind of do in my sleep, and then I thought about. You know, what kind of energy do I need when I record my podcast? What kind of energy do I need when I'm working on sales leads? And I sort of listed maybe the five or six different kinds of work that I need to do, and I did the same red, yellow, green for that. And then I mapped out my calendar in a way that made sure that I was reserving my most creative energy. For the kinds of work that really required it, which avoided me ever getting to the end of the day and needing to get something done that really needed that creative energy and I just couldn't access it. And it also means that I don't waste creative times of day on stuff that I could kind of do in my sleep. And when I talk to people in customer success specifically, but pretty much everyone, it's. You're never like, it never seem, it never, you never seem to have enough hours in the day. So it's about being the most productive with the hours that you have and being more intentional about where you put certain kinds of work throughout your week. And I think that is gonna make, I don't know, it's gonna, it feels like a 20 to 30% product productivity improvement just by making those adjustments.

Alyssa Nolte: 21:07

So yes to all of that. Um, I have what I call puttering time, and the team is familiar with my puttering time and sometimes I just need to like, walk around the house with no plan of what I'm gonna do and just like let the moments come. I might be walking the dog, I might be changing, like reloading the dishwasher one day. I shampooed the carpet for like an hour and a half, um, while I listen to a podcast. I just needed that time to like let my brain reset. But I like to think about activities in that same way with the added layer of. Energy neutral energy negative. Energy positive. This activity is energy neutral for me. I will come out of here with the same amount of energy that I, that I came into it, right? This activity is energy draining, basically anything to do with accounting. Energy training. It's my, it's, that's what I'm doing. It's the only thing I can do that day.'cause I will set myself with every iota of joy in that process. And then there's energy positive where I get so much out of that activity that I can do pretty much anything after because I've, I've just like filled that energy for me. So for me it's like recording these podcasts. I love these conversations. Um, building anything new. So if there's a problem to solve and I have to create a vision for it and, and the strategy of it. That is energy positive for me, but you're so right. If I try to do something that is energy neutral or energy negative, when I'm not feeling it, I'm just gonna spend an hour and a half wasting my time instead of spending five minutes doing my best work.

Bob Mathers: 22:32

Absolutely. And so. One of the things I'll do, and I, I know that it's, it's never quite as clean as we imagine it, right? But even just being intentional about it, I think helps. So what I'm actually doing is creating separate Calendly links. So if you wanna reach out to me on LinkedIn, I always love talking to people, but that's probably not gonna happen in the morning because I've got paying customers that really need my best energy. So that link will be, you know, somewhere between one and four in the afternoon, and I'll have, but my. There's separate links for different clients, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this happens because if you just have a couple Calendly links and you or you are working for a company where people can book meetings whenever, you know, whenever you're available, it's gonna be virtually impossible to control this time.'cause you're gonna have, because you, you know, you've, you're talking earlier about boundaries. Like these are the boundaries I have to set if I'm going to be able to. Walk away from my computer at the end of the day knowing that I got everything done I could have.

Alyssa Nolte: 23:33

Yeah. And, and to the best quality that it could be.

Bob Mathers: 23:35

Yeah.

Alyssa Nolte: 23:37

So Bob, tell us, I. Who in your mind of, of all the amazing people you've had a chance to meet, whether you know them or, or just, um, their thought leaders that you follow, who is taking back Monday? Who is leading the charge?

Bob Mathers: 23:50

Hmm. I, again, maybe some recency bias. I had a lovely conversation with Christie f Russo. Christie, I'm hoping I'm pronouncing your name properly. I bet she'd be a great guest on this podcast. I'm actually having her on my podcast next week. She's gonna be a blast and, uh. I just think she does a really good job on LinkedIn of being vulnerable, providing thought leadership, sharing personal stories, and most importantly, when I got on the phone with her after kind of being LinkedIn commenting friends for a year, she's exactly who I thought she would be.

Alyssa Nolte: 24:29

That's incredible. I follow Christie too. I love her content. So we will definitely have to reach out to Christie and see if we can get her on the podcast. Um, last, Bob, if someone is really connecting with you, they need help, their hair is on fire, or they just wanna talk about guitars and music and, and, uh, get to know you better, where can they find you online?

Bob Mathers: 24:45

Probably the best place is LinkedIn. Um, and you can also listen to the podcast. It's called the Growth Mix Tape, which is. Um, just my excuse to reach out and talk to interesting people doing jobs I didn't know existed, to see what I can learn from 'em. It's about pretty much everything except customer success. So it's, it's a blast.

Alyssa Nolte: 25:05

I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking back Monday with me.

Bob Mathers: 25:08

This has been amazing, Alyssa. Thank you so much.

Alyssa Nolte: 25:12

Thanks for joining us on taking back Monday where we say goodbye to the Sunday scaries and hello to meaningful and fulfilling work. If you enjoyed today's episode, let's connect on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear your thoughts, and if you found value here, share the podcast with your network. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review. It helps us inspire more leaders to join the movement. Until next time, let's take back Monday.