Big milestones force you to look in the mirror. They make you take stock of the challenges you’ve overcome, the things you’d do differently, and the ambitious goals still waiting to be reached.
This week, my daughter turns one. And looking back on this year has brought me face-to-face with a practice that is severely underrated: deliberate reflection.
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IN THIS EDITION 👇🏼
- Article: Balancing Business and Fatherhood
- Podcast: Workplace Conflict: A Gift That Unlocks Cultural Innovation
- Lesson: Digital Body Language: The Weight of a Click (LinkedIn)
- Subscribers: Email Challenge: Your Expertise is Invisible If you Never Share It
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Balancing Business and Fatherhood
At the start of this year, I was quietly terrified. I vividly remember sitting there thinking, How the hell am I going to get through this? I was a first-time dad, the business was limping along, and self-doubt was creeping in fast. Was I crazy to keep going on like this?
Call it stubbornness or pure survival mode, but I kept going. And to make it work, I was forced to become ruthlessly intentional with my time.
Cutting Distractions to Reclaim Time
Becoming a father triggered a radical shift in my daily habits. The biggest change? I haven’t watched television in nearly a year (save for the occasional rugby match). Removing that single distraction revealed hours of time hidden in plain sight. Combining that newfound focus with principles adapted from Cal Newport’s Deep Work, I began ruthless time-blocking, setting hard boundaries around my calendar to secure four hours of hyper-focused, uninterrupted work each day.
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Why Reflection is an Underrated
Freeing up that mental space opened the door for reflection. And reflection changed everything.
My best thinking happens in quiet solitude—at the gym, on long walks, or in the middle of the night when I'm desperately trying to sleep.
By stepping back and removing digital distractions, I found myself able to detach emotionally from the hard parts of the business and look at operations objectively. I realized my sales processes were leaking energy. So through a cycle of trial, reflection, and adjustment, I built a sales framework that now yields an ~70% win rate on qualified leads.
That is the power of reflection: it moves a business from barely surviving to maturing past levels you previously thought impossible.
Buying Back Time for What Matters
But the real payoff wasn't the bottom line.
Because I reflected on what wasn't working and built a system to fix it, I achieved one of my original founding goals: taking one full day off every single week to spend with my daughter. Business new found success had delivered on the thing that mattered most..
None of this efficiency, growth, or clarity would have happened without the willingness to pause, evaluate, and adapt. You rarely know where a season of change will lead, but when you meet it with open arms and reflect, you get to look back with genuine perspective and pride.
So this week, as we light the candle on her first birthday cake, I won't be reflecting on conversion rates, calendar blocks, or revenue goals. I’ve already put all of that to paper.
Instead, I’m going to sit back and reflect on our moments together in her first year: the first time I held her, her first laugh, her first roll, her first clumsy steps, and the incredible little person she is becoming.
