Midlife MavericksIn January, my calendar looked like a crime scene.
Meetings everywhere. Context switching every 30 minutes.
I was “productive”… and completely fried.
I wasn’t unhappy.
But I wasn’t calm either.
I had just committed to write 30 Super Threads in 30 days, which did not help.:
I was doing too much of the wrong kind of work and paying for it with focus and energy.
So this year, I stopped chasing growth metrics and started paying attention to something more honest:
How my work felt.
Did it give me space to think?
Did it respect my nervous system?
Did it actually help my clients move faster?
Or was I just keeping everyone busy?
These questions reshaped my entire year.
I was drowning and I had no idea.
None of This Is What Finance People Do
Let me be clear: everything I’m about to share is completely foreign to my industry.
Finance people don’t talk about AI workflows or nervous system regulation. They talk about deals, valuations, and market positioning.
Nobody in my 25 years of investment banking taught me to batch my calendar or record my meetings. That’s not how we operate.
I only learned this stuff because I forced myself to network outside my bubble.
The entrepreneurs I met over coffee? They showed me how to systematize.
The writers I connected with on Threads? They taught me to see AI as a thinking partner, not a threat.
The coaches and consultants in my DMs? They normalized boundaries I thought would kill my business.
A couple of weeks ago I talked about 2025 being the year I stopped only talking to finance people and started building relationships with people who thought completely differently.
That cross-pollination saved me.
You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. And I’d been stuck in mine for two decades.
The Hidden Cost Nobody Talks About
Here’s what keeps most of us stuck:
We think being busy means we’re building something.
We mistake activity for progress. A full calendar feels like proof we’re in demand. Saying yes to everything feels like good client service.
But what’s really happening?
You’re spending your best thinking hours on admin that a VA could handle for £15 an hour.
You’re context-switching so much that you can’t remember what you walked into a room for.
You’re “available” to clients 24/7 because you’re terrified they’ll find someone more accommodating.
And here’s the part that stings: you’re not protecting the work that actually makes you money.
The deep thinking. The strategy. The frameworks. The client breakthroughs.
That’s what they pay for. Not your ability to respond to Slack in 90 seconds or reconcile expenses on a Friday night.
I spent the first half of 2025 drowning because I was performing productivity instead of building a business.
It took me way too long to admit I needed help. To block my calendar. To say no.
I guess admitting that felt like admitting I couldn’t handle it.
But the women who scale aren’t the ones who do it all. They’re the ones who stop doing the wrong things first.
Quote of the Week
“You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
James Clear
What Actually Moved the Needle in 2025
I want to be very clear about something upfront: I’m not going to talk about revenue, I’d rather leave that to the hustle bros.
My focus here is to show you what I’ve done to help me get my sanity back.
This is not a list of tools to copy-paste into your life. It’s just what I did, what worked for me and my clients this year. Take what you need of it, or nothing at all.
1. Learning AI Properly Bought Me Back 20+ Hours a Week
At the start of the year, I made a deliberate decision:
I was going to learn AI properly, so I bought a paid version of ChatGPT.
Slowly I started learning how to
- Prompt
- Use Projects
- Creating custom GPTs
- Train Chat GPT with my voice
- Build simple automations around my workflow
By June, I was consistently saving around 20 hours a week.
I stopped doing repetitive cognitive labor that never should’ve lived in my brain in the first place.
And something unexpected happened: the quality of my work jumped.
I started seeing patterns across clients faster.
My consulting frameworks became cleaner.
My coaching resources became more structured, reusable, and calmer to deliver.
This also helped my clients get results faster.
By June, I was consistently saving around 20 hours a week. But time saved means nothing if you’re still showing up half-present. That’s where the second shift came in.
2. Recording and Reviewing My Meetings Changed How I Show Up
The second big shift was deceptively simple:
I started recording my meetings and actually listening to them.
I use Fathom. I started paid. I now use the free version. It’s brilliant.
Here’s why this matters if your work involves conversations:
- You can properly focus on active listening and looking your clients in the eye
- You stop guessing how you sound
- You notice where you ramble, rush, or rescue
- You see exactly what lands with clients and what doesn’t
I also started encouraging clients to review their own calls.
The result?
Better pitches. Clearer positioning.
And a big source of content to use as presentations/sales collateral and social media articles without doing any further work. Two birds, one stone.
All those recordings, insights, and client patterns were gold. But they were scattered everywhere—until I finally built one system to hold it all.
3. Moving Everything Into One Brain (Notion) Changed How I Think
Switching fully into Notion was another powerful shift.
In Finance most people work with Microsoft 365. I still do, but it’s not great to establish missing links between all the documents you touch.
Now I have everything in one place:
- Contracts.
- Proposals.
- Client notes.
- Presentations.
- Past work.
- Content ideas.
- Meeting recordings.
All in one place.
Now, one client call can turn into:
- A clearer diagnosis
- Multiple insight threads
- A LinkedIn post
- A blog
- Or a pattern I see across five clients
Connecting the dots has become a lot easier for me. And that is what clients actually pay for.
Having everything in one place made something painfully obvious: I was still doing work that shouldn’t be mine.
4. Delegation
This year, I hired an automations specialist (Make + Power Automate)
and I’m in the process of onboarding a VA.
It took me way longer than I expected to define what I needed because portfolio careers don’t fit neat boxes.
Earlier in the year I was spending 5-10 hours a month on bookeeping. I am writing this and I am so embarassed of it. Why have I not addressed this earlier? More than the time that some of these tasks took from me, the mental drain, the antecipation of having to do it – the dread – that’s what was killing me.
Hiring help bought me time. But time alone doesn’t fix chaos. I needed to protect how I actually spent it.
5. Batching My Week Regulated My Nervous System
This one surprised me the most.
I now:
- Batch all calls on specific days
- Keep deep work on protected days
- Separate admin completely
Context switching destroys my focus and really destroys my mood.
On heavy meeting days, I don’t expect deep thinking from myself anymore.
I thought clients would have a problem with this, after all I was restricting access. Instead, they loved the idea.
And I’m calmer, happier and more present.
A regulated nervous system is a business asset.
If there’s one thing I’m carrying into 2026, it’s this:
I’m going to keep investing in preserving my nervous system.
Every change I made this year reduced noise for me and for my clients. Cleaner thinking. Faster outcomes.
Now I want to know: what’s the one thing you stopped doing in 2025 that gave you your sanity back?
Hit reply. I read every single one.
Happy New Year, Mavericks.
I’ll swap the coffee for champagne for one day only – then it’s back to the espresso and systems that actually work.
Claudia
