As a leader, it’s easy to get caught up in the demands of your role and neglect your own well-being. But what if we told you that personal growth and self-care aren’t just important for your personal life — they’re essential for your success as a CEO? Join Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo in the final installment of ‘From Solo To CEO,’ closing out with a topic that’s often overlooked: how to balance the demands of leadership with your own personal growth and self-care. They talk about how you can thrive as both a CEO and an individual by prioritizing both. Tune in and explore how investing in yourself as a CEO leads to better decisions, stronger leadership, and a more sustainable and fulfilling career.
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From Solo To CEO: How To Thrive As A Leader By Valuing Self-Care (Part 4)
In this episode, we are closing out our From Solo to CEO series with a topic that I think actually, Gwen, is overlooked way too often, which is how to balance the demands of leadership with your own personal growth and self-care. Leading a growing business is so exciting, but it comes with stress and challenges that take a toll on everybody’s well-being.
In this episode, we are going to talk you through how you can thrive as both a CEO and an actual living, breathing human by prioritizing your personal growth and well-being. I’m here with my absolute favorite operations expert, Gwen Bortner. I just think that we need to talk about this more, especially in public settings, Gwen. These conversations happen behind closed doors all the time, but I very rarely hear anybody publicly talk about why it is so important to focus on your own individual growth as a CEO while balancing the dual responsibilities of leading your team and leading yourself.
I’m just curious, Gwen, if you have maybe a quick story because your career spans over 40 years. I don’t want to age you more than the calendar already has. I’ll say it like that. I’m curious. From your own experience, maybe you can come up with a quick example of how personal growth has impacted your own leadership journey.
Personal Growth as a Business Investment
It’s interesting because I’ve always seen all three of these integrated. It may have been one of the reasons that I had quite a bit of early success in my life career thing. Part of it is, as you said, that I’ve been doing this for many years now, and part of that is that I started young. Part of this was being able to establish some habits and behaviors early in my process.
One of the things that I think it’s important to acknowledge is depending on what your personal path has been, and there are so many choices along this path. There’s practically an infinite number of choices along the path, this may feel more intuitive for you because you’ve been doing it for a long time. This may feel completely counterintuitive because it goes against everything, all of the trainings, all of the behaviors, all of the actions you’ve been taking. For me, what I saw was when I grow as a person, I can’t help but grow as a leader.
I know that’s not absolutely true, but there was also a lot of natural leader instincts behaviors at a very young age. I’m not even talking about adulthood. I’m talking about junior high. Those things always tied together for me. That’s part of the reason. I also have always had a pretty strong understanding that if I’m not at my best, there’s no way I can be at my best for anyone else, which is back to the self-care piece.
The way I often thought about it is I am selfish and I’m okay with it. Where a lot of women have been taught, “No, you can’t be selfish,” and they see self-care as selfish instead of self-care. For me, this has been a super obvious easy journey and I know that I am the unicorn and I get that and I acknowledge it when I’m working with my clients. I don’t expect them to have anything close to my same experience.
I think that makes everybody feel better, that we are not expected to be like you, Gwen, because you are a super human.
No one wants to be like me. Trust me, they don’t want to be like me
When CEO’s Forget Self-Care
What I see is this expectation that entrepreneurs are always supposed to be on in order to run their businesses successfully. I have children. I remember seeing a meme a few years ago and thinking, “That’s exactly it. I’m expected to show up to work as if I don’t have children and then I’m supposed to parent my children as if I don’t have work.” There’s this expectation that in order to be successful, we have to be on. We have to be go time all the time. There’s this other side of it. We have all seen what happens when somebody, especially a business owner, does not take care of themselves. I’m curious from your perspective, Gwen, what have you seen happen in the cases of CEOs who neglect themselves?
It’s not even necessarily that they neglect themselves. I’m going to be conscious about that because when you say that, often, they don’t think that they’re neglecting themself. That’s why I don’t want to use that phrase. They don’t see it that way because I hear phrases like, “But I love what I do so I’m going to do it all the time.” They don’t see it as neglecting themselves. “I love my customers, I love what I do,” and that trite line of if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. That is not actually true, people. You can love what you do, but it’s still work.
I think pulling that piece away and saying that’s not necessarily like I know I’m neglecting myself because I think a lot of people don’t, which is where the problem actually lies. They’re often conflating multiple things and not seeing how they’re different and how they provide different aspects to their lives. It’s also why I rail against the word balance because often, we think of balance like a teeter-totter and it has to be absolutely equal. That’s not it. Sometimes, this is taking more of my life and sometimes, that is taking more of my life, and then it goes back.
The trick is that all of the work, all of my personal life and all of my self-care can’t take all of my life all at the same time because that would be 300% and we don’t have 300%. It’s also why I hate the thing of, “I give 110%.” You can’t give 110%. You only have 100% to give. Your 100%may look like 110% compared to other people because you’re more outstanding but it’s still your 100%. Understanding where those percentages are falling at any point in time because you can’t give 100% to all three because there is no such thing as you giving 300%.
Personal Development Means Changing Behavior
I think that is important also, understanding that not everybody martyrs themselves. I also think it’s important to draw a distinction between personal growth and self-care because they’re not necessarily the same. Sometimes, personal growth is investing in therapy, which some people would consider self-care. Sometimes, personal growth is investing in your own professional development in altering your mindset. I know you are a believer in continuous personal development. How do you see investing in your own development as a CEO, as a leader? How do you see that helps CEOs make better decisions and maybe affects how they lead, not just how they manage stress?
For me, personal development is the idea that because I have new knowledge, I am going to approach a similar or the same situation differently with the expectation of getting a different and hopefully better result. I say hopefully better because just because someone said it should be better doesn’t mean that it will be better for you. It’s that concept of I’m going to look at this thing that I looked at maybe a week ago, but maybe a year ago or maybe ten years ago with a different set of eyes because I have gained new knowledge and I have figured out how to apply it to this situation.
Our work together is a great example of that. We’ve been working through some development issues and part of it is my willingness to get some personal development and sometimes, personal development is just the conversation between you and I. It’s not a formal program. It’s being willing to hear it as, “Have you thought about considering it this way?” To me, that’s also personal development. It doesn’t have to be a formal program.
What I have found in my own business is when I decided to hang out my shingle and become a consultant, I knew the jobs that I had, I knew the style of leadership I had worked under, the style of leadership I had observed, but that was the sum total of my perspective. That was my worldview. Somebody would recommend a business book, I’d pick up that business book, read that and maybe I’d get some ideas, but I wasn’t the type of person that walked up and down the aisles of a bookstore looking for a book to make me better at what I did.
What I find about personal growth, whether that’s hiring a coach or, like you said, just having some biz bestie conversations right on a peer-to-peer level, is it’s given me a different way to look at things. It’s shown me that just because my experience, like the last time I saw this was because of this other thing, doesn’t mean that’s the only reason that thing happens. As you said, it’s given me more options of how to move forward.
I love that you painted that picture for us because I do see the personal growth piece for CEOs directly tied to business performance, but I know a lot of CEOs don’t. They figure like, “The company’s still making money. I must be doing fine.” They don’t invest in themselves to become stronger, more resilient leaders and I think sometimes it’s to the detriment of their company.
That the whole thing is, yeah, you’re doing great, but I think, typically, entrepreneurs also are always looking to, “Can I do better?” Going back to my earlier example, a lot of folks would say, “You’re doing 110%,” that’s because you naturally do better than a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean that’s still the top of your capabilities. Wouldn’t you love to do better beyond where you currently are? I think having that approach to say, “Is it possible to think about this differently, to do it differently, to ask different questions, to behave differently to all of those things?”
Not that you should just constantly be learning because that can also be a trap as well. Looking for where is that nugget? Where is that thing that says, “That makes me think maybe I could try something different that might get me a different result that’s closer to the result that I’m looking for or a better result that I’m already getting?”
Yeah, I have nothing to add to that. You said it very well.
That might be a first
As CEO, You Are Your Business’ Million-Dollar Racehorse
We’ve talked a little bit about the self-care piece. In part three of this series, I spoke about the connection between delegation and avoiding burnout or resistant to delegation leading to burnout. I think this is an episode where we need to touch a little bit more deeply on burnout because we were at an event. You explain the million-dollar horse analogy.
One of the analogies they use at Genius Network, which is one of the events that I attend on a regular basis, is the million-dollar horse analogy. That is, if you had a million-dollar racehorse, would you run it as many miles as you could every day, make sure it didn’t get nearly enough sleep and possibly feed it the horse version of junk food? No, because you want that horse to be running optimally when the race is actually worth $1 million.
If they’ve done that several times and now even, they’re out for stud, they’re not running anymore. We still want to make sure that we’re keeping them alive, that we’re keeping them healthy, that we’re doing all the things that have to be done to get that value. What we forget is that as the entrepreneur, the founder, the CEO, and the visionary for the business, whatever terms you think of yourself in terms of, we are the million-dollar racehorse for this business.
Although we will make sure our employees are well fed and that they’re sleeping well, we forget to do that for ourselves. When I say employees, I’m using it in a very generic term. It could be contractors or anyone that’s helping support us. Someone else once said, “Who is the most valuable person in your business?” Everyone usually points to somebody else. However, you, as the CEO, owner, founder are the most important person in the business because if you go away, unless you do it intentionally by selling it or something of some other nature, the business goes away. You are the most important person in the business.
You’ve said before that your number one job as CEO is to ensure the health and sustainability of your business. In the case of a business that has been a one-person show, a solopreneur business that is growing and scaling up, that’s still the case. You are still 100% responsible for the health and well-being of your business. That means being responsible for the health and well-being of yourself. When I know what I consider some signs of burnout, like early signs of burnout, I’m happy to share, but I want to hear yours. What have you seen?
I want to hear yours first this time. We don’t do this very often, but I want to hear yours first. I’ll add 1 or 2, probably, beyond that.
I think for me, what I have learned for myself, the earliest sign of burnout is what I call compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue for me is when things that didn’t used to get under my skin suddenly do. I do a lot of people. That’s the nature of marketing. I work with a lot of people. I answer a lot of questions, I do a lot of tech support that when it’s client-facing or even with my own clients. I never get tired of answering questions. I am one of the rare people who does not mind answering the same question 50,000 times.
When I get a question very frequently and somebody asks it and I find myself irritated that they asked it and grumble about answering it, I know I’m on the edge of burnout. I have learned enough by pushing past that feeling that burnout is coming. It’s the same way as when somebody asks me a question and I don’t take the time to think about them and how I respond. We all have different communication styles. I typically am good about communicating with people in their preferred style versus my own, but when I am on the edge of burnout or coming close, as the kids these days like to say, I have zero Fs to give.
That’s a perfect example and I’m going to make it even more generic because I think it’s one of the ways. When do you start noticing you are not behaving in the way that you would typically behave and the way that you want to behave? I think that can look like a lot of things to a lot of people. I know you well enough, and I am not shaming you about this, but if you skipped your exercise routine, this would not be a sign of burnout for you. I know you well enough to say this. I’m actually the same.
I am a luxury model. I am not an SUV.
That being said, for someone else, that could be a sign of burnout. I’m good about running every day, going to the gym, or doing whatever my exercise routine is, and when I start skipping it, that’s probably a sign of burnout. That’s why you can’t give an answer of what does burnout look like, because if I gave that for you, you’d be like, “I must be burned out all the time.”
I was born burned out.
It’s not an appropriate answer for you, but what you just described could easily not be a good answer for somebody else. I do think that more generic thought of when I’m not doing the things that I typically do very easily, and maybe not easily, but that are just part of what I do, it’s part of who I am, it’s part of my identity and/or I’m not doing it in the way that I know is my normal way of doing it. I think both of those things are where the sign of a burnout is. From there, the details become immense as we try to define it. I think that’s the easiest, most generic way to define.
Self-Care for CEOs Means Setting Strong Boundaries
Now, I’d like to just move into some practical tips. How do we make this all happen, especially when you’re running a business that’s already busy? If I imagine that most people reading this show are not people who are sitting around going, “Good golly gee, if I only had some work to do, life would be different.”
I feel like the people reading this show are people who are reading this while trying to do four other things all at the same time, hoping that some of this just seeps their subconsciousness because they don’t have much of their conscious brain to give. I’d love to give that reader some practical tips on how to prioritize self-care and self-leadership. I don’t know that we’ve talked about this on the show yet, but you don’t work Fridays.
Generally, not. Although, what are we doing? We are recording.
Will you stop stealing my thunder? I had words I was going to say. Ever since I’ve known you, you have been good about not working Fridays. Somebody will say, “I want to interview you for a podcast or I want to do this, I want to do that and here’s my availability.” You’d say, “Actually, I don’t work Fridays. Is there another day?” If they say, “Actually, no. It’s a live stream show. I only do Fridays,” you’re like, “In that case, obviously, I can make arrangements to be available on a Friday.”
You’ve also been very careful over the years that if you’ve had to work on a Friday like we’re working now, you don’t work the following Friday because you’re like, “I know myself too well. If I do it two Fridays in a row, suddenly I just added a fifth workday.” I want you to talk a little bit about why you don’t typically work Fridays and how that helps you create some harmony in your work routine.
There are a couple of things that I think are important to note in this. It’s not for any typical reason that I don’t work Fridays. It is a pragmatic reason for my particular circumstance, which is my husband moves to a 4-10 work schedule Monday through Thursday in the summer. It’s only for 2 to 3 months. It’s not a big, long timeframe. The first year that happened, I found I was feeling overwhelmed and couldn’t be present to take an extra day off with my husband. We love to go do stuff, particularly on that Friday when everyone else is still working. We want to make the most of that day, but by then, I don’t want to work on Saturday to backfill the Friday. I get to Monday and I was like, “I feel way behind.”
It was like, “How do I adjust my work schedule so that I’m not working Fridays so that when that happens in the summer it’s not a giant panicky thing?” That’s the first thing. What I’ve also realized and what’s been happening is that I’ve been working quite a few Fridays this last quarter or two, and part of the reason is that I’ve been having to take time off for other personal things during the week. Yesterday is a perfect example. Yesterday, I actually only work an hour or two. That was actually work time because I have some PT, I was getting a manicure. I know this all sounds very luxurious and it is, but that was the thing. I don’t feel like I’ve worked five days this week. I had only worked three days this week and this is my fourth day.
Sometimes, I will swap them out. I stay conscious of it’s not just I don’t work Fridays. I’m trying to not overwork so that I can do the personal things that I want and need to do. I prefer to make doctor’s appointments on Fridays, but my dentist also takes Fridays off. I always have to go see the dentist on Monday through Thursday. I try to make doctor’s appointments on Fridays because that’s one of the things that I need to do, and I don’t want it to interrupt my day, for example. For me, it’s a balance of both of these pieces of it and seeing it as a holistic picture as opposed to a hard and fast rule is huge for me. I think there was a second part to the question which I haven’t answered and I’ve lost track of.
That’s okay because I’m here for you, Gwen. I know that not everybody has a goal to take Fridays off and that that’s fine. I do think this is a good example of how you start prioritizing yourself. Whatever you need as a CEO, if that’s self-care, great. If that’s professional development, fine. However, taking Fridays off is polarizing.
I know a lot of times when I talk to people like, “I can totally do that on a Friday because one of the clients that takes a lot of my daytime hours doesn’t work Fridays,” they’ll be like, “That must be nice. I could never do that,” or they’ll say, “Is the business not doing very well?” First of all, I know that we are very busy four days a week. I also know because you’ve told me that you feel like you get as much done working a Monday through Thursday schedule versus a Monday through Friday schedule.
You feel like you haven’t actually reduced your productivity. I happen to think it’s because you’ve developed a routine. It’s easier to make decisions because Friday’s just not an option. As you said with your dentist, because the dentist also doesn’t work Friday and they’re not coming in for you on their day off, when you take some time off earlier in the week, then you’re like, “I have Friday now that I can fill it in.” It’s not like you’re having to pack 40 hours of work into a 30-hour week because you had to take some time off. You’ve established that strong routine.
Here’s what else I know. You had to start at one point because you just said you haven’t always had this routine. I think where people get tripped up, it’s not that they don’t want to do a thing. It’s not that they don’t want to make room in their schedule for something of personal interest or something to develop themselves, but they don’t see how, and they’re not sure how they get everybody else on board. I know there had to be a time when you went from working Fridays to not working Fridays. How did that transition go?
The first and most important thing was actually the last thing you said, which is what the reason people struggle with it is they’re worried about how everyone else is going to perceive it. It’s often less about the doing of the thing, whatever the thing is, taking Fridays off. It’s about the fact that someone’s going to say, “That must be nice,” and we’re worried about how everyone else is going to perceive it. I don’t worry about those things much because I know I have zero control over what no one else is going to think. I also have zero control of how anyone else is going to react. If it bothers someone, they’re not my people and that’s okay. That is absolutely okay. There are enough people. I am nowhere near capacity and I do not come close to serving the world. There are enough people. It is okay. I’m not going to worry about that.
However, as women, we are often conditioned to worry about what other people think and how they’re going to respond. Unfortunately, that’s a huge disadvantage we have because that’s something we don’t have any control over because back to humans, we’re dealing with humans and we just can’t control any of those things. Part of it is being completely comfortable that there’s going to be someone who’s going to make some snarky remark, who’s going to be upset, who’s going to do whatever, to say, “Sorry, that’s just the way it is.” The other is I also look at it with a pragmatic eye because it’s my reality. The work I’m doing isn’t life and death. The fact that I may not answer a call on Friday doesn’t mean something horrendous is going to happen.
I’m also enough in touch with my clients. I had one that was dealing with quite a few crisis things and I said, “If you need me on Friday or over the weekend, you text me. I will respond,” but I don’t say that all the time and they know that I’m not going to say it. I have set my boundaries and expectations in a way that I’m not apologizing for them, and I know when I’m going to be flexible with them. I know all of that in my head ahead of time. Back to the decision process, I’m not making having any decision fatigue about this. I can barely quickly say, “Does this fit to the Friday or not?” I offered to do this recording on Friday to you. I’m not sure you would’ve asked.
No, I never asked you to do things on Fridays.
I offered because I also know I’m going to be unavailable because I’m doing quite a bit of travel and other things and we needed to do this. It’s not only reducing some stress for me, but it’s also reducing stress for you. I don’t want you stressed out either because that’s not helpful to me. This is an appropriate trade off given what’s going on. One of the things that I will do on Fridays often is take my personal care time on Fridays, and although it’s not work, it’s valuable for work.
Personal care time, although it's not work, is valuable for work. Share on XI like how you talk about your own process because, for me, it’s a little bit different and I am new at establishing work hours. The nature of the work I do, I’ve always accommodated whatever the client’s schedule was, and my clients had schedules all over the place. Just because of life circumstances, I have found that I am not very available after 2:30 in the afternoon. I tried to do the whole I’ll cut off at 2:30 and then I’ll come back at 6:00 and then I’ll eat dinner and then I’ll try to work 6:30 to 8:30. Once I was out of my rhythm, I was out of my rhythm. I wasn’t doing good work at that time. I’m much better at shifting my life earlier and just working 4:00 AM to 2:30 and calling it good.
It was a tough adjustment for people around me because I had conditioned people that I was always available. It took some time. For the reader who’s like, “I could never do what Gwen does,” you can, but I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it’s not hard. You train people one way and you have to take some time to train them another. However, I have not had one person come to me and be like, “This just isn’t working. You used to always pick up my calls and now you return my voicemails the next day,” or, “You used to be so good about answering my emails five minutes after I sent them and now I’m finding 6 to 12 hours goes between emails or 24 to 48,” quite honestly. What I would encourage any reader who feels like they don’t have the boundaries they want and they need to adjust and create some boundaries to give it some time.
I think the most important thing you said is that it’s hard, but it’s harder for you than for anybody else. We always think that we won’t do it because it’s hard. We feel all of that hardness in our souls and in our activity, but most of everybody else doesn’t perceive it in that same way. It may be hard for them too, but the way that you feel about it is way stronger 99% of the time than anyone else feels about it.
If there’s someone who’s strongly reacting, it’s probably because they were taking bad advantage of you from the get-go. Now you’re not holding to that anymore, and they’re grumpy about it. It’s probably okay to part ways. That’s like a whole another episode we can talk about, but that will be to everyone’s advantage in the long run. People who are your good clients in good fits will say, “I’ve got to change my behavior a little bit.” Usually, for them, it’s a pretty tiny change. It feels huge to you but usually for them, that’s a little tiny change.
Just because somebody complains doesn’t mean you owe them going back to the way things used to be. You get to make your own choices. I like how you acknowledge it is hard for a time. Change is hard for all of us. As we begin to wrap up, I feel like we’ve covered the self-care piece pretty well. We have covered why it’s important to prioritize your own growth. If you’re going to lead a strong team, you need to be a strong leader of yourself as the CEO.
Just because somebody complains doesn't mean you owe them. Share on XWhat I would like to do, and mainly this is because I know that you are such a fan of personal growth and leadership development, Gwen, as I am, is what would be some advice, like where should a reader go from here if they’re looking to develop themselves as a leader? Obviously, we have programs for that. We have an amazing accountability program, which I think is a great starting point for anybody trying to exercise that muscle of self-leadership in particular because the best part about being a CEO is that nobody tells you what to do. The worst part about being a CEO is nobody tells you what to do.
In addition to working with our team, I know you, you love to read. There’s books, there’s workshops, there’s personal development courses. You’ve mentioned Genius Network, which is a mastermind community you’re a part of. What else you got for our readers, Gwen. What else would you recommend?
Part of it is just being curious all the time and paying attention because some of the best things I’ve learned were not in what I would call a learning mode where I wasn’t there to learn for whatever reason. I’m having a conversation with somebody and they say something and it wasn’t like I’m learning something from them. It was just a conversation, and then all of a sudden, “That is the nugget.”
Always listen for the opportunity of where there is an insight that is actually the insight I need right now today, this minute that I maybe didn’t even know I needed. Also, making sure that you are incorporating some, I’m going to call it more formal ways of learning, like books, conferences, mastermind groups and conversations with other peers where there is the intention is to come in and learn, but I think it’s about keeping that curiosity option open all the time. For some of us, it comes way more naturally and for others, not, but it still is a skill. It can be learned. It’s not a characteristic. It’s a skill.
Being curious all the time. That’s the big skill. I like that. Any books you want to recommend? You recommended a book in the last episode. Do you want to recommend a book in this episode? I’m thinking about self-leadership.
I want to give the list of 48 books because I have lots of favorites at any given point in time depending on the topic. One that just struck me as you said that is an older book written by a gal named Annie Duke. She was a former professional poker player and it’s called Thinking in Bets. You need to read the book, even though I’m going to give you the big insight. A good decision with a bad result doesn’t mean it was a bad decision.
A bad decision with a good result doesn’t mean it was a good decision. She goes into a whole lot about that. It was a surprise reading years ago. For me, that has become one of my favorites. To me, this is related to all of this about just because we’ve tried something and it didn’t work doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to try. Just because we’re doing something and it feels like it’s working doesn’t mean it’s the right thing in the long term. If I was going to pick one for this episode, that’s going to be the book.
I will also say that if business books are your thing, Gwen and I co-lead a fun little book club. It’s called The Small Biz Book Club. You can find more information at SmallBizBookClub.com. Every month we grab a book, just like Thinking in Bets and we take the big ideas in the book and we apply them to the small realities or the realities of small businesses.
I think that signals that our time is about up. Gwen, thank you for downloading your brain on this important topic because self-care is just a conversation we need to keep having in public spaces. If you’re reading this episode, I encourage you to be a person who has these conversations in public spaces, whether it’s with your biz besties, your networking groups, or whatever.
The more we talk about this, the more we normalize the importance of prioritizing our own personal growth as CEOs. If this is something that you want to explore more deeply, I would encourage you to visit us online at TheBusinessYouReallyWant.com. That is where you’re going to find resources and tools that will help you prioritize yourself while you continue growing your business. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for sticking with us through the end of this series, and we hope to see you next time.
Mentioned in the Episode
- Prior episodes in the series
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke is the chosen book for the Dec. 18,2024, meeting of the Small Biz Book Club
- Find all resources mentioned in the episode at The Business You Really Want
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
