Open space on your calendar does not automatically make you a different leader.

I want to say that again, because I learned it the hard way.

You can cut meetings. You can protect a morning. You can do everything we talked about in Part One. And you can still find yourself right back where you started, scattered, reactive, convinced that everything depends on you.

That is what Part Two of this conversation with Joey Gourdji is about. Not just how to create white space, but what to actually do with it. And more importantly, what has to change inside you before any of it sticks.

If you have not listened to Part One yet, go back. This will make so much more sense if you do. But if you are here and you are ready, let’s go.

Watch the Full Episode Here: 

The Flywheel Nobody Warns You About

Joey opened Part Two with something that stopped me cold.

She described two flywheels. The overwhelm flywheel goes like this: you are overcommitted, so your brain is cluttered. When your brain is cluttered, you cannot make good decisions. When you cannot make good decisions, your business suffers. When your business suffers, you feel the pressure and take on more. And round and round it goes until you are in genuine scarcity, not enough money, not enough time, spinning your wheels.

The abundance flywheel runs the other direction. Better choices create more white space. More white space creates better decisions. Better decisions produce better results. Better results make it easier to feel abundant. And from abundance, good choices come naturally.

The entry point to the second flywheel is the same regardless of where you are right now. You start making different choices. Today. Not after you get the business to a certain point. Now.

The lesson: Your business is a result of you. If you are not in a good place, you are driving it somewhere worse. The work starts with you, not with your calendar.

SLED: The Four Moves That Create Space

Joey uses an acronym to organize the choices that lead to white space. It is called SLED, because you do not want to slide.

Stop: Pause or eliminate the lower-impact activities in your business. The things that take your time and do not move anything forward. This is the mushroom coffee from Part One. Anything low impact goes, whether it takes you five minutes or five hours.

Limits: Set boundaries on your calendar availability. Time blocking. Meetings that end when they are supposed to end. Protecting the hours that matter most so you are not just getting pulled wherever the day takes you.

Efficiencies: Look at the high-impact work and ask whether it has to take as long as it does. AI tools, better systems, smarter processes. There is almost always time to reclaim here.

Delegate: Identify what does not actually have to be done by you and hand it off. This one is harder than it sounds. We will get to why.

These four moves are the mechanics. But using them well requires a tool that tells you which things belong in which category.

The lesson: You cannot delegate your way out of a calendar that has no order to it. SLED only works when you know what actually matters.

The Effort-Impact Matrix

This comes from Stephen Covey’s work. Joey did not invent it and neither did I, but the way she taught it to me made it click in a way nothing else had.

Picture a simple grid. The vertical axis is impact, how much a given activity actually moves your business. The horizontal axis is effort, how much time and energy it costs you.

Anything on the bottom half of that grid is low impact. It does not matter whether it takes you twenty minutes or two hours. If it is not moving your business forward, it belongs in the stop category. Get rid of it.

Anything high impact and high effort is where you look for efficiencies and delegation. These are your food and water, you need them but you do not need to be doing all of them yourself at the level of energy they currently require.

Anything high impact and low effort is your sweet spot. Those activities are gold. Protect them.

Joey’s tip for making this feel less overwhelming: put concrete numbers on it. Decide what counts as high effort for your business, maybe anything over an hour a week. Put a financial number on impact. You do not need to be perfect. Directionally accurate is good enough. And usually, Joey says, your gut already knows. The numbers just give you the confidence to trust it.

The lesson: Knowing your numbers is not optional here. You cannot sort what you cannot measure. Even a rough estimate is better than going by how something feels on a hard day.

The State You Are In Matters More Than the Framework

Here is the part that surprised me most when Joey taught it to me.

The effort-impact matrix is a cognitive exercise. You sit down, you think, you sort. And the quality of that thinking depends entirely on the state you are in when you do it.

Joey introduced me to a model from Melinda Cohen’s book Sustainable Success, the Four Levels of Consciousness. There are four states.

To Me is the victim state. Nothing I do makes a difference. The ocean is too big. I cannot fight it. This is your signal that something needs to change, not your permanent address.

By Me is where most driven store owners live. This is the I-will-figure-this-out energy that built your store. Resilient. Relentless. Taking control. It is productive, and it is also exhausting, because it is built on force.

Through Me is where things flow. You let go of judgment. You let go of needing to control the outcome. The right decisions come through you rather than being pushed out by you. This is where the matrix actually works where you can sit down and see clearly what matters and what does not.

As Me is full alignment. Full presence. Joey describes it as nearly a religious experience. It is the outcome of spending enough time in Through Me.

When I first heard this, I went straight to Through Me and stayed there in my head, convinced that By Me was the problem and I needed to leave it behind. Joey corrected me. Every state has a purpose. To Me tells you something is wrong. By Me gets things done. Through Me is where the magic happens. You are not trying to eliminate the lower states. You are learning to recognize them and move through them faster.

The fastest way to move from By Me to Through Me when you are in the thick of overwhelm? Box breathing. Four seconds in, hold for four, four seconds out, hold for four, repeat. Joey keeps a literal box with the word “breathe” on her screen. It sounds too simple. It is proven.

There is no situation you cannot make worse by overreacting. The By Me state takes the reins and makes a series of decisions that turn a hard situation into a worse one. Box breathing interrupts that before it starts.

The lesson: If everything on your list feels urgent and high impact when you sit down with the matrix, that is not a prioritization problem. That is a state problem. Get centered first. Then sort.

The Thing That Holds It All Together

I have failed at this work. More than once.

I would get it right for a stretch, more space on the calendar, clearer head, better decisions and then I would slide back. Fall into doing everything myself. Convince myself that this particular thing really did require me. Find a hundred reasons why right now was not the right time to protect my morning.

What I did not understand until recently is that it was not a scheduling problem. It was a belief problem.

Joey calls the solution Positive Brainwashing. The name is intentional. Here is what it is in practice: you identify the automatic negative thoughts running in the background of your mind, the ones driving the decisions you keep making even when you know better and you deliberately rewrite them.

I have a recording I listen to most mornings. About ten minutes. I do it outside with my coffee, getting some sun in, which Andrew Huberman has convinced me matters. It covers what I believe about myself, about what is possible, about the kind of leader and mother and wife and friend I want to be.

It is not affirmations in the eye-roll sense. It is a decision filter. When I am in a hard moment and someone asks me something, I know what I actually believe and I can act from that instead of from fear or habit.

Joey will ask me mid-coaching: don’t you believe the best in people? And sometimes I have to stop and say, you are right, I am not acting like I do right now. And then I can get back to it.

Joey had a season of serious health challenges and family difficulty. She was crying nearly every day. And she recorded herself saying I am overflowing with positivity. Obviously not true in that moment. Two weeks later, she noticed herself actually becoming that person. Not because she forced it. Because she had been telling herself a different story long enough that it became the one she lived from.

This is the cement that holds everything else together. The SLED framework works. The matrix works. The breathing works. But without the belief work underneath it, you will build white space and fill it right back up before you know what happened.

The lesson: Behind every bad action is an outdated belief. You cannot think your way into new behavior. You have to believe your way there first.

Your Millie Moment

Joey’s Millie Moment from this conversation was not a number or a business result. It was this: every single day, she gets to live in choice. She gets to live in alignment with her values. That is her win.

It started, she said, not with a framework or a tool, but with believing she deserved to be happy. That it was possible to be successful and also be the person she wanted to be.

Here is where to start this week.

Name the state you are in right now. Not the state you want to be in. The one you are actually in. To Me, By Me, or Through Me. No judgment. Just awareness.

Try one box breath before you open your task list tomorrow. Four seconds in, hold, four seconds out, hold. Do it once. Notice if the list looks different after.

Write down one automatic negative thought you notice running this week. Just one. The one that shows up most often. The one that sounds like “I have to do this myself” or “I don’t have time” or “this won’t work for someone like me.” Write it down. That is your starting point.

Grab the Become Her resource in the show notes. It is free. It is the companion to everything we talked about in this episode and it is the thing that helped me actually do this work instead of just understanding it.

And if you skipped Part One, go back. The water, food, and mushroom coffee framework lives there. So does the carrot analogy. You need both parts for the full picture.

Resources & Links

💚 Remember: White space is not the goal. It is the condition. What you do with it, who you become inside it, that is the whole point. You are astonishingly fabulous and you are loved. Now go protect some space and use it well.