Nicole: Let me say something that might surprise you. Freedom doesn't come from flexibility. Freedom comes from structure. If you want real freedom in your practice, time freedom, mental freedom, nervous system freedom, you don't get it by being more spontaneous, more available, or more go with the flow. You get it by building boring, repeatable systems that work without you. And today I want to walk you through exactly how to do that step by step in a way that actually works for clinician CEOs.
Nicole: Welcome back to Lead Better, the podcast for clinician CEOs and health-based business owners who want to scale without sacrificing their lives. I'm your host, Nicole Harlow, and today's episode is about freedom. Not the aspirational someday kind, not just the word that you put in your journal or you pick for this year, but the kind you can actually feel. It feels like taking time off without anxiety. It feels like stepping away without every single thing breaking, or even one thing breaking. It's about knowing your business can grow without constantly being on.
Nicole: This episode is inspired by something I'm reading right now. It's the book Clockwork. I'll link it in the show notes. And also by what I see every single day working with practices inside of Lead Better. And I'll admit that this is something that I'm working on in my business at the same time. So we can kind of work on it together.
Nicole: I know that most clinicians want freedom. I have heard it in every single sales call that I have ever done for, oh, at least a decade, working with clinicians. Every single one has wanted freedom in some ways. Some want freedom to be able to take time off from the business and do things that they just really love. Like that's completely away. Some want freedom to work on the business. Like you love being an entrepreneur, you love being a business owner. Some want freedom to be more in the clinical side of things. Hey, I want freedom from the business so I can actually just really enjoy the work that I do with patients. And some want freedom to be a thought leader. They want the freedom to create and write books and speak on stage and do that TED talk. And you might be a combination of all four, but I see those as the four main freedom-loving archetypes, freedom-wanting archetypes that we work with at Lead Better and that I've worked with personally for the last decade.
Nicole: But the thing that I notice about almost every single person that I've worked with, even those who are running busy clinics who feel like on paper, it seems like everything's working. Very few are actually building it on purpose. And I know this also for myself that for a really long time, I haven't been building this on purpose. I write down freedom on my journal and it's there in my notebook, and it's there in my New Year's resolutions, and it's there in my meditations that I want freedom. For me, it's such a North Star. But I spent a really long time not actually baking that into my business kind of at all. And resenting the business for that. It's like the business doesn't give me freedom. Actually, I feel like more chained to it. I feel more like I can't step away. And as I grew, I felt that feeling even more. And you might just be right in my shoes too. So even though we're in a different industry, the principles are the same.
Nicole: And here's the thing: I feel like we've been sold a lie about freedom. And here's the lie. The lie is once I'm successful, I'll finally have freedom. It's backwards. I didn't realize this myself either. If you don't build for freedom first, success will actually make you feel more trapped because more patients, more decisions, more revenue equals more responsibility, more visibility means more dependency on you. So this is why so many successful clinicians feel exhausted, successful in air quotes. It all looks good on paper, but they didn't build a business, they built a very demanding job, a job that you can't even step away from.
Nicole: So obviously you can see that this is flawed and you're probably nodding your head along because I'm gonna guess that no matter what stage you're at in business, this probably sounds a lot like you. This is a pattern that you see whether you're just starting out or whether you have a big team, lots of patients, and lots of money. Let's take a little walk over to the side here to talk about this from a science perspective. So the human brain has a finite decision-making capacity per day. That means every choice, whether it's big or small, pulls from the same mental energy pool. So when every scheduling exception comes to you, every lead question comes to you, every team issue comes to you, every patient issue comes to you, you're burning all that decision energy on things that should already be decided. So what systems do is pre-make decisions. And that means fewer decisions equals more mental freedom.
Nicole: The other thing that we really need to understand from a science perspective is that your nervous system does not interpret busy as success. It actually interprets busy as a threat. It interprets unpredictability as a threat. So when things like outcomes depend on you, when there's constant fires, or even if you're just, you and your team are in reactionary mode most days, all day, nothing feels contained, your body actually stays in a low-grade fight or flight. What structure does is it creates predictability and predictability creates safety. And it's this safety, not just the wanting of freedom, that allows you to actually step away.
Nicole: Right now, here's the framework that I want you to adopt. Boring systems create exciting lives. I'm gonna say that again because I really want this to sink in. Boring systems create exciting lives. I know no one dreams about SOPs and building systems. That's why we do the systems part because nobody really wants to do it. But SOPs and systems are what allows you to leave early, take real vacations, stop checking your Slack at night, think creatively again, step away and have some white space to actually think what do you really want to be doing with the business? How do you want to be growing? How do you want to be serving?
Nicole: Freedom is not spontaneity, and I think this is what a lot of people get wrong. Freedom is not spontaneity. Freedom is actually baked in so that you can be spontaneous. Freedom is knowing the machine works without you. This is actually gonna be our like north star is that the machine, meaning your business, your practice can work without you. This is a process. This doesn't happen overnight. And the freedom to walk away from your business and take time off isn't a switch that you flip. It's actually something that you practice progressively.
Nicole: So here's how to translate that for a clinician CEO like yourself. So step one is we're gonna start building for what we'll call a 24-hour absence. I want you to ask yourself, could I disappear for one full business day without chaos in my business? If not, you may feel like you need more staff. You don't need more staff. You actually need one, clearer roles, two, decision-making rules, and three, a lead handling system. This is where most practices break. So they're breaking even in the 24-hour absence because no one really knows what they should be doing. There's not clear SOP, you don't have a system for handling leads, you don't have a system for handling who makes decisions and how they're empowered to make those decisions. As a side note, the lead handling system is exactly what we do here at Lead Better HQ. So if you're interested in putting a really awesome patient flow in place that has these automated systems, including using some really cool AI tools, you'll find a link down below to hop on a call with my team.
Nicole: Step number two is we want you to graduate to a three to five day absence. So you don't just take a month off or a summer in Europe without planning for it. So the next question in a three to five day absence is could I take a long weekend without being pulled back in? So this requires you to number one, have delegated decisions, not just tasks. Two, a clear patient journey ownership, and three, automated follow-up. If you can't take three days off, scaling will definitely feel unsafe.
Nicole: Step three is over time we're gonna practice taking a full week away. Now we're talking real freedom, and I mean like a real week away, where you are just completely off the grid, not needing to jump into work, not needing to take calls, not needing to work with patients, not needing to chat with your team every day. At this stage, someone else owns the intake, someone else owns the sales or the qualification process. Your calendar is not the bottleneck. The business might not grow while you're gone yet, but it shouldn't regress. That's the thing. Like we shouldn't step back into a worse business, but we might not step into a better business at this point.
Nicole: And then step four is the one-month test. So this is the real goal. If you can take a month away from your business, you could take longer away from your business. Then you get to decide how do I want to be in my business? How often do I want to be in my business? Do I want to take more time off and be more of a passive owner? So this is the end game. So this is not telling you that you can't be a part of the business. You could be in there every single day if you want to, but you have the freedom to know that you can step away. And not only are things not falling apart, but they're actually better than when you left them. This looks like a business that survives without you, stabilizes without you, and eventually improves without you. And it doesn't happen by accident.
Nicole: And it can be hard for us to really like step into those shoes because we want, on some level, we want the business to need us, right? And so the identity shift around what happens when the business doesn't need us anymore is a big one and something that I'll cover in more detail. But today I want to make sure we keep it practical. So the one-month test and the end game, it happens because you built systems intentionally. You removed yourself as a constraint and you led like a CEO, not a hero. And this is a big thing. We want to be heroes. That's what I'm saying, talking about the identity crisis. It's like we run in there like the hero, like only I can fix it, only I can help them. A CEO bakes in the system so that they're able to step away.
Nicole: And the dirty little secret is that most clinicians never get here. Most clinicians don't fail because they're lazy. They fail because they confuse being needed with being valuable. They delegate tasks, but they keep all the decisions and they never stop to design for freedom. It was never really baked in to begin with. And here's the hard truth. If your business can't function without you, it cannot give you freedom. It will never be able to give you freedom. So you can cross it off of your vision board for the year because if it's not designed to function without you, you will never have true freedom in your business.
Nicole: And this is where I want to be really clear because the clients that we work with here at Lead Better, they understand something fundamental. And I want you to understand this as well. Freedom is a systems problem. See, you're a great fit for working with us if you're not looking for more hacks, more tools, more effort. You want predictable patient flow, you want decision containment and understanding how the decisions get made. You want your leadership leverage, you want your time back. You're ready to stop doing and start designing. That is your job as the CEO is designing. And an important distinction to make is that at Lead Better, we don't just set up the tech. This isn't just we set up the automations and then we leave it to you. This is a true growth partnership. We identify where freedom is leaking. We install boring systems that hold the business, things that just run in the background and you don't even have to think about them. We help remove you as the bottleneck and we help you practice stepping away safely. This is how freedom becomes real. Not someday, not after you burn out, but now.
Nicole: Something I want you to do after you listen to this podcast is I want you to think 18 months in the future. And I want you to put on the calendar a month away from your business. 18 months is plenty of time to build these systems in your business without feeling rushed or without feeling like your nervous system goes into like pure anxiety mode. So I want you to put that in your calendar, let's say anywhere from 14 to 18 months, because you made me, I'm recording this in February, so it's a perfect time to think about next summer. And this is actually something I'm doing myself in the business too. So it's cool to have some accountability.
Nicole: And if freedom is something you want in your practice, not theoretically, but practically, here's your next step. First, you can start off with our predictable patient flow assessment. It'll show you where your business depends on you, where systems are missing, and what to fix first to create real freedom. It's free, it takes about two minutes, it's multiple choice, but it's really going to give you a lot of great information about what's not working in your business and what is working in your business and where to start first. From there, you can chat with one of our business growth strategists and map out what scaling and stepping away actually looks like for your practice. You'll find those links both in the show notes. Because freedom isn't stepping away and hoping nothing breaks. Freedom is knowing your business can run and grow without you. I'll see you in the next episode of Lead Better.