How to grow a business when the world is burning

It’s been a really fucking awful week. In an age of fear, bigotry, and fascism on the rise, seeing children in cages was a new low for an already horrible regime.

With Brexit still on course to wreck it’s cultural and economic destruction in my own country, the ongoing Windrush scandal revisiting my own countries vile ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy, the summer refugee ‘season‘ heating up in the Mediterranean (when God how many people fleeing unimaginable terror in Syria will drown after being turned away by Spain, Italy, and other European countries), the seemingly endless horror of the war in Syria, the sight of children screaming for their parents was too much to bear.

Yet bear it we must. Bear it we did. Not because there’s some sort of moral medal to be won for absorbing human tragedy, but because to turn away risks becoming complicit.

And yet this is really fucking hard.

I lost many hours of ‘work’ time this week because I was too upset to do the things I’d planned to do. Most of my calls with clients and colleagues also focused in part on the horror we were witnessing. We emailed, we called, we raged, we shared on social media, we donated.

Some even went and put themselves physically in front of detention centers. Some were protesting this weekend.

And many, many, many of us felt guilty that we couldn’t do MORE. Felt guilty when we had to pull away. Felt conflicted about getting with work, doing the things to run and grow our businesses.

Because there are times when it feels too much. When it feels like to retreat, to withdraw, to forget about the horror is a betrayal. is giving in and letting the evil win.

So how the hell do you grow a business when the world is burning?

It’s too big a question for me to answer on my own. So I put in an emergency call to my two besties in business – Lara Heacock from Kind Over Matter and Liz Applegate from the Midlife Schmidlife podcast. Liz, Lara and I talk about this stuff repeatedly – how Do you keep going? How much is enough? How to care for ourselves without feeling guilty for taking the time out? What do you do when you want to fucking scream at the cruelty and the horror unfolding?

Like I say, I don’t have the answers. But between us, we came up with some suggestions. Some things that can help. Some things that can give perspective. And I recorded our conversation. And you can listen to it here.

We talk:

Self-care in the age of Trump
Share what we do when it all feels too much
Share practical things we’ve done and are intending to do that contribute to the reduction of harm being done.
And what has actually given us some joy this week – even in the midst of all this horror.