S2E5. Take Care Of Yourself - The Chaos of Scale

What if the most powerful thing you could say to your team… is just four simple words?

In this episode of The Chaos of Scale, Andy unpacks why “take care of yourself” is anything but a throwaway line. Inside fast-moving, high-pressure environments, it’s easy to slip into constantly pushing through tiredness, illness, and exhaustion—until burnout quietly takes hold.

Drawing from a deeply personal burnout experience, Andy explores how leaders can create cultures where people actually feel safe to slow down when needed—and why that’s not a weakness, but a long-term performance strategy.

This episode breaks down three deceptively simple principles that can transform how your team shows up every day: treating adults like adults, defaulting to trust, and empowering people to make good choices. Scaling a company isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and sustainable performance starts with protecting human capacity.

If you’ve ever felt the pressure to keep going when you know you shouldn’t, or you’re leading a team through the chaos of growth—this one will hit home.

Your one takeaway?

Next time someone says they’re not at their best, resist the urge to interrogate it. Just pause and say: take care of yourself.

Because when people feel safe enough to do that… they come back stronger.

#ChaosOfScale #LeadershipMindset #BurnoutPrevention #PeopleFirst

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Transcript

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Take care of yourself. Four simple words. And it's something that I say to my teams all the time. Someone sends me a message saying they didn't sleep well, they're not feeling great, or they're just not firing on all cylinders that day, and my response is almost always the same. Take care of yourself. And on the surface, that might sound like a throwaway phrase or one of those polite things that we say in passing, something that you quickly type before you jump into the next meeting. But when I say those words, I mean them very deliberately. Because inside a scaling company, inside of the chaos of scale, those four words can carry a lot more weight than we sometimes realize. Inside a scaling environment, everything moves fast. The pressure is constant, the to-do list never really shrinks, and there's always another problem waiting just around the corner. And when you're surrounded by that kind of momentum, it can become incredibly easy to slip into a mindset of constant pushing. Push a little harder, push a little longer, push through the tiredness, push through the illness, push through the exhaustion. And at first, this feels like a productive team player mindset. It feels like you're committed, like you're doing what it takes to win. But if you stay in that mindset for too long, it quietly turns into something else. It turns into burnout. And burnout rarely arrives dramatically. It creeps in slowly, almost invisibly, while everyone is busy trying to keep up with the pace of growth. Which is exactly why these four words matter so much. Take care of yourself. Hello and welcome to The Chaos of Scale, the podcast dedicated to helping scaling businesses navigate the human side of growth. I'm your host, Andy Golding. Today we're talking about something deceptively simple but incredibly important if you want your team and yourself to survive the long game of building and scaling a company. Taking care of yourself. As always, I promise to leave you with at least one thing to think differently about in how you work with others and at least one actionable step that can help you show up as a rad or even more rad human at work. And of course, if you find value in today's episode, please like, subscribe, share, and for some extra kudos and gratitude, please consider leaving a review. Life inside a scaling company is intense. There is always something happening: new opportunities, new challenges, shifting priorities, moving deadlines, teams growing, roles evolving, and often goals that are moving so fast they might as well have wheels. It's exciting, it's chaotic, it's energizing, and it's exhausting. And in this kind of environment, it's incredibly easy for everyone, leaders included, to fall into the habit of constant acceleration. There's always one more email to send, one more message to reply to, one more problem to solve. And slowly, often without even noticing it, we can end up creating a work environment where the unspoken expectation is that everyone just keeps pushing. Even when they're tired, even when they're sick, even when they're running on empty. And this rarely comes from a bad place. Most of the time it actually comes from people caring deeply about what they're building. They want to contribute, they want to help the team, they want to help keep momentum moving forward. But the chaos of scale can also be a slippery slope. If people feel like they don't have permission to slow down, if it's not safe to slow down, if they start to feel like if they slow down things break, then eventually the whole system will start to crack. I learned this lesson the hard way when I was 27. I burnt myself out completely. And when I say I burnt out, I don't mean I was tired for a week or I needed a long weekend. I mean the kind of burnout where your brain literally just stops cooperating. For weeks I was basically staring at the walls of my apartment, unable to do anything. No focus, no creativity, no ability to engage with work in any meaningful way. It took a long time before I began to feel like myself again. My burnout didn't arrive with flashing warning lights. It was simply the result of pushing too hard for too long without ever really stepping back and switching off and giving myself permission to rest. The upside of the experience, though, is that I was paying enough attention to learn from it. And one of the lessons that stayed with me is the importance of leaning on kindness with yourself. If you've listened to season one, there's an episode on leaning on kindness, which I believe is one of the core guiding guidelines or key guidelines of the Chaos of Scale, and leaning on kindness with yourself is tantamount. Because some days you will wake up with 100% energy and focus, and those days are fantastic. You lead in, you get great work done, and you feel alive. But other days you might wake up and only have 25% in the tank. And on those days, if you give that 25%, you've actually given 100% of what you had available, and that still counts because consistency over the long term is what matters. Consistency over the long term stacks wins and stacks progress. That experience of being completely incapable of anything other than staring at walls has really shaped how I lead my teams and myself today. And let's look at what this looks like in practice. Over the years, I've realized that creating a culture where people can actually take care of themselves doesn't happen through policies or well-being initiatives. It happens through small signals that leaders send every single day. For me, there are three ideas that guide how I try to create this space. The first is very simple. Treat adults like adults. If someone tells me that they're not well or they're exhausted, or they just need to take it a bit slower that day, my job is not to interrogate them or manage their recovery. My job is simply to make it okay. My job is simply to say, take care of yourself because they're an adult. They understand their own capacity far better than I ever could. And the more you treat people like responsible adults, the more likely they are to behave like responsible adults. And I know you're thinking, but what about the people who will game the system and take advantage? We deal with those separately. We have honest conversations with them, we treat them like adults and say, hey, this is not gonna fly, we gotta make a change here. But I digress. The second idea is to default to trust. I hired these people, I chose them because I believed that they were capable, responsible, and committed. So if someone tells me that they're unwell or that they need to step away, I have to trust that they know what they need. And if I can't trust them, that's actually on me. It's my mistake for hiring them in the first place. No one invited themselves into your business. You hired them, you let them in. So you have to default to trust because a culture built on suspicion is exhausting, but a culture built on trust is sustainable and scalable. And the third idea is something that I say to my team all the time: make good choices. If you're sick, make good choices. If you're exhausted, make good choices. If you're overwhelmed, make good choices. Sometimes the good choice is pushing through and getting it done. Sometimes the good choice is closing your laptop and going for a walk. Sometimes the good choice is simply saying, I don't have it in me today. The important thing is that people feel safe enough to make the choice. I don't know what a good choice for you is. I don't know what you're navigating, I don't know what lens you're looking through the world at. So I can't make a good choice for you. I can offer up advice, but you need to make the good choice for yourself because you are an adult. And why this matters at scale is because scaling a company is the long game. It is a marathon, not a sprint. So if you want people performing at a high level over the long term, you have to protect their capacity, you have to protect their ability to perform. And when people feel trusted enough to take care of themselves, something amazing happens. They recover faster, they show up with more energy, they think more clearly, they stay longer, and most importantly, they keep contributing at a high level over time. This is how you build longevity inside of a chaotic environment. Give people agency over their own well-being. Treat adults like adults, default to trust, make good choices. Your action item from today's episode is incredibly simple and you can start doing it today. The next time someone on your team tells you they're not feeling great, either physically or mentally, resist the urge to manage it. Let adults be adults. Trust them and trust that they know what they need in that moment. Give them the space to make good choices. Take care of yourself. These four words can create more psychological safety than most policies and initiatives ever could. The truth is, in the chaos of scale, the work never ends. There will always be another email, another deadline, another challenge waiting just around the corner. But the people doing the work are not infinite, they're human. So when someone on your team tells you they're not feeling great, when they're sick, exhausted, or just running on empty, don't rush past it. Pause for a moment and say the four words that might make more of a difference than you actually realize. Take care of yourself. Because when people feel safe enough to take care of themselves, they'll come back stronger. And that's what's going to allow teams and companies to keep going even long after the chaos settles. Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Chaos of Scale. If you found value in today's episode, please like, subscribe, share, and leave a review. Or maybe you want to consider sharing this episode with a colleague who you think could benefit from taking care of themselves. Until next time, remember business growth is messy, but the human side doesn't have to be.