Ep 85 Creative Brains Need Different Business Structures: How to Stop Running Your Business in Survival Mode

Welcome back to the podcast, my gorgeous souls.

Today’s episode is a really important conversation for creative women in business, especially those of you who are wildly talented at what you do, but behind the scenes feel overwhelmed, overstimulated, emotionally drained, and like you’re constantly trying to catch up.

Because I truly don’t believe the issue for most creatives is capability.

I believe the issue is structure.

So many interior designers and creative business owners are trying to operate inside systems, schedules, and expectations that simply do not support the way their brain works best. And eventually, that leads to nervous system overload, burnout, and running a business fuelled by adrenaline rather than sustainability.

In this episode, I’m sharing my own experiences, the habits I had to unlearn, the structures I had to rebuild, and the practical toolkits that helped me create a business that supports my creativity rather than punishes it.

We’re talking about creative capacity, peak performance, time blocking, nervous system support, CEO days, white space, and how to stop building your business around survival mode.

This is your permission slip to build your business differently. To work smarter, softer, and more intentionally. And to create a business that feels good on the inside as well as the outside.

Join Lisa-Marie and the women in the Design Boss Diary family, follow on Instagram HERE and find more about how you can work with Lisa in 2026 and Beyond. 

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Ready to be supported inside your business and move forward with clarity, structure, and confidence?

If you’re at a point where you know things need to shift and you’re ready for guidance that actually holds you through that process there are several ways we can work together.

From high-proximity 1:1 mentorship to group spaces designed to build momentum and accountability, each experience is created to support you at different stages of your journey.

To explore what support would look like for you, reach out directly at designbossdiary@gmail.com and start the conversation. 2026 has a limited amount of spaces already. 

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See you in the next episode, from your Interior Design business strategist and soulful leadership business mentor x

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Welcome back to episode 85. How are you all doing, my gorgeous souls? So today I want to talk about something that creative women need to hear right now because so many interior design business owners they're not struggling with capability. They are wildly talented, but they're struggling with capacity, structure, nervous system overload, and they're trying to operate a creative business inside systems that were never built for creative minds. And I want to dive into today's conversation and give you a little bit of a helping hand, some toolkits, some support, talk to you about my journey of how I worked through it, so that you can hopefully at the end of this podcast be able to take some of those toolkits and implement them into your own business. So today's conversation is for the woman who constantly feels like they have 27 tabs open in their brain. The woman who is exceptional at what they do creatively, but behind the scenes they do feel overwhelmed, they feel overstimulated, they feel exhausted, emotionally drained, and they're constantly trying to catch up because I see this so often in the design industry, and I actually don't think the issue is capability, I think the issue comes down to structure and how we operate. I certainly know from my experience, which I'm going to be sharing, that I used to have habits built in a way that was not helping me and aiding me in the business. I think so many creatives are trying to force themselves into business models, schedules, routines, and expectations that simply do not support the way their brain works best. Now, as creatives, we are wildly talented on a particular part of our brain, but on a certain other part of our brain, we might really struggle to comprehend certain things. And as creatives, we need to lean into what works best for us. So what happens is as a creative, we swing between intense productivity and complete shutdown at times. What we want to do is we want to find happy mediums. Now, I coach and mentor so many women, and when I meet women for the first time, and I'm having conversations with them, they're telling me they work right up unto the wire. They push themselves through presentations, they overfill their diary, they say yes basically to far too much, they they overspill in all areas, and they sit at their desk for hours trying to force output. And then what happens afterwards? They completely crash. They need to go into a dark room, they need to take time off, they fall really, really unwell. And I want today's episode to feel like permission, permission to build your business in a way that supports your creativity rather than punishes it. And if I were to look at my own experience, when I was in my early years, I used to absolutely work the night shifts, push myself right up onto the deadline, I'd be printing mood boards out an hour before presentation, I'd be getting trays ready in the car sometimes. And I knew very early on in my business that that is not sustainable, that is not good practice to run your design studio. And I would force myself to sit at the desk for hours and hours and hours thinking, if I wasn't at my desk working, then actually I'm not running a business, and that's not that's that's not how it should be. I don't want you to work like that. So today we're gonna have a conversation about lots of different things around the structures and toolkit. So hopefully you're gonna walk away from this and you're going to be feel supported. And I want you to know, I want you to reach out to me after this podcast if anything has resonated so I can support you building an interior design business that works for you. So the first segment I want to cover is really understanding creative capacity. Now, creatives often confuse time capacity with energetic capacity. Okay, so you might physically have space in your diary, but mentally, emotionally, and creatively, you are at full capacity. You're 100% full capacity, you physically cannot give any more, okay? And with client-facing work, you know, it requires emotional energy. Presentations, they drain energy, you get decision fatigue a lot quicker, and we can overstimulate ourselves so much more. So, where I use my example of the late nights, the presentation boards, the constant tweaking, working right up to the final deadline. And did I get the project done? Yes, I would get the project done, but afterwards I would completely dissolve. I would need to sit in a dark room, I need a couple of days of recovery, I need to sit in silence, and I'd need to really look after myself. And that's when I thought, do you know what? If we're gonna grow and scale this business, we cannot work like this. This is basically working in survival mode. And I want you to sit and look at your capacity of understanding your peak performance levels, okay. I want you to think about when do you work best as a creative? And I want to start leaning into that, okay. I want you to start forcing yourself into a generic nine to five, and when I started to give myself permission to lean out of the nine to five, everything changed for me. Now, instead of asking how many hours should I be working in my business, I started saying to myself, when does my brain work best? When am I on peak performance? Okay, when do I focus really, really well? When does creativity flow at its best? When does admin feel at its easiest? And then when do I get those slumps mentally? And I started auditing and paying attention to all of that to start to build a structure. And I want to kind of offer the same advice to you so that you know there is no point sitting at your desk between 2 and 5 pm if you know that you are in an absolute slump and you cannot get through work. Your workload is even though it's the same, it's going to take two or three times as long to get through because you are dragging yourself through it. So if you are a morning peak performance person, then this is a great time to look at presentations and strategy and pricing and design development and proposals, things that take a lot of energy to do. Okay, maybe if you're an evening peak performance person, those things are best done in the evening. So I want you to think about when is your peak performance and lean into tasks that require a lot of energy. Then I want you to look at lower energy tasks and find a time that suits them best. And if that is maybe in the afternoon, or it might be after lunch, or you might find earlier on in the evening, then emails or sourcing or site visits or a little bit of admin or a meeting, if those work better for you when you are in a lower energy, then you know they are not going to be as hard. So the main thing is about creating a structure to work to your advantage. And as creatives, we know that sitting still at our desk nine to five doesn't help. So let's look at movement-based work as well. Being out in the fresh air, walking, sourcing, looking, getting our brains thinking, you know, driving, changing our environment, allowing our brains to decompress, allowing our brains to think about a scheme, allowing our brains to work through the creative output that it needs. And whilst some people don't like being put into a rigid structure, it's not that we're building a rigid structure, and it's not because we're becoming more stricter, but we're trying to become more supported within ourselves to support our capacity, work smarter, not harder. Okay, and then we also want to look at separating on the business versus in the business. Okay, now what I mean by that is in the business will be your client work, your presentations, your sourcing, your installations, your procurement, your revisions, your project management, all of your client-based work. And on the business work is your marketing, your visibility, your finances, your forecasting, your lead generation, your systems, your sales, your boundaries, your content, your client experiences, everything to do to make your business operate. Okay? Now, one of the biggest reasons women in the creative industry can feel overwhelmed is because they're trying to do both at the same time. And what I want you to do and introduce to you in your business is time blocking. So let's look at CEO days, let's look at creative days, let's look at admin blocking days, let's look at visibility blocking. And if these are things that you naturally would struggle with, let's actually sit down and structure days that it's really going to support you. So I know that I love my Mondays being my CEO days. I look at my admin, I look at my on-the-business days, and for the rest of the week, I really look at my in-the-business, my client work, my meetings, my calls. So try and time block a little bit of time in your diary for a particular day or days and lean into peak performance for tasks that you feel heavier with because that is when your energy is going to be at its highest to get through it. Okay. When everything lives in one giant mental pile, the nervous system never switches off. And it's really important that we allow ourselves as creatives to decompress with white space in our diaries as well. We always feel like we're go, go, go. And you most probably are listening to this going, but yeah, Lisa, when am I ever going to build white space into my diary? I've got a family, I've got kids, I've got a business to run, I never get space for myself. And actually, you're not giving yourself the permission to allow space for yourself, and that's one of the big key reasons why our nervous system, you know, goes off on one, we feel overwhelmed, we feel like the water's up to our neck load. And it's about sitting down once a week and looking at our diary and looking at that appropriate time blocking, even if it's just scheduling a bath in, have it in your diary twice a week, a really beautiful bath in the evenings. Allow yourself to soak, allow yourself to decompress. Maybe it's going out to do some yoga, maybe it's going out for a really lovely walk, getting some fresh air in. If you work from home, time block that time to say in lunchtime, I'm going to go for a 20-minute walk around the block, feel the elements, feel the fresh air, and come in and make some lunch and then go back to my desk. The power of that natural break will support your nervous system and support your brain capacity to be able to have these little blocks of decompression so that you can get through the next tasks and the next tasks. And when I started time blocking, I absolutely love the Pomodoro time block effect, but when I started to build a schedule on Excel and time blocked and put particular things in in particular days when I knew I was on peak performance, I noticed a huge shift in how I worked and the capacity of what I could cover as well. We also want to stop building our businesses around adrenaline, okay? And so many creatives are knowingly building their businesses around adrenaline because pressure becomes the motivator. Deadline panic becomes the system, it's what we lean into. Creatives thrive on. I know I do it really well if I'm up against a deadline and I just know I need to get it done. And actually, I don't work as well as when I'm structured. That needs to change. To run a sustainable, thriving, feel-good business. You cannot be working up against the wire because eventually our body starts believing that stress is productivity and that will hit hard really emotionally, not only to you but to your family when something happens. So we need to teach ourselves that breathing room is absolute necessity within our business. Internal deadlines before client deadlines. Okay, so the breathing room to have your own internal business deadline before the client deadline. And this is something that I used to do when I was on a client presentation deadline. If I had it in, say for the eighth of the month, I always used to pull the deadline to the fourth or the third to give myself some breathing room to really look at the presentation, sit and you know, assess over it, look at is that right for the client? Does anything need tweaking? And then give myself that breathing room to go into the presentation. This is what we call presentation buffer, and we build this white space in our diary to allow ourselves to breathe and to have overflow time as well. And we also need recovery time after launches, installations, you know, heavy procurement days, things like that, because it also allows our brain to quietly shut down when we need it to shut down. So, for example, if your presentation is on a Friday, then your internal completion date should be a Wednesday, but then you don't want to be booking any any heavy meetings in for the Monday because you're going to feel that Sunday dread. So it's really, really important that you need to make sure that we are blocking out that breathing room, that white space, and we really stop the adrenaline running through ourselves and running through our business. And then we want to look at the practical systems and software that we can introduce into our business to really help us. Now, I'm an old school girly, I absolutely love Google Calendar and Excel, but there's there are some really great practical and calming tools out there like Notion, Asana, ClickUp, and simple project trackers to be able to help and support you, input information into these to allow you to structure your business on a weekly basis to support you. Now, the tool itself is not the transformation, it's the consistency around how you're using the tools. So you want to look at colour coding blocks, project capacity tracking, weekly planning sessions, monthly forecasting, visible workload management. And this is where a coach and mentor really comes into play, is because a coach and mentor can actually support you with your structure, hold you accountable, help you ebb and flow into your peak performance and when you need to pull back. So I want you to sit and think about if you were to introduce any practical systems or software into your business to support you from today, what would they be? What do you like? Are you an old school girly or guy that you absolutely love an Excel spreadsheet? Or do you want to take it a notch up and go onto Notion or Asana and really think about how you're utilising that piece of software? It's also about not adding overwhelm. And some of you might be sitting there thinking, Lisa, I haven't got time to breathe. How am I even going to download a new piece of software and start learning it and inputting it in? And what I would say with that is if you are at that point, just simply time blocking in your Google Calendar or printing out you know an old school sheet with times on it and dates and kind of writing things in just to kind of get it out of your head and onto paper, is such a mental relief that it will support you. So lean into something that you feel is going to work for you. And I know from my experience, I sit down on a Sunday evening every week and really look at my diary for the week ahead. So I mentally know what's happening every single day, and I can understand the time blocks, I can understand when I've got areas of decompression, when I've got to really lean into peak performance levels of working through client work, meetings, deadlines, etc. And I set myself up for the week. I also have an Excel document which has my Monday to Friday on it, and I can go a lot deeper into seeing all of those spaces laid out and time block areas in for me as well. So I do it across my Google Calendar as well as an Excel document, and it's also about leaning into it and understanding it and embracing it as well. I think that's the most important, the important part, the key, is to allow yourself the time to sit down and say, right, what have I got going on this week? What are my key focuses? And actually, let's be a little bit more gentler to myself because we cannot work at full pelt, at full capacity every single day. As a woman, we also have hormonal fluctures, we have time of the months, we have periods and cycles where we're not feeling our best, and other days we're feeling like we can take on the world. So it's about ebbing and flowing into really knowing yourself, knowing your peak performance levels, and building that all around your business with your capacity and your lead times and your deadlines as well, so that you're not running yourself into the ground. If this episode has resonated with you, and if you know you're absolutely wildly creative, but you're craving more support around the structure of your business, the structure of you being the best businesswoman you can be to build that feel-good business, then this is exactly the kind of work I do inside my world. And inside my one-to-one mentorship, it's not for everyone, but it's for the woman that wants to build a structured business model to really support her capacity, support her with her pricing, her visibility, her forecasting, her systems, her growth, and to allow her the freedom to take time off when she needs it. To look at what her week really looks like. Does she want a three-day week or does she want a five-day week? Or maybe does she not want to work on the last week of the month either? And inside the mentorships, we build a business that actually feels really safe to hold on a long term as well. Because I truly believe women deserve businesses that feel good on the inside as well as the outside, and for me, it's so important that I am supporting a woman build a business that is right for her as well. So there are details in the show notes of how you can reach out to me if you want to ask me a question or you want to inquire working on a one-to-one mentorship. But what I want you to take from today is a couple of the tools that we've talked about and really think about how do you want your business to work for you? How do you want your business to flow? How do you want to work at peak performance? And how do you want to get through certain parts of the day in areas within your business that you can ebb and flow in and out of. Just remember to be kind to yourself. Rome wasn't built in a day, and business is about being on a journey. It's not about doing it all at once, but it's about doing it in the right way with the right structures so that you're not going back and double handling work or creating more work for yourselves or having to rip down, dismantle, and rebuild. There's certain way businesses should be done. And every woman deserves a business that works for her. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode and I would absolutely love to hear from you with what parts have resonated. But until next time, thank you for listening and I will be back next week with another Powerful Packed podcast.