Have you ever reached the end of the day and wondered why everything suddenly feels harder than it should? You still love your work. You still care deeply about your clients and your team. But the decisions feel heavier, the motivation isn't quite there, and even the simplest tasks seem to take more effort than they used to.

This episode was inspired by The Cognitive Athlete by Clint Rahe, a book we recently explored in our Connection Book Club. It gave me a completely different way of thinking about the mental demands of running an allied health practice and why so many practice owners are feeling tired, even when they aren't necessarily burnt out.

Sometimes the problem isn't that we need another productivity hack. Sometimes we simply need to recognise that our brains have been working incredibly hard, and they deserve the same care and recovery we would give our bodies.

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why running an allied health practice creates an enormous cognitive load
• The difference between physical tiredness and cognitive fatigue
• Why many practice owners mistake fatigue for a lack of discipline or productivity
• What elite athletes can teach us about preparation, performance and recovery
• The importance of recognising the different seasons of business and leadership
• A simple question that helps cut through the overwhelm: "If I could only work for two hours today, what would I choose to work on?"
• Why recovery isn't something we earn after finishing the work, it's part of doing meaningful work well.

My biggest takeaway

One of the biggest lessons this book gave me was recognising that I spend a lot of time intentionally managing my business, but not nearly enough time intentionally managing myself.

As practice owners, we often expect ourselves to think clearly, make great decisions and perform at a high level every single day. But just because we can keep going doesn't mean we should.

Maybe the answer isn't squeezing more into our day. Maybe it's creating more opportunities to recover before we reach the point where everything starts to feel flat.

If this episode leaves you with one thought, I hope it's this:

You're not failing. You might simply be cognitively tired.

Giving yourself permission to recover isn't selfish... it might just be one of the most important leadership decisions you make.

Thank you so much for listening. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love to invite you to learn more about The Connection, our membership for allied health practice owners. It's a place to connect, learn, reflect and remember that you don't have to navigate practice ownership on your own.

You can find out more and explore our free resources at https://theconnectionco.com.au

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Welcome to My Good Allied Health Practice, the podcast for allied health business owners who are looking to bring smart and heart together on their journey.

On the podcast, I'll cover things about being vulnerable and brave, pivoting failures, good wins, things that work, things that don't work, and I'll talk with other practice owners who are doing good in their journeys. I'm Amy Geach, practice owner and mum, and I'm here because I believe in you. So let's go forward on this journey together.

Hi and welcome back to My Good Allied Health Practice.

I am your host, Amy Geach, and today I want to share with you some thoughts from a book we recently read in our book club, which we host, Inside the Connection. It's part of our membership and our members have complimentary access to our book club, which we run quarterly within the membership.

Now, the book we covered recently is called the Cognitive Athlete, and it's by an author called Clint Ray. And it's one of those books that I found found myself referring back to mentally over the past few weeks.

Not because it was telling me something I didn't already know, but because it gave me a different lens through which I could really look at something that I see all the time in practice owners, but all the time in myself as well. Over the years, I have had hundreds of conversations with allied health business owners.

Some are just starting out, some have small teams, some have much larger teams, and they all have different goals and different challenges. But there is one thing I hear remarkably often. I hear it in myself as well. People are tired. They're not necessarily unhappy.

They're not necessarily in full blown burnout. They're not necessarily wanting to walk away from their business or although some of them do tell me at particular times they want to blow it all up.

But they are tired. A type of tiredness that can often feel really difficult to explain to other people.

The type where you still love your work and you still care really deeply about clients and your team.

And yet there are days when everything just feels so much harder than it should and the decisions feel heavier and the problems, they just feel bigger. And a lot of the time the motivation isn't quite where we would normally want it to be.

So when I was reading this book, the Cognitive Athlete, I really found myself wondering whether part of the challenge is that we often underestimate just how mentally demanding practice ownership actually is. Because when most people think about work, they think about time.

How many hours they're working, how many clients they're seeing, how many tasks they're completing. But this book encourages us to think about energy and cognitive load instead.

And I think that's a really interesting conversation because we spend our days thinking as clinicians, we spend our days solving problems. We're assessing situations all the time.

We're making decisions, we're prioritizing, we're communicating, we're supporting people through some really difficult moments. We're managing emotions, we're learning a lot of new information, and we are constantly adapting our approach as we go.

And if you're also, then on top of that, a practice owner, you're doing all of that while simultaneously leading a team.

Or if you're a solo practice owner, leading yourself, making financial decisions, planning for the future, dealing with all the operational issues that come with running a business, and just trying to keep it all happening and working. And when you say it out loud, it's actually quite a lot. Right?

Yet I think many of us have become so accustomed to carrying that load that we don't really stop to acknowledge it anymore. We have absolutely normalized it. We simply get up each day and. And we do what needs to be done. And I'm the same. I'm the same.

The book talks about how many of us operate in a state of constant forward motion. There's always another email to answer, another decision to make, another opportunity to explore, another challenge to navigate.

And we're kind of on a lot. And what struck me was that most of us have become incredibly good at managing physical workloads. Incredibly good.

And we expect ourselves to be incredibly good at managing mental workloads as well. If somebody asked us to run a marathon every day, we'd recognize fairly quickly that wasn't sustainable from a physical point of view.

Yet many of us ask our brains to operate at maximum capacity day after day after day, often without giving much thought at all to how we're going to recover. And I see this show up. I'm having conversations with practice owners over the last few months.

The tiredness is there, but people are starting to feel flat.

And that makes me really sad because I've been in that place before where you just feel flat and you're going through the motions and you're getting up every day and you're doing all the work and you're not getting it all done, and you get up the next day and you try again and eventually you do start feeling flat.

One of the things that's important to talk about here is that tiredness that doesn't go away with one good sleep, because this is one of the concepts discussed in the book with regards to cognitive fatigue.

And I found myself thinking about this quite a bit because I suspect that many practice owners have experienced it without necessarily having a name for it. I think they don't want to go to the necessarily the burnout pathway. We seem to be.

We try and kind of repel that idea, even though I think a lot of practice owners are in burnout or in the pre stages to burnout. But we know what physical tiredness feels like, right? Maybe we've had, you know, the late nights or you've done a lot of traveling.

We've had a busy week. We know when we're tired and we know what that kind of looks like. But sometimes cognitive fatigue feels a little bit different.

It's sitting down to write something and you find that your brain just feels foggy and you can't write it. You read the same email twice because it didn't quite sink in the first time you read it.

Or it might be looking at a task that you've completed many times before and just struggling to get through it for the 10th time or the 12th time or the 20th time. It's often finding yourself more easily distracted or more reactive or more emotional or less creative or less decisive.

These are all things that can show up when we have cognitive fatigue. And I think it's important because what then happens is many business owners assume that there's something wrong with them.

They tell themselves they need to be more disciplined or more organized or more productive. And I've done this to myself before.

I have berated myself internally and my husband will vouch for this because I talked to him about it, that if I was just more organized, I would get through so much more stuff. But perhaps what we actually need is more recovery, not more time in the day, more recovery, because we're not failing. We are simply bloody tired.

And that's one of the thoughts that I kept coming back to while reading this book, is I didn't put enough emphasis on my cognitive fatigue. And the.

The way I was approaching work and how that was stitching myself up the way I was approaching work and trying to work in performance mode all the time. I was the one contributing to having trouble making decisions or feeling tired or simple tasks just feeling harder than they should.

Now, the book is based on concepts that have been developed around how athletes train, because they don't train to perform every single day. This central idea runs through the book that athletes don't just train randomly.

They don't wake up in the morning and See how hard they can push themselves. They follow structured cycles, cycles of preparation, performance and recovery.

And I really found myself wondering what would happen in my life if I adopted a similar mindset. Because one thing I've noticed in many practice owners is we work through every week in peak performance mode. Or well, we try to.

I hear people and I can see it all the time, that every month should be productive. Every initiative should be forward, every opportunity should be pursued, every project should be completed.

And when that doesn't happen, we feel like we didn't do a good job or we feel guilty or what are we doing or this isn't working, I'm not good at this. Gonna blow it all up and go and work at Bunnings. That's a common thing people get to.

We always tell ourselves we should be doing more, but perhaps that's not how sustainable performance works. We know this, we know this. There are seasons in business and there are seasons in life.

And I found this so much being a business owner, I really lean into this idea of seasons because there are times when we really need to either build foundations or just take a step back and strengthen some of the foundations before we can do anything else else. But there are also times when we are learning or when we're implementing or when we have chosen a growth pathway.

And there are times when we simply need to just try and maintain what we have built and keep it afloat. Some of you listening might be in that stage right now. And when I look back over my business years, I see all of those seasons for sure.

And when I look at other business owners that I work with, I have the privilege of seeing them in all sorts of different seasons in their business as well. And I think the challenge comes when we expect ourselves to be in growth and performance season all the time. It's not the reality.

Now, one of the questions I loved in the book, which really challenged my thinking, was if I could only work for two hours today, what would I work on? I think it's such a wonderful question because it cuts through so much noise.

As business owners, there is a never ending supply of things to do, right? We're never short of a to do list. The list goes on.

In fact, if you're anything like me, there are probably enough ideas sitting in a notebook right now to keep you busy for the next five years. So the challenge isn't identifying things to do. The challenge is identifying what matters most.

And I think that's really important because our attention is one of the most valuable resources. But we're not nurturing it. Every decision we make about where to direct our attention is also a decision about where we're not directing it.

And the book talks quite a lot about focusing on work that creates the greatest impact, rather than simply reacting to whatever arrives next. And I suspect that's something many of us could like.

We know, but we can always benefit from revisiting it over and over again and trying to find ways in each week that we can keep refining that focus. The other section that I really enjoyed reading about in the book was around recovery.

And I think many practice owners have this tendency to view recovery as something that happens once all the work is finished. But the problem, of course, is the work is never finished. Is it really? My work is never finished.

There's always something else, another project, another idea. Maybe it's another challenge or another opportunity, another thing that could be improved.

And if we're waiting until everything is done before we commit to greater recovery, we may be waiting a very, very, very long time. And what I appreciated about the athlete analogy is that recovery isn't treated as a reward, it's treated as an equal part of the system.

Athletes understand that recovery is what allows them to continue performing at a high level, whereas we don't prioritize it like that. We expect to continue performing at a high level without the rest part.

We try and fit more in the day, we sleep less, we're up late at night finishing reports off or whatever it might be. And without built in recovery, our performance eventually declines. And I think that's what's happening for the people that feel flat.

That's what's happening for the people that just feel like it's a little bit hopeless at the moment. There's a real valuable lesson in here for us, particularly because many of us, I think, genuinely enjoy what we do.

We really care about our clients, we really care about our teams, and we really care about making a difference. And sometimes that passion can make it difficult to recognize when we need to step back and replenish our own energy.

As I finished reading this book, I really found myself wondering whether many of us are trying to solve the wrong problem. We spend a lot of time looking for better productivity systems, better planning tools, better ways to get more done.

I've done it myself, and I've talked about it in past podcast episodes. For sure, there are certainly value in those things and finding ways to feel more productive during the day.

But perhaps an equally important question is whether we're creating the conditions that allow us to keep doing meaningful Work over the long term, whether we're paying attention to our energy, whether we're recognizing the season that we are currently in, whether we're giving ourselves permission to recover before we get to the breaking point. And if you're struggling to give yourself permission for that, I will write you out a permission slip that you can stop to recover.

One of the biggest lessons I think I got from the cognitive athlete is, I think it was around questioning myself, am I being as intentional about managing myself, my cognitive fatigue, as I am about managing the business? And the answer was no. It was a big fat no. Actually. I'm really good at managing the business and being able to see when I.

When I need to push the business forward, when I need to, to sit in a holding pattern and, and give the business some recovery time, when I need to rebuild the foundations. Like, I can look at all of that from a business point of view and know what I'm doing. And I can set really intentional goals and targets around that.

But definitely reading this book highlighted for me that I don't give the same intentional management to myself and how I'm approaching my work. And I. I often expect myself to work at peak performance. I'll get really frustrated at myself when I'm not able to do that. I didn't get as.

Didn't get as much done today. That's a heavy feeling I carry when I go to bed at night. And I don't feel I was as productive as I wanted to be.

And I think what I taken away from this book is, is that's on me. That's on me. Because I haven't prioritized my cognitive function. I have let myself derail into cognitive fatigue without even realizing.

And there are some really great tips in the book. Small things, small tweaks. That's one of the reasons I love the book so much. Tiny things we can do that will help. So let me give you an example.

I used to do meal planning. I was, I was actually delayed getting on the meal planning train. That. That's changed.

So I was doing meal planning, and then I dropped off for a while recently. Like, I hadn't, I hadn't done it for months. And, and I didn't even know when we dropped off or why or how that even happened.

But what I was finding was then I'd get to the end of the day and go, oh, what are we having for dinner? I had no idea. I'd go to the fridge. My. I was really struggling to kind of. I don't even know If I want that, that's boring.

Oh, we had pasta the other night. Like, I just felt really like bleh about cooking and I really like cooking, so I was getting frustrated about it.

I've gone back to meal planning and game changer. It's such a game changer because it's one less decision. Actually, there's probably multiple less decisions that go on throughout my afternoon around.

What are we having for dinner? I don't have to think about what we're. I don't have to think about whether we've got the ingredients to make what I wanted to make.

I don't have to think about the timing or when I'm going to start cooking it. A lot of my stuff is pre cooked and I've done that on the weekend because I like cooking on the weekend.

I put my music on and off I go in the kitchen. I really like it. And so I've gone back to that.

And that's an example of a tweak that you can make to decrease the number of decisions being made during the day. So you're lessening your decision fatigue, for example. So that's one area that I think is really good.

I think one of the other ones that I loved hearing about in the book is this blend we have, right? We blend the end of a workday in with home life, right? And we can do this in a number of ways.

We either don't have a finish for work and so the thoughts just keep going. We carry a lot of it. It's still there, isn't it, at nighttime.

Like the conversation you had with the client earlier in the day, that's still there in your brain at nighttime. The payroll that you did, that's still there in your brain at nighttime.

The email you didn't get back to, that's still there in your brain at nighttime. And sometimes that's because we didn't finish work off.

And I don't mean that in a way that we didn't get through all the to do list and that's why, but it's. We didn't have a kind of closing routine. We didn't let go what we didn't get done. We didn't make a plan for the next day.

So we know we've got a space to address those things the following day. And it doesn't need to be in the nighttime. And we didn't physically shut off from work. I'll often just get. Get up and walk away from my laptop.

It just stays on all night.

Whereas in the book it suggests physically close it down, shut the laptop down and put it somewhere so you've got that physical cue that work has stopped there.

So there's lots of great examples in the book and tips and ideas for how to reduce your cognitive fatigue, how to be more alert, how to prepare yourself for higher performance, what to do when you need to work in high performance, and then how to recover. And it's recovery in small bite size moments. So we're not saying, right, you've got to have two months off work to recover.

They're just small things throughout the day which can help, but also planned things throughout the year. So you've got things to look forward to and proper breaks when you're not expecting yourself to work at peak performance.

Now, if you've Enjoy today's conversation, we have a complimentary book club. It's inside our connection membership and each quarter I choose a book. It gets mailed out to all of the members who want to be part of our book club.

And for those that don't feel they've got time to read or they feel it's a bit easier for them in terms of how they learn or consume information, you can get the option of an audio book as well and we read it and then we have a summary session where I unpack the ideas, kind of discuss what resonates, what doesn't, and what are we going to take away from that book and what can we put in place. So if that sounds like something you'd enjoy. A couple of things I want to share with you today.

The first one is you can jump across to our website and have a look at our information about becoming a member. We would love to have you there.

We've got lots of beautiful, amazing allied health practice owners in the connection and it's a really beautiful place to feel supported and connect with other people and connect back with yourself a little bit more as well.

And then the second thing I wanted to share with you is over on our website under Resources we also have a great free Download which is 21 great books to read for practice owners. So if you're looking for a book to read, you can head over to our website and download that resource for free.

Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I always appreciate you listening in and I look forward to sharing some ideas with you again soon. Thanks so much. Thank you for being here.

I am incredibly grateful. If you have a friend that would find this helpful, please go ahead and share it with them too.

You can learn more about me and how to be part of my Allied Health Connection community over at theconnectionco.com au.