654: The Phrase That Changed Our Year
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What if the key to protecting your business and sanity is actually learning to care less? In this episode, we share how our unorthodox Word of the Year—“care less”—helped us step back from constant urgency, emotional overload, and decision fatigue. We talk about naming our non-negotiables, especially around safety and standards, while letting go of guilt and overinvestment in pricing pushback, employee drama, and social media opinions. We walk through the practical tools we used, like decision deadlines, “good enough” standards, and release phrases that helped us move from dwelling to doing. By the end, we show how caring less about the wrong things made room for more joy, clarity, and confidence in our life and business.
Main topics:
Redefining what “care” means
Combating decision fatigue with structure
Setting firm non-negotiable standards
Emotional detachment vs. apathy
Making faster, value-driven decisions
Main takeaway: “It’s really important to recognize that caring more is not the same as caring well.”
In pet care, we’re taught that the more we care, the better we are—but that mindset can quietly drive us straight into burnout. In this episode, we talk about how we learned to protect our emotional bandwidth by deciding what truly deserves our deepest care and what doesn’t. We share how setting decision deadlines, naming our non-negotiables, and releasing imagined reactions from clients and employees changed how we lead. If you’ve ever felt crushed under the weight of caring about everything, this conversation will help you care well where it counts—and let the rest go.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
care less, decision fatigue, emotional investment, business growth, client feedback, employee conflicts, decision deadlines, mental bandwidth, non-negotiables, professional standards, time management, emotional detachment, business operations, leadership, work-life balance
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:00
I care less. It's not exactly the inspirational phrase you expect to hear from a business owner, but this year, that was our Word of the Year, and it ended up being one of the healthiest choices that we've made. Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of pet sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter, whether it's your first time listening or the 654th time you're listening. We appreciate you being here. And we would also like to thank our sponsors, pet sitters, associates, and our lovely patreon supporters who love the podcast want it to keep going to 1000 episodes and beyond, and choose to give some of their hard earned money back to the podcast to keep it going every month. If you are listening and you say, Hey, that sounds like me too, you can go to pet center, confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out, and we appreciate each one of them. Today we're talking about our Word of the Year, which we don't typically do a word of the year, but we did for this year, just why not? We quietly chose this word back in January, and we didn't want to announce it because it's a little unorthodox our word or words were care less. And before anybody starts to panic, panic, this episode is not about neglect. It's not about slacking off. It's not about lowering our standards or the standards of our company. It's about reclaiming that margin and letting go of things that were burning us out while giving us nothing in return. So like I mentioned, we don't usually do a word of the year, but we felt that this year we needed a word, because, like many of you, we reached a point where everything felt urgent. Every client email was a crisis. Every employee question felt monumental. Every policy had to be perfect. Every decision required hours of deliberation. We really kind of felt on this edge of burnout. You know, every opinion from clients or employees or strangers online felt personal. We were attacked by it, and we really shouldn't have been, but that's how we felt on again, this this burnout that we were feeling. It seemed as though we had unintentionally created a world where everything was the number one priority, and I know that me, personally, I was probably the instigator of most of this, because I do feel that everything is important all of the time, and it must get done right now, which is not healthy, and I recognize that, but we both felt that we needed to get off of this plateau and create more peace and more calm and more space into our life and our business. You know, when everything is mission critical, nothing actually is. You know, everything cannot get done at the same time. All of the time, we were tense, we were overwhelmed, we were emotionally exhausted. And with new projects starting at the beginning of the year and major shifts happening in our business, something had to change, and we knew that
Collin 02:43
we were really desperate to create more margin in our lives and in our business, we were operating at 120% every single day, and when we looked at the year ahead, we saw that well, in order for us to take on new things and change and do more, we actually have to peel away and start doing less in our business, and that started with our mindset around, if we carried around every single day that everything was the number one priority, everything was a fire, everything was an emergency, which is where we kind of got because we were tired, we were stressed out. There were changes going on. We were trying new things, and it just had bubbled and bubbled and bubbled, and here we were spilling over at the end of last year. So last November and December, we started to have these feelings about, how in the world can we tackle these big things next year, if this is where we are right now, and
Meghan 03:32
this wasn't even just because of the holidays last year. Of course, holidays are always busy for everyone, no matter where you are. But we knew that that was going to die off in January and February, but we were still staring at ourselves, going, we are not in a healthy place mentally or physically or Yeah, able to pivot our business to where we want to go, because we are on this edge of even the slightest little hair of something off and we just, we set a blaze. Basically, we're. We are. We cannot self regulate ourselves enough right now?
Collin 04:01
Yeah, so it's important to note that while we have this phrase care less, this does mean things, but it also doesn't mean things, right? We didn't go into the New Year caring less about safety. That was still we had to sit down and go, what are our real priorities? What's actually important to us, and what will we hold to and so we our list of safety training, client communication, high standards, boundaries, pet well being, ethics, reliability. We were still going to care a lot about these. Care a lot more than anyone else can or should care about these. These were our non negotiables. We were not going to budge an inch on these caring less for us does not mean to be careless. We are still going to be intentional and focused, and we are still going to plan and critique and build in systems and policies and all this stuff. This wasn't about us lowering our professionalism. This wasn't. Going, Okay, well, this is too we've set too high of standards, so we need to then peel away these and be worse. It really was about lowering our emotional friction with all of these things that come up. This was about our mindset and thought process around how our business operated, how we handled problems, how we took on and received feedback in how we tried to institute change. This is where we started to go. Maybe I can lower prioritize my emotional response here, or that it's not the end of the world if these things happen and I can move forward with this well.
Meghan 05:35
And a lot of times, it's because we get decision fatigue. As business owners. We have 1000 decisions to make every single day, especially if you have employees, it's almost tripled if you have employees. And so we had to come to the realization that because there are so many decisions to make every day, we do have to make a decision and then move on. We can't just really sit in this obviously, if it's a really big thing that's significantly impacting our business or our clients, then we have to slowly deal with that and be methodical about it, but there are a lot of decisions where we were sitting on them for really no reason at all. We were mulling over things that really should have been a quick decision and then move on to something else. Yeah, and it's
Collin 06:11
probably just based off of our personalities. We are very particular. We are very exact and precise individuals, and so realizing that not every decision or thing that we had in front of us needed to take 45 minutes or three days to come to a conclusion on of you know what? Let's just go ahead and write the script for the social media post, and I'm not going to sit here and go back and forth as to whether I should use which or that in this phrase. We're just going to pick one and move on, because we realize that if I sat here and I gave this as much time and attention as I wanted to, it meant that I had less time and attention to devote to other things and in the reality and the scope of importance of my business, should I devote time and attention to my safety policies and procedures or to a grammatical using which or that in this sentence for my social media post, there's an obvious answer here, and that's really what this year was about.
Meghan 07:09
We had to save our emotional bandwidth for the things that were truly important and that we're going to move our business forward in that direction.
Collin 07:16
Yeah. I mean, it was things about caring less about client opinions, around pricing or policies, right? We stopped getting emotional or bending emotionally every time someone pushed back. We knew going into this year that we were going to have some price increases, that we were going to be changing and doing things that people might not be on board with. And we just had to know going into this that they may do this, they may have comments, they may have feedback, but I'm not going to sit here and wither away and melt into a puddle emotionally about this. Now, we still care about feedback, we still listen to feedback, but we have this filter now, right? I'm no longer absorbing the emotions behind the feedback. It's not my responsibility to because we just can't. I cannot sit here and and deeply personally empathize with every person who comes and says, I don't like this new price increase, or I don't like this new policy because of this deep, emotional reason. I have to keep that business in front of us and say, for Business Operations and Business Excellence, this is what must be done, and it protects Megan and I when we do that
Meghan 08:29
well, and I think pricing is the one where there's a strict dichotomy here, of this is the easiest thing to care about, but it's also the hardest thing to care about, because obviously we don't want to lose clients, and so we deeply care about when I have to raise my prices at the same time, we kind of have to be not stone cold, but we do have to kind of put up a front and say, Well, this is I have employees, and this is brass tax because of the way I run my business. This is what I must do, or because I need to provide for my family or provide for myself and my own home. This is what I need to do. We also took the careless model into internal drama with our employees. Not every complaint needed our full emotional investment. If an employee didn't understand or didn't care that, we needed to send a clean litter box picture at the end of every visit. Well, it doesn't really matter, because that's the policy you need to follow the policy. It doesn't matter if you don't like it. That's what we do. Also, not every minor conflict required a 45 minute meeting
Collin 09:29
where maybe once we would sit down with the employee and really hash it out and really get into the nitty gritty details and figure out the why behind things. And really, you know, just like sit in it at the end of the day, Megan and I realized that this level of emotional investment, this level of emotional involvement in that was actually not worth the squeeze, because, as Megan said, There's policies and procedures that need to and should be followed. If you aren't, we will work to figure out what happened, but then I want to spend my. Emotion going into a direction, going into where we're, where are we going to move from this? Okay, great. It happened. Understand. Here's a little explanation about why. But then I don't want to stay there, and I think that's really where we got caught up in this of, let's just sit here in the in the that it happened. And really what we're doing here is going, Okay, I do care that it happened, but, but I need to be moving in a direction here and us learning the difference between things that needed our action and things that just wanted or were dragging our attention and going okay, so this happened. What do we do about that? And really just jumping to that action step has saved us a lot of headache and has really helped us move forward a lot quicker in things and decisions than before, and really be more direct with the employees. Is something that that we've been working really hard on, is I can sit here and go through 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half to emotionally figure out why this thing happened, but it's more important that we don't let this happen again. And so what are those steps? That's where we talk about where is my time and energy going to I could focus on the first part, but for our business to be successful, and for Megan and I to have a life, we need to focus on the action and really get going there.
Meghan 11:21
It's very similar to when something negative happens in your business that you know is not impacted by your employees. A client doesn't like that you did this or you forgot this, and you learn these lessons. And we talked about this previously on episodes where we talked about lessons of, okay, yes, this, this bad thing happened, this negative thing happened. We got to figure out why. But then shortly after that, we need to have the action step and move on. That's how we move faster in our business. We learn the lesson, and then we quickly move to the next thing, right?
Collin 11:49
Well, which ties into the third thing of we started caring less a lot about having perfect policies. This one was really big for us. We used to sit and draft something and then just it would sit in our Google Drive. It would just sit there because it wasn't perfect, and sometimes it never got released. And what would happen sometimes is Megan, I would start to have this conversation of, oh, man, we really need this policy about X, Y, Z. I would go and start writing, and then realize, oh, we already have something like this. It was already over here in this inbox. We need to just do this thing right? So now, when we have these ideas, we we write it, we're careful about it, and then we publish it, right? We send it out to the employees, so that they know. And importantly, our step here is that internally, Megan and I have a, you know, let's, let's evaluate how this is going. In 30 days, all of our employees have been educated and are empowered to give us feedback when it's not working, like immediate stuff. Hey, here's this. We just rolled this out. Let us know what you think, and this kind of cooperative effort. It's not us being lazy and just shooting it off of our desk and going, Ugh, I can't deal with this. It's going if we sit on this and wait until Megan and I have thought of every particular thing, every little thing, it'll be there for years. Instead, get feedback, get on the real world, give it to our team of employees who are amazing and who we trust with this kind of stuff, and who are actually going to be doing this. And we'll make it better a lot faster. And now we reiterating a lot more, and it's beautiful.
Meghan 13:21
It's that doing versus dwelling. Right? We don't want to sit on something too long and dwell on it and try to make it better and make it perfect. You know, 80% of the way is still 80% better than what it was when we first started of 0% so just get it out there and yeah, it's not going to be perfect, but if you wait till the perfect moment, it's going to be too late. Probably the biggest thing that we cared less about was what people might think. And obviously this extended to social media posts as well, because we didn't want grammatical errors out there. But we were less careful about crafting the post this year, but we stopped rehearsing imaginary conversations in our head. Well, okay, a client is probably going to come back and say this, or because we rolled this thing out, the employees probably are going to say this, or even between each other of I need to present this idea. What is Collin going to think about this?
Collin 14:08
If we're being perfectly honest, this is where I fall short a lot. This is what I do. I go, I'll stop myself from action because of a conversation that I generated in my head and didn't actually have. I just assume what the other person is going to do, and then, and it's always the worst case scenario. And so then I don't push forward. I don't do it. We don't hold people accountable. We don't hold our ground or our boundaries with clients or employees or with other people in our life. And we just go, Well, I don't want to make that person angry. And they'll probably say this, and they Oh, yeah, okay, well, just, we'll just, we'll be fine. We won't move forward with this. But this year, it was a focus to stop catastrophizing, stop having those make believe worst possible conversations in our heads and try and predict what happened. I mean, Megan, all the time will be like I'm so glad you can predict the future and read my mind. This is really not helpful, and it's true, we can get into that tendency. Where we just kind of talk ourselves out of it, because we think we know how it's going to end up.
Meghan 15:03
I know all my clients are going to leave because I'm raising my prices by $2 so okay, I don't want to have those hard conversations, so I just won't do it.
Collin 15:10
Or I know the employee is going to get upset when I hold them accountable and write them up because they violated this policy, so I'm not going to and instead going, well, I don't know how they're going to respond, and it's not my responsibility for how they will respond. My responsibility is to uphold my standards. My responsibility is to have this conversation and then they will respond one way or the other. But however, that turns out, I still have to uphold what I am supposed to do. I have that responsibility that is on me as the business owner, and just morally and ethically, I have to speak up about this and then let the chips fall where they may. But that's not on me. I can't go around on eggshells and on tiptoes going well, I don't want to say anything, because they'll get angry and they might leave and and I know they're working hard and blah, blah. No, we have to care less about that, because otherwise the standards fall, and we really do have a crisis on our hands in that moment, because we aren't being the champions for our business.
Meghan 16:08
It's really important to be proud of who you are, the business that you've built, and how you are serving your community. Because a lot of people don't think this is a real thing. They are surprised to learn. Even for Collin and I, we just had a conversation a few days ago with somebody who was like, Oh, you have X amount of employees, and you service two service areas. I had no idea. I thought it was just you guys. And you know, there is this misconception that pet sitters just come in, throw food on the floor and leave and they don't, aren't actually good at their jobs, and can't make this into a full career. Well, obviously we, and you listening, are proof in the pudding of that can absolutely happen. And when we don't speak up about our standards, we prove them right, they continue to think, Oh, this is just a side thing that you have going on, and you don't actually take this seriously. Again. We aren't responsible for how they feel or how they interpret our words. What we can do is continue to be loud and proud about the successful businesses that we run. Because you are a professional pet sitter, you need to have business insurance as a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's for a family member, but who's got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out. They make it easy to protect your business get a free quote today at petsit llc.com as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care.
Collin 17:32
Like we said, this was something that we went into 2025 with. And so what has changed? What impact has this actually had on us and our business. The first one is that our decision making really sped up dramatically. Last year, we would stew on decisions for days and weeks. We'd go back and forth. We'd get emotionally invested and tangled into this but this year, we really worked hard to set deadlines on decision making and and stuck to them. And often, what happens is Megan and I won't really have a chance or opportunity to talk about business decisions until eight, 910, o'clock at night sometimes. And we will come to what we think is a resolution, and we'll say, Okay, tomorrow we are making a final decision on this one way or the other. We sleep on it, and then the next day we make that decision, and we move forward from
Meghan 18:24
this, or we've pretty much made the decision that night, have a gut feeling of where we want to go, and then just revisit it quickly the next morning and go, Okay, yep, we reaffirm we're moving on. Yep.
Collin 18:35
We're making decisions based off of our values, our defined business goals, and where our businesses and what we believe, instead of fear, instead of the concern about the worst case scenario, about those catastrophes that might could potentially who knows could happen. And we move forward quickly with this, and it's really helped us chunk through again, not saying that everything is like that. Now we have the margin to invest emotionally when we need to, but it's all the other 90. Because what we found is that basically, like 90% of our decisions can just be cut through quickly and don't need to be sat on and worried about.
Meghan 19:11
I think the biggest change was the hires. When we make decisions about hires, if we move them on to the next step in the process of we were sitting on decisions for a while, and we found this year that really was not necessary at all, and we were just wasting a ton of time, because a lot of times there's one, at least one red flag when reviewing the hire. And so we were trying to still have a conversation about, maybe we should move this person on, and we don't know, and we weren't really going with our gut on this of Nope, this is a clear No, so we need to file that away and move on. Yeah, it was
Collin 19:41
basically, I feel like a lot of this was came out of us trying to convince ourselves that we were wrong about things and maybe that we were in so we'd second guess ourselves a lot, instead of just going, No, we trust we've got a process. We have values and data in front of us. Let's, let's go with that. And and because of this, we had a lot of emotional energy. It returned. It came. Back to us. We had this mental space. We were able to be more creative when we needed to have new marketing design, or when we were talking about where we were headed or how we were going to solve problems, more clarity around definitionally, who we are and how we operate. It gave us more margin for our kids, for our family time of I'm not going to sit here and have the kids over at the table while we discuss this for two hours. Instead, let's cut this down. Get this done in 30 minutes, and then we can go back to be with our family, which is what is really important to us.
Meghan 20:37
So I guess all of this is really being more intentional with our time, going these things that we were giving time and agency to were not worth it. We're just wasting time in the long run. And so we were more efficient with our time this year because we adopted this careless philosophy.
Collin 20:52
Yeah, we weren't running every decision through fear or guilt filters or all these ifs ands or buts about it. We really were engaging our problems more directly, instead of emotionally. We didn't. We decided intentionally, like you said, like I'm not going to give their this more emotional valence than it is owed, because not everything needs that amount of investment. Instead of internalizing issues, we address them clearly, and we address them once right, we're going to work on this, and then we need to move on. Obviously, if we didn't make the right decision, or more information came to light, we would come back to it. But instead of sitting here circling the drain around things, like with the hires, you said, Megan, of like, both Megan and I just started to go, the writing's on the wall with this one. It's plain and clear, let's just make the decision that we know that we're going to make in another three days. What if we just made that now? Right? And, oh, my goodness, the amount of freedom that it gave.
Meghan 21:50
We chose not to spiral or not to over process. We just wanted action. And this is hard for a lot of us, pet sitters. We struggle with this in the industry, this care less philosophy? Because we define our value by how much we care. Caring really becomes our identity. I love your pets like they're my own. They become my family. I am adopted into your family. So when we say care less, it can feel like a betrayal of this. I don't know. I don't care less about your pets. That's not what we're saying here. We still value them and are going to serve them well, it's about caring less about the less important things.
Collin 22:28
We also struggle because we are people pleasers. We this is a service based industry. We serve others, and people pleasing often masquerades as customer service of I'm just going to do everything, invest everything, be involved in everything, emotionally care about absolutely everything. And I'm going to try and tout that as customer service. Instead, we're going, what is actually necessary to get this accomplished, and just going, if I pull back 5% on this, if I cut back 3% here, and we're not saying just cut it all out
Meghan 22:59
entirely, but we are saying stop answering the phone at 11pm
Collin 23:03
and we are saying stop allowing the your clients to emotionally dump on you or to guilt trip you into things care less about that, and allow yourself to say no. That empowers you to do that.
Meghan 23:19
Another reason we struggle with this is because we fear being seen as unprofessional. We all want to be the professional, the high standards, the we care so much and so having a motto of care less. Well, that's not professional. That's not what I want. I want to be seen as the best. So how can I care less if I'm the best? Well, we try to over explain or over perfect or over justify things that we do. So we do these things a lot of times out of imposter syndrome, instead of out of confidence.
Collin 23:47
We kind of sit there and go, Okay, well, I need to raise my prices. So I need to write a 15 page essay about why that's necessary, and I need to think through every aspect or emotional response or retort that somebody may have, and I need to XYZ and have all these things figured out. Instead going, the price is now $30 are you going to book or not? Right? Like, that's what it is. And we so really stepping and going, I just need to present myself with confidence and let the let the rest fall,
Meghan 24:20
because we serve others in this industry, this job itself attracts deeply empathetic people. We care a lot. So yeah, us up here saying care less is probably you're going like, What are you talking about? Because when we are deeply empathetic, it means that we that those emotional boundaries are harder to really separate and say, Okay, I do care about you, client and fluffy, I really do, but I also need to make this policy so that I can continue to be here in 10 years.
Collin 24:48
It's really important to recognize that caring more is not the same as caring Well, and what we mean by that is caring about the things that should be cared about. Right, care deeply about those, invest in those. That's what you have to answer that for what you are willing to do and where that needs to lie. We've outlined where we did in our business and how that's worked, but like, you know where you need to invest your time caring less was it's blunt, right? It is way in your face, and it needed to be that way for Megan and I to get it through at least my thick skull and kind of just front me and just like, you know, punch me in the face every time I said it to remind me of how serious this was. This was our way of saying, care when it counts. Stop caring when it drains you.
Meghan 25:36
We really couldn't afford to be emotionally taxed and emotionally drained any more than we already were. So we knew going into this year we had to make some big changes, and so we needed a big phrase to punch us in the face in
Collin 25:48
order to get there. There are several things that we had to do, and the first one I know we already talked about was, was setting decision deadlines. Emotion expands to fill whatever space you give it. Deadlines force clarity, your emotions will go and work themselves up into a tizzy if you give them a full week or one hour. So give them the hour and force clarity upon yourself. And this is really hard to do as business owners and operators, as solo leaders of the business, because there's no one else holding us accountable. So you have to find ways to force that on you and say you don't have any more time and so so this may be, if you're having a conversation with a client, I will have an answer to you no later than tomorrow at five o'clock. We started to say this during our hiring process of at the end of the interview, we would tell them you will hear back from us with a final decision no later than Thursday at two making because now there's an external accountability where they're depending on me in order to give them an answer, which, what, which put pressure on Megan and I to finalize that decision and just move on. Because we had to, we had to work on holding each other accountable when, when we made agreements like this, of, hey, we're not going to rehash this topic when it's done, or we need to sit down and we're going to have 45 minutes to discuss this, and then we've got to move on to other things, because we have a very busy night, or we're both tired, so we need to work through this. Did we stick to it perfectly? No, no, but at least what we tried to do when we did this was it changed that dynamic of we can just talk and talk and talk about this, talk and talk and talk about this, and circle the drain over and over, instead of facing the hard facts of, No, we just have to act. I just have to send that right up. I just haven't have to make that phone call. I just have to tell that client, no, I just we just need to just cut to the action once we realize it. And it saved us so much time and headache.
Meghan 27:43
One of the best things that we do in our business for each other is we do a one to 10 of one is usually no. 10 is usually yes. Where do you fall on the scale of this decision? And we'll say 123, and then our number, and then we can continue to have that conversation, but we at least know where each other is and on what side we need to make the decision.
Collin 28:04
It forces us to to put it on that scale like it's when you put it down and just pick a number that best defines your feelings on this and where you want to head. Then you know each other. You have a starting point. And it doesn't matter if you say, Okay, I'm an eight. I'm this high because of x y z, I'm not a 10 because x y z, and Megan would say, Well, I'm a two and I'm a two because of x y z, and then we know where we're coming from. But it really cuts through that, because a lot of times, what we found was we were mostly and you will find this even if you're dealing with clients or with employees, of you start talking about your emotions instead of what's actually going on. I remember this whenever I was a streams biologist with the Department of Conservation of many times you're talking with a landowner and they're really upset about what's happening with the road crossing or with their stream bank, and what they're actually really upset about. And here's what people do. They're mining gravel out of the bottom of a river, and it's causing all this big erosion upstream, and things are falling in whatever when you talk to the landowner who's mining that gravel, emotionally, they were mining the gravel because they wanted to have a swimming hole for their grandkids, because it's where they used to swim with their granddad when they passed down the generations of This farm, and so we're trying to have a conversation about the facts and statistics upstream of the devastation cause. And they're having a conversation about family history and lineage and their grandchildren, and really going, Okay, we need to figure out a way to have this conversation so that we both understand where each other coming from. And that's what this 123, say. Number is doing is it's putting us on the same playing field. We know that Megan doesn't have a different scale than i She's not on logarithmic and I'm not on, you know, whatever, like log base 10, and she's log base eight. We're all on the same scale, which really helps those conversations move a lot
Meghan 29:57
quicker to get to the care less mentality we all. Chose curiosity over emotional reaction. Instead of saying, why are they doing this to us? I'm personally attacked and affronted that they chose this language, or they said this thing, or or they left me for another sitter. Instead of all of that, we shifted to, huh, what's going on here? What's the actual need? What can I do differently? Because here it's all about defining that control. What things do I have control over, versus what is completely outside of my control. If somebody leaves my company, whether it's an employee or a client, I don't have a lot of control over that. What I can do is hopefully make my processes more simple or more attractive to potential hires or to clients, and shift into an area that's going to benefit me as the business.
Collin 30:43
Yeah, it's about shrinking that emotional intensity, because that first question of, why are they doing this to me? Well, this is all sorts of hypotheticals and unknowns and things that you could never really get information about, and so you just sit in undefined hypotheticals the entire time, which raises your emotional level, which heightens you to kind of a frantic state, instead of grant. We need to ground this in what's the actual need? What are the facts about this? How do I actually need to proceed that the practical application of this is okay, that happened. Now what not? Let me dig into this, that it happened, and really understand all of the emotional background. And, oh, maybe they did this because at three years old, they blah blah blah, blah, blah blah, no, okay, acknowledge and move on. And when you do that, you're you, you're actually, instead of focusing your energy and your attention on the emotional side and heightening that, you actually take that same intensity and you do something about it.
Meghan 31:41
So speaking of doing something with this, identify an area where you are caring too much, think about has anything struck your mind since we've been talking some common candidates are pricing feedback, you know, nobody really likes that. Some schedule changes or policy enforcement, employee frustrations. Have there been common issues that have been coming up, or client tone issues, and then potentially the biggest one of all social media comments? Are you caring too much? What other people say online about you and your business? Once you've identified one area where you're caring too much, then decide what your non negotiables are, what will you never care less about. What are some things that you know safety for us, that we're never going to compromise on, that we're never going to care less about, that list those non negotiables out, then write out a good enough level for decisions you don't need 100% it can be an 80% decision that you just need to move on about and get it off of your plate.
Collin 32:40
Because many times we sit there and we try and get to 100% satisfaction or 100% surety, so we delay, we look for more information, we ask more questions. We sit there and dig and dig and pick and pick and pick and pick when, honestly, 80% is good enough to make that decision for you.
Meghan 32:56
Now, of course, this is not with everything. We are not we're not saying everything with this, but it applies to a whole lot more areas than you think. Then you want to practice emotional detachment, not apathy, but you can care about the outcome, but stop caring about imagined reactions. Try to stop playing out those conversations in your head, because a lot of times they are not accurate or what is actually going to become reality. When we try to stick to the facts as much as possible, we do negate some of those emotions. And yes, again, there are things that we care about, but there are things that are can just be based on facts and numbers and make a decision and move on. And finally, when you feel yourself getting too emotionally invested, you need to build a release phrase, something like this isn't mine to carry, or this doesn't require emotion, or I can care about this, but I need to do it differently so I can care differently about this.
Collin 33:47
Megan's in my release phrase was we'd stare at each other and go, Hey, care less. And that's what we had to do when we when both either and I either Megan or myself. We knew when the other person was kind of spiraling, or we recognize it in ourselves. It was this, hey, hey, care less. And then that was our phrase in our cue to say, Okay, we need to step back from this ledge, because this is going in a direction where we don't need to go and that when, even when you say that out loud, it's a reminder to yourself, I need to do something different. I need to do something different. I need to go in a different direction.
Meghan 34:18
This is taking too much of my mental bandwidth, my emotional valence, and I need to create space. We are about to head into a new year, and we want a new word for next year, something more inspiring than care less. But the truth is, we wouldn't make it to that word without this one so careless. Gave us the space we needed to breathe again. It gave us that mental bandwidth back. It helped us reconnect with our mission and clarify our values. We simplified our systems over this year, we strengthened our leadership by being able to make decisions faster and more quality decisions because we weren't so emotionally attached to things we moved. Moved faster and with more confidence, but most importantly, it made room for joy again in both our business and our life. So if you have been caring too much or caring too intensely or burning out under the weight of things that actually, at the end of the day don't matter, maybe this year is your year to care less, care less, intentionally, strategically, healthily. Let us know what your Word of the Year is. We love hearing what others are focusing on. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com, or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional, thank you for listening today. We are appreciative of you and your time. We also want to thank pet sitters associates and our Patreon supporters, we will talk with you next time bye. You.
