Ep 240 Tended, Pt 2: The Energy Audit

You’ve probably heard all the advice: get more sleep, exercise, drink more water, take a vacation, take better care of yourself.

But what if you’re doing some of those things and you’re still exhausted?

In this episode of Design for the Creative Mind, Michelle Lynne takes a deeper look at the difference between being tired from working hard and being depleted by the way your business is operating.

Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you need more rest. It’s that your energy is being spent in places that aren’t serving you.

Michelle walks through the hidden energy drains she sees in interior design business owners—from difficult or misaligned clients to social media comparison, overfunctioning as an owner, and the expectation that you should always be available.

She also talks about an important distinction between recovery and restoration. Recovery stops the drain. Restoration actually puts something back in the tank. And as a business owner, you need both.

Most importantly, Michelle gives you a simple exercise you can use this week: an energy audit. Pay attention to what takes your energy and what gives it back. Then use that information the same way you would use any other business data—to make better decisions about where your time, attention, and energy belong.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The difference between normal tiredness and deeper depletion

• Why misalignment can leave you exhausted even when you’re getting enough rest

• How the wrong clients can drain more than your time—they can drain your confidence and creativity

• The comparison spiral created by social media

• Why overfunctioning as a business owner keeps you stuck in the day-to-day

• The hidden cost of being constantly available to clients and vendors

• How setting communication boundaries can actually strengthen client relationships

• The difference between recovery and restoration

• What Michelle has discovered actually restores her energy

• Why unstructured time and “white space” matter for business owners

• How to conduct your own one-week energy audit

• Why your energy is a business metric worth paying attention to

Your takeaway: You are a business asset. Your energy is one of the most important inputs in your business—and you deserve to know where it’s going.

If this conversation hit close to home and you’re ready to build a business you can actually sustain, visit thedesignbakehouse.com and click the Coaching tab to learn more about working with Michelle.

Design for the Creative Mind is hosted by Michelle Lynne, founder of The Interior Design Business Bakery.

Transcript:

Michelle Lynne (01:02)

Hey y'all. You're listening to Design for the Creative Mind. I'm Michelle Lynn, and this is Tended, a mini-series about the part of business nobody puts in a standard operating procedure. We'll be back to the operations talk, profits, business, all those types of things, I promise. But first

I want to talk about you.

If you caught episode one, you know that I opened this series with a pretty direct premise that you are a business asset, not a support system, not the person who holds everything together while everyone else's needs get met first. You are a core input in your own business. And when you're depleted, your business is depleted. We spent that episode talking about what it costs the firm when the owner is running on fumes, and we talked about the physical side of this: sleep, movement, food.

You know, the basics, and these basics somehow become optional when things get busy. So today I want to go a layer deeper. Because I think a lot of us have heard the, you know, sleep more, take care of yourself message, you know, stay hydrated, get your exercise, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, we nod along, and maybe we even believe that we were doing it, but we're still exhausted. And

The more I started thinking about why this is, I think it's because we're treating the symptom without understanding the actual cause. And what I mean by that is when you're tired in a way that sleep just does not fix, it's not a rest problem. It's an energy problem. And those are two different, two different things. At least this is my theory. Okay. I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on TV. But rest is what happens when you stop.

Energy is what you have when you start again. And what I've learned, sometimes the hard way, is that you can get plenty of rest and still wake up without energy. Because the energy isn't just about how many hours you slept or what your aura ring says.

It's about what you're spending it on, where it's leaking out without you realizing it, and whether anything in your life is actually restoring you and putting it back. So today I want to do an energy audit. We're going to look at the specific places that interior designers lose energy. And I'm not talking about the obvious ones, right? I'm talking about the ones that hide, the ones that look like work. It looks like we're being helpful.

Looks like we're staying informed, but actually what we're doing is we're just slowly draining the battery. And then I want to talk about what I believe restoration actually looks like. Because again, I think that a lot of us have confused stopping with restoring, and those aren't actually the same.

So let's get into it.

Want to start by making a distinction that there's tired from working hard and then there's tired from something being wrong. The first kind is actually pretty good, right? When you finish a large install and you come home and you're physically tired, you just can't talk anymore, but you're you're excited because everything went well. Okay. Your body's processing big output. You sleep, you recover.

You're back the next day. But then there's that other kind of tired that I think a lot of us designers are living in. And it doesn't necessarily just go away on the weekend. Or you take a vacation and you come back, and two days later, it's like you never left, right? You sleep in on Sunday and Monday morning, still feels like you're hitting a wall. You're not sick.

Okay, nothing is technically wrong. You're just operating at a persistent low level that that we start accepting it as normal. So it's not fatigue from output, it's depletion from misalignment. And here's here's what I want to, here's what I mean by that. I think misalignment sounds abstract, but it's actually pretty concrete when we dial into it. Okay. Misalignment.

Is taking on a project that you knew wasn't right for you. Misalignment is staying in a client relationship past the point where it becomes clear that it's just not working. Misalignment is doing things in your business that belong to somebody else's job description because you think it's easier to just handle it yourself.

Misalignment is building a business that looks successful from the outside, but doesn't actually reflect who you are or what you want as a person. So when you're spending energy on things that are out of alignment with where you want to go, your body keeps score. And that's not a metaphor, honey. It shows up as fatigue that doesn't resolve with rest, as a short fuse with the people around you, as creative blocks.

As that low-level dread that some of us have just learned to power through every morning. So I'm not saying all of this to make you feel bad. I'm saying it because I've lived it. And there were stretches where I lived it for longer than I'd like to admit. The shift for me wasn't working less or taking more vacations. The shift is getting honest about where my energy actually goes.

And whether those places deserve it. That's the audit. Let's start by looking at your clients. You ready? Let's talk about the people you're working for, because this is where a significant amount of designer energy goes. And not all of it is proportional to what you're getting in return.

I mean, that's what we got into business for, right? There's that version of a client work that is genuinely energizing. Like you're working with someone who trusts you, who gives you real creative latitude, who communicates clearly, they pay on time, and they're just a decent person to interact with. Those projects don't drain you the same way. They're still work. I mean, we're not laying on the beach in Fiji, right? They're still demanding, but when you wrap up a day on one of those projects.

You don't feel like a hollow shell of yourself. Speaking of which, there's the other kind. The other kind of client. We all know this client. You can probably picture them right now. The one who emails you at 9 o'clock p.m. and expects a reply before 10 o'clock p.m. The one who's approved everything and then changed their mind after the order was placed. You know, she says they trust you.

But questions every single decision that you make.

Or the one who's renegotiating your scope in every single meeting.

Or the one who makes you feel like you need to justify your existence as a professional in every single conversation. And by the way, yes, those examples are all previous clients of mine. And what I want to say about this, what I think is important to name, is that this kind of client doesn't just take your time, they take something harder to replace, they take your confidence.

Your creative energy, your willingness to be bold in the work because you've learned that bold gets questioned. They take your focus because even when you're not in front of them, you're managing the anticipatory stress of what they might say or do next. Can can can you picture that? Like, do you make up responses to things they might not have even said yet?

So I've been on install days, on genuinely beautiful installation days, where the room comes together exactly as we envisioned it. And yet I still couldn't fully enjoy it because I was already bracing for the client's reaction. Y'all, that's like a tax. And it's a tax that you pay whether or not the client ever actually pushes back.

And then there's a more subtle version of this. It's the client who isn't, you know, exactly difficult, but who just isn't a fit. Maybe it's the wrong scale of a project, wrong communication style, wrong expectations for what the process actually looks like. Like they're not bad people.

But their work, this work just doesn't fit where you are as a firm. And these projects, they've got a drain too. It might just be a little bit smaller, a little bit quieter. You're spending more time explaining than designing. You spend energy managing expectations that shouldn't have to be managed, y'all, because this type of project isn't what you do at your best.

So the audit question here is simple, but it's not easy. Which clients right now are costing you more than you're getting back? Not just financially, but energetically. And the follow up is what would it take to not be in that situation next time? It's a business structure question. It's a pricing question. It's a qualification question, an intake process question. I work on a

Exactly that kind of thing with designers and private coaching, because you can't fix a wrong fit client problem in the middle of the project. You have to fix it upstream before you ever get in the same room together.

Okay, the next thing is a little personal. Okay, so I'm gonna spend some real time here. And that is that social media has done something to our industry that I think, and again, in my opinion, that we're all still collectively processing.

Social media has created an environment where everybody's work is visible all of the time. And that's fabulous in some ways, right? But it's also created a low-level current of comparison. And it runs underneath everything. And if you're not careful about it, it becomes a real drain.

I compare myself not as much through my design side, but from my coaching side.

Okay. So let's talk about what the spiral actually looks like, whether it is I I mean, it could be anything. It could be she's prettier than me, or she has more business than me, or her projects are better than me, or that's a great angle from coaching. She's better than I am. So let's be specific about what the spiral, this comparison spiral is what I call it, what it looks like. Because I think sometimes I've just underestimated it.

So imagine, you know, you're sit sitting on the couch, you're on Instagram, you're looking at a beautiful project, and you're inspired. Okay, rock on. That's normal. But somewhere in the scroll.

You're so I don't know, something just shifts. You see a designer who started maybe the roughly the same time you did, and her project has a feature in a shelter magazine. Okay, you see someone posting about their busiest season ever when you just had a crap quarter.

Or you see a designer with what appears to be a flawless team and a flawless process and flawless photography and a flawless life. And you start running this comparison math in your head without even realizing that you're doing it. Does that sound familiar? So here's where the energy goes because you're not just looking at someone else's work anymore. You're you're comparing yourself, you're auditing yourself against it, your portfolio, your pricing, your branding, your team, your trajectory.

All of a sudden it feels like it's up for evaluation relative to the other person's curated highlight reel. Okay, and you didn't decide, you didn't agree to that evaluation. It just happened.

Like I've I've caught myself doing this. You know, 10 o'clock on a Tuesday when I should be sleeping. I don't even like to I don't even like to have my phone in my bedroom. But here I am scrolling, lying in bed with my phone, going deeper and deeper into somebody else's Instagram grid. And then coming out of it feeling worse about my own damn business than I did before I picked up the phone. And nothing's changed. My projects were the same project. My coaching content was the same coaching content. My clients were the same clients.

The only thing that changed was that I let somebody else's visibility become a measuring stick for my own.

So I'm saying this as much to myself because sometimes I need to hear it and I'm saying it to you, and that comparison is not inspiration. Okay. Those two things feel similar, but they're not the same. Inspiration is when you see something and it makes you want to create. Comparison is when you see something and it makes you feel like you're behind. You see how one of those adds energy and the other one bleeds it.

The comparison spiral also costs you in a way that you might not have thought about. It pulls your attention away from your own direction. When you're constantly looking at what other designers are doing, their prices, their pricing, their processes, their portfolio positioning, social strategy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Hell, even the what shoes they're wearing and how their hair looks better than yours, you start making decisions based on what everyone else is doing.

instead of based on where you are actually trying to go.

I'm guilty of that.

What happens though is that that drift compounds over time. You end up building towards somebody else's version of success and then wondering why it doesn't feel like you.

So I'm not telling you to get off of social media. I'm saying put your blinders on and be intentional about how you're using social media. There's a version where you're following the people who genuinely fill you up, where you set limits on when and how long you scroll, where you come back to your own work as the reference point instead of everybody else's. It's a discipline and it takes practice.

But it's worth building that muscle.

And when you fall off the wagon and you start spiraling again, hopefully this time you'll catch it faster and you can get back on the horse.

Okay.

Enough about that.

I want to talk about overfunctioning as an owner. It's when you're consistently doing things in your business that are not yours to do. All right. Answering emails that your team should handle. Maybe you don't have a team, but do you really have to answer that email? Are you just answering it because it's in your inbox?

Jumping in on vendor calls because you're worried about how your colleague or your assistant's gonna represent you. Redoing work that came back not quite right instead of redirecting it to the person who originally did it. Handling the logistics of a project because it's faster to just do it than to explain it. Like it looks like you're being helpful. Being a good owner, staying on top of things, being available, not burdening your team.

In the short term, it is. Okay, things get handled, the project moves forward, the client's happy, but what you've done is you've quietly opted yourself out of delegation. And over time that becomes a very expensive habit.

Between you and me. I'm trying to teach that to my husband because he keeps doing it for my daughter. He does all the things for her. She's eight years old. You know, being a butler is completely different than being a dad. It's the same thing in your business. Okay. So the thing about this overfunctioning in your business, it's almost always rooted in something real. Either you fully don't trust your team yet, which is which is legit.

Okay, but that's a training and process issue. Or you haven't clearly defined roles, like what belongs to who. Okay, it's a systems issue. Or you've built a business that depends on you being in every decision, which is a structure issue. Any of those things can be fixed, but you have to be willing to see it as a problem first. And that's a really hard shift when it looks like being responsible.

But what I've learned is that overfunctioning, it has a ceiling. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many decisions that you can make before your judgment gets tired. Only so much task switching that your brain can handle before the quality of your thinking starts to drop. And when you're filling your time with work that belongs to other people, you're not available for the work that only you can do. You know, the visioning work.

The client relationship work, the business development work, the creative decisions that actually require your specific expertise.

So I remember a period at ML Interiors Group where I was so deep in the day to day that I hadn't done anything truly strategic in months.

I was executing constantly and I never actually was working on the business. I was just mired deep in the business. And I didn't notice how depleting that was until I finally cleared enough space to think. And I realized how long it had been since I'd felt like myself in the work. So delegation is not abandonment. Okay. And that's probably what my husband feels, but that's also what overfunctioning owners oftentimes feel.

Even if, even if you don't want to say it out loud, that letting go of a task feels like losing control. And losing control feels like risk. But there's a different kind of risk, honey. The real risk of becoming so essential to every small thing that your business cannot grow past the limit of your personal bandwidth.

Is that ceiling closer than you think?

So the audit question here is what are you doing this week that someone else could do? Not perfectly, but well enough. I mean, what would it take to let them do it?

I wish we had some ominous music. Some ominous music to just insert here. Dun dun dun. All right. So let's talk about. here's here's the one that I think it takes the most out of people. It's it's something that I've seen in my team. It's something that I experienced years ago. And thankfully, I'm not the same with my clients.

And I try not to be the same with my team. But it's this expectation that as a business owner, you're basically always reachable, that your phone is always on. Your email's always checking itself. A client can text you at 7 a.m. and you'll see it immediately. A vendor can call during dinner and you'll consider picking up, right? You've probably told yourself that this is just the nature of the business, that service requires availability.

And that responsiveness is part of the value that you provide.

Y'all, I believe that it was a long time ago and it was for a long time. Okay, but what I've come to understand is that it's partly true, but it's mostly just a story that we've told ourselves to justify a boundary that we were afraid to draw.

You might want to hit rewind. I'll repeat it.

Mostly being available all the time is mostly a story that we have told ourselves to justify a boundary that we were afraid to draw. So here's what happens when you're always available. Your brain never fully clocks out. Even when you're not actively responding to something, the part of your brain that monitors for incoming demand stays on. You're at dinner with your family, but you're also half listening for your phone.

You're winding down before bed, but you're also aware that you haven't responded to that email yet. Okay. It's the weekend, but you're not really on the weekend because the work is always one notification away.

I will say that that persistent background awareness is exhausting. It's not dramatic exhaustion. It's a slow, steady trickle.

And it's so slow and such a steady drain that you get used to it and you stop noticing it. You just feel like you're always a little tired, always a little behind, always a little tense, and you can't quite put your finger on why.

So I started doing something a few years ago that felt uncomfortable at first, and now it's a complete non-negotiable. And my team does it now as well. We have communication hours. It's not exactly office hours, but it's a clear expectation communicated up front in my sales process with our clients about when they can expect to hear from us and when they won't. Email responses 24 to 48 hours, Monday through Friday.

Text for true emergencies, or if somebody's running late, that's totally fine. Okay. And we talk about all of this in our onboarding conversations. And the first time I held that boundary with a client who pushed against it, I was nervous. I thought I was going to lose the relationship, lose the lose the contract, the project. Okay, but here's the deal what actually happened is the client respected me more. I wasn't there to push around.

Because I was showing them how I expected to be treated, and people take their cues from that. The clients who pushed hardest against the boundary were unsurprisingly the ones who were already showing other signs of being a pain in the booty client. So your availability is not a gift that you owe people. It is a resource. And like any resource, it has limits. Managing those limits.

It's not being unprofessional, it's running a sustainable business.

All right. We touched on this at the top of this episode restore versus recover. And they're not the same things.

Recovery is what happens when you stop doing the thing that was depleting you. You finish the hard project, you take the weekend off, you cancel the plans, and you stay home. Recovery is necessary, but it's passive. You're just not adding to the drain.

Restoration is active. It's doing something that actually puts energy back. And the difference does matter because if you're only recovering and you're never restoring, you're perpetually perpetually operating at whatever level you've managed to stop depleting yourself down to. You're not building back, you're just not digging a bigger hole or making it worse.

What restores energy is different for every person. Okay, so I'm not gonna make a list of things that you should be doing, and I say should with air quotes, because I think that list often becomes just another thing that we feel bad about not doing. Okay, but I'm gonna share what I've noticed for myself because maybe it'll help y'all identify one or two or three different things of your own or more.

So I will say that movement restores me in a way that's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. Not in a punishing sort of exercise, like pounding the pavement, running a marathon, is not restorative to me.

It's not the kind of exercise that I used to think I had to do. You know, the boot camp in the parking lots. But consistent movement. Okay. I have a trainer. It's not one-on-one. It's it's a class, but it's a small class trainer. And it might sound indulgent for a long time. It it can be, right? But now I took a break. I took a break earlier this year. But now I I I'm back to consistent.

Because I think it's one of the most operational decisions that I've made because the mental clarity I get from that hour of movement is not something that I can replicate with coffee. It changes the quality of my thinking for the rest of the day. That's one for me. Time without an agenda. babe, that restores me like nobody's business.

Not time to catch up on tasks, not productive leisure, just actual unstructured time when I'm not accountable to anything or anybody. Okay. That's actually why I took some time off of exercise earlier this year. So I stopped exercising January, February, March, and April because I just could not have one more thing on my calendar. Okay. Now.

Time without an agenda is harder to protect than I thought it would be because the pull to fill this space with something useful is really strong when you're a business owner. You know that there's almost always something that you can do. But I've definitely learned that unstructured time is where my best ideas come from. Think of it as white space in your interior design.

When I have white space on my calendar in my life, it's where I can reconnect with the part of myself that actually loves to work.

Connection restores me, like real connection, not networking, not industry events when I'm working the room, but it's time with people who know me and aren't in a professional relationship with me.

Husband, my friends, family, my sweet daughter, doing absolutely nothing related to business.

And I had mentioned that I don't I don't like my my phone in my bedroom. Y'all, I don't like my phone as soon as I get home. Like any disengagement restores me. Putting my phone down when I get home. A friend of mine makes fun of me that I don't I I have text hours, right? 'Cause I just put it down, leave the room.

And I just cut myself off from the current information and demand that runs through the phone, whether it's scrolling, whether it's checking my email, whether it's reading the news, like just disengaging. And I know none of these are revolutionary. Okay. You've probably heard versions of all of them. But the question isn't whether you know that they help. The question is whether you're actually doing them. And if not, what's in the way?

So I I had mentioned that we're doing this energy audit. So here's something practical because I don't want you to walk away with just a sense that you're tired and you should probably do something about that. An energy audit is simple in concept. For the next week, just pay attention to two things: what takes energy and what gives it back. And I mean notice it specifically, not in a general sense.

Which clients, which tasks, which conversations, which decisions feel draining? Which people around you? Okay, what feels draining and what feels like fuel?

I'd say a lot of women I know have a sense of this, but they've never written it down, never looked at it clearly because we just roll with it, right? So when you write it down, you're gonna see these patterns that emerge that you can actually do something about it. You might notice that one client takes more energy per interaction than your other three combined. That's data.

You might notice that you always feel better after certain kinds of site meetings and worse after certain kinds of client calls. That's data. You might notice that the hour you spend doom scrolling other designers' Instagram at night is reliably followed by a worse morning the next day. That's very actionable data. Okay. The audit's not about guilt, it's about information.

You are a business owner. You make decisions based on what the numbers tell you. And your energy is one of the most important inputs in your business. You deserve to understand where it's going.

So if you've been listening two weeks ago to episode one and today, and something's like hitting you hard, if there's a version of this conversation that you want to have in a more personal way, y'all, that's exactly the kind of work I do in private coaching. It's yeah, we we do business strategy, absolutely. But my goal is to help you build a business and a way of operating that you can actually sustain.

Because none of this business strategy works if the person running the business is running on empty.

So you can learn more and get in touch at the designbakehouse dot com. Just click the coaching tab. And if it feels it feels like a fit, schedule a call. If I'm the coach for ya, I'll tell ya. If I'm not, I'll refer you to who I think is.

So thanks for spending this time with me. If anything from today or episode one hit close to home, I'd love to keep the conversation going.

Let's talk about what working together could look like. Hell, you've spent a lot of energy building something worth protecting. Let's make sure you're in it for the long run.

Next episode, episode three in our little series, is that the word no has a return on investment. We're gonna get into boundaries, not as a personality trait, but as a business decision as a business decision. And we're gonna be honest about the fear that lives underneath the yes you said when you mean no. So I'll see you there.