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I’m in culinary school this week, but I wrote this email in advance to make sure I could be present during my course experience 🙂

Most of us are working well beyond our true capacity, and while it’s really easy to blame our to-do lists, I believe one important thing that gets overlooked is the concept of guiding principles.

Guiding principles are overarching values that shape a person's decisions and actions. They are typically broad and long-term, and can help individuals align their goals and actions with their personal values by providing a framework for decision-making in both personal and professional contexts.

Do you have a personal set of guiding principles?
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Guiding principles are lifetime level, and they don't change much.

You may tweak and adjust them along the way, but they'll likely remain pretty consistent over the course of your life because our core values don’t tend to change drastically. In order to make your goals personal and meaningful, they need to align with those guiding principles... otherwise your actions and supportive practices will feel out of alignment with the kind of person you want to be.

When we know the kind of person we want to be — based on our core values and guiding principles — we can begin to identify behaviours and choices that will bring us closer to those pillars.
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In any given season, there's a handful of principles that are framing the choices I'm making: the way that I'm leading my life, spending my time, running my company, engaging with my family, and so on.

I review these guiding principles every day as part of my start up ritual:

Others may prefer to use core values to guide their decision-making, and that’s great too!
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Core values and guiding principles go hand-in-hand.

Honesty → Be honest

Courage → Discomfort is a learning opportunity

Generosity → Be a day-maker / Elevate other people

Often the same core value can show up in multiple guiding principles.
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So how do guiding principles impact my to-do list?

Guiding principles make decision making easier.

If I’m prioritizing for impact and sustainability, I can filter projects through this lens:

• Is this project impactful? In what way? To what degree?
• Will taking on this project be sustainable with regards to my time, energy, and attention? How about business profitability?
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When you run a potential commitment through the lens of your guiding principles, the decision often becomes more clear. “Oh, I think I have to turn down this project because if I say yes, I won’t be able to complete this other project, and my guiding principle is Adopt a Finishing Mindset.”

I once heard Mariah Coz say that their company had a “no panic policy” — it was one of the company's guiding principles. You better believe that policy has an impact on how they shape their business model, engage with customers, and show up in their business. They don’t indulge in panic.
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Do you have guiding principles that help you make better decisions about what you put on your list?

If you haven’t taken the time to identify what’s most important to you, it will be more difficult to trickle down into the practices and choices that help you get you where you want to go.
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For people with ADHD (it's me, hi), decision fatigue can be particularly challenging.

Decision fatigue is the idea that our ability to make good decisions deteriorates as we make more and more decisions throughout the day. This can lead to procrastination, a lack of focus, and poor decision making.

One way to combat decision fatigue is to reduce the number of decisions we have to make each day by automating certain tasks or simplifying our routines (theming!), or we can prioritize important decisions earlier in the day when our decision-making abilities are strongest.

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Let your guiding principles do the heavy lifting for you.
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Now, how do we actually define our guiding principles?

Start by reflecting on your values and priorities.

• What matters most to you?
• What kind of person do you want to be?
• What are your long-term goals?
• What do people consistently reflect back to you in terms of appreciation?

Once you have a clear understanding of your values and priorities, you can start to identify overarching principles that align with them.

You probably intuitively have some that you live by but haven’t named yet.

You can even Google Guiding Principles and find tons of examples. Read them and check in; how do you feel when you read them? Try them on and see how they fit.
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For example, I read one about Being Tough and “demanding the highest standards of your team” and my whole body said NOPE. There are much better principles to help me define how I lead my team and that wasn’t it. Do I expect high standards? Yes. Does the word tough resonate? No.

Listen to your body when you look at some examples.

For example, Be a Day-maker came from Alexandra Franzen. I loved that framing as soon as I heard it, and I knew that one belonged in my list.

Your guiding principles don’t have to be unique, they just have to fit.
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How do we let our guiding principles lead us?

Ask yourself, when are you in harmony with your guiding principles? What does it look like for you?
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For me, that might mean a willingness to have a challenging conversation. I’ve seen too often how resentment can build up when people don’t feel safe to express themselves. Inevitably as a business owner my personal guiding principles will show up in how I lead my team. If I see an issue I try to name it as soon as possible, and normalize sticky conversations. It’s not always easy, but by encouraging honesty over comfort, I’m living in alignment with my values, and that becomes part of our team culture.

Do your best to to identify what it looks like when you are living by your principles using real examples from your lived experience.

And finally, make it visible.

Whether it’s sticky notes on the wall, a manifesto, or a Notion dashboard, making these visible helps me remember to live in alignment with these values as best as I can every day.
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Go forth and live out your guiding principles!
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That's all for this week.

Thanks for being here!

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P.S. I’ve been talking about things like your ideal week, working with constraints, theming, and guiding principles because we’ve got a workshop coming up that will help you bring that big picture planning to life in your day-to-day. I’ll be sharing more about that in the weeks to come, but if you’re keen, you can get in on the capacity planning action now!

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