Why Slowing Down is a Chief of Staff Superpower

0:09Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Chief of Staff podcast. I'm your host, Scott Amenta. Today's guest is Carrie McMahon, a two-time Chief of Staff who's currently at Horizon 3, a fast-growing AI company in San Francisco. Carrie's career runs through Zendesk, Coda, which is now Superhuman, Benevity, and Product Board, and she spent most of it building functions from the ground up and working closely with senior leaders across go-to-market strategy and operations. But that's not quite what we're here to talk about today. Carrie is also a certified yoga and breathwork teacher, and she's built an incredible practice specifically for strategic operators around something that almost never comes up in chief of staff conversations, energy management.

0:49This isn't productivity hacks. It's not time blocking. This is the actual physiological work that keeps our nervous systems functioning well enough to make good decisions, show up for our teams, and have something left over at the end of the day. If you've ever closed your laptop, still thinking about the product roadmap, woken up at three in the morning, running through a presentation in your head, or felt like you had nothing left to give once work was done, this episode is for you. And if you're skeptical of anything that sounds like it belongs in a yoga mat rather than in a boardroom, Carrie was there too.

1:20That's what makes you the right person to be making this argument. Let's get right into it. Carrie, welcome to the podcast. Nice to have you here.

1:27Carrie McMahon: Thanks so much, Scott. Great to be here. You're a two-time chief of staff. I knew you were currently in a chief of staff role, but I was just going way back on your LinkedIn and realized that this is actually your second stint as a chief of staff. I would love to hear a little bit more about your background, what brought you into the role, and maybe some of the current work that you're doing in Horizon 3 today. So background, mostly got started in go-to-market and spent a lot of my time there. Started in sales at a company called Dundesk, which has definitely grown since I first joined. And pretty early on, really enjoyed working with others, enjoyed helping others, and ended up moving into management there.

2:07Carrie McMahon: From there, spent some time managing a couple sales teams. And from there, really wanted to look into the inner workings of the company, of a business. So moved into more of a strategy and ops role. After my stint at Dundesk, I moved to a small startup called Coda, which is now superhuman. So not so small anymore. And I had a really awesome opportunity there. I was able to build functions from the ground up. So I built the sales function. I built the whole PLG function there and learned a ton there. I would say I probably got my MBA working at Coda. It was an incredible experience. After Coda, I moved into a role where I was working with the leadership team and owning enablement.

2:50Carrie McMahon: So building enablement from the ground up at a company called Benevity. Then I moved to a company called Product Board. I followed the leader who I worked with at Coda and was chief of staff and owned RevOps. So as you can see throughout my career, I was jumping between lots of different functions and was able to work really closely with leaders, work very cross-functionally in all my different roles and a lot of building from the ground up where there was a lot of ambiguity. So the chief of staff role kind of happened naturally. It was something I was really interested in because I wanted to work cross-functionally.

3:22Carrie McMahon: I really enjoyed working with others. I really enjoyed taking on a variety of projects and being able to get exposure into all different parts of the business and bring in the sort of strategy process people all into one. So that's kind of how I fell into the role. And now I'm a chief of staff at Horizon 3. It's been an incredible experience. We are growing really, really quickly. So I've been focused on a variety of projects as I would have expected. Things like working through what our expansion strategy looks like, working through what our company kickoff will look like next year, working through sort of an investor roster and how we manage all of our investors.

4:00Carrie McMahon: So yeah, projects are all across the board there. But again, I'm supporting all the executives. And it's been a great experience because we're growing really quickly. So how we can keep a concise and communicative team and keep the leaders aligned as we scale significantly. One of the most common questions I get, having talked to thousands of chiefs of staff at this point, is what are chiefs of staff backgrounds? Where do they come from? What makes a great chief of staff? And I think your answer just kind of summed it all up in one clear point. There is no clear background. Chiefs of staff come from all sorts of past experiences and professions.

4:34But there is a very clear through line, I think, in terms of this willingness to lean into ambiguity, this idea of finding complexity, exciting, right, and wanting to tackle kind of hard challenges. And usually those challenges are not siloed in one part of the organization. They are like the cross-functional, hairy things that nobody else wants to get their hands on. And that tends to be the traits that I think make great chiefs of staff kind of stand out. but certainly the stories that we all tend to like jump off the page as well. And yours seems to be no exception. I mean, you've got between Coda and Zendesk, like two amazing companies under your belt.

5:09And it sounds like Horizon 3 is also off the races.

5:12Carrie McMahon: So pretty cool track record. Yeah, it's been awesome. We are not really here to talk about your chief of staff role per se today, although we're certainly going to kind of hover around the kind of outskirts of it. What we are really here to talk about is how kind of speed is the chief of staff currency, you know you're living and breathing at a fast-growing AI company in San Francisco right like the kind of heart of what is setting the pace for what feels like the rest of the world at this point and yet you have kind of a totally different project initiative thing that you work on outside of Horizon 3 that is all about slowing down and all about finding a pace that is reasonable for you as a chief of staff for other strategic operators and how that mindset can ripple across the rest of your organization.

5:59So let's get into that. You are an active chief of staff. You're not just a wellness instructor. You have a background in yoga and teaching. The credibility obviously for you comes from living the strategic operations and making the hard decisions day to day. When did you realize that kind of managing your energy and not just managing the tasks at bay was the real job?

6:21Carrie McMahon: So in this role, so much of your day is spent giving to other people, right? Your time, your thinking, your output, your emotional presence. You got to show up for the executives you support, the leaders you support. What I realized, candidly, the hard way is that you can't keep giving if you're not actively refilling. I used to get to the end of the day, I would close my laptop. I would still be thinking about the product roadmap I was running through, the to-dos in my head. I'd be checking Slack late at night just because I felt behind. And I would wake up at 3am thinking about an upcoming presentation.

6:59Carrie McMahon: And when my partner would ask me how my day was, I feel like I had nothing left to give to him and very little energy to leave me to enjoy my time outside of work. So I just realized that I was pouring into everyone else and running myself dry. And as I've gotten more into this work and working with various clients. I'm seeing a lot of high performer, strategic operators feeling very similarly. It's something we don't often talk about. So I ended up getting into a lot of body based work, breath work, meditation, yoga, somatics. It was something that I was interested in and curious to learn more about.

7:36Carrie McMahon: This was years ago. And since then, it has just completely transformed my life in all the ways. So I actually started to feel my system recharge and heal throughout the day as I incorporated this work. And I started to realize that energy management and learning how to better manage the energy that you have isn't really a sort of bonus. Like it's part of your job and it should be incorporated into the work that you do. When did you start thinking about this concept of energy leakage? That happens both probably day to day at the office. And as you just described, when you come home, kind of feeling like you had nothing else to give to your partner, to yourself.

8:18When did that kind of terminology start to play a role in your life? Was that inspired by something else that you've seen?

8:24Carrie McMahon: Yeah. So I've always liked to make sense out of chaos. I think that's why I've gravitated towards the chief of staff role. And I like structure and rhythm and routine. And so as I was diagnosing my own sort of work with how I can better manage my energy in my job, And the more and more I worked with clients on some of this work, I started to bucket energy into 4 key pillars or 4 key areas. Again, that happened organically as I had lots of conversations with various people, as I even analyzed my own day. But again, I needed to make sense of something. So I could go put together a plan. That's the best way to do things when you're trying to fit something in or fix a problem that you're not quite sure how to tackle.

9:11Carrie McMahon: So I basically looked at energy management across four areas. So first one is your daily rhythm, your daily operating cadence. Second one is how well you're matching tasks to your natural energy levels throughout the day. The third one is how you're building in micropauses throughout the day. And then the fourth one is how you're winding down at night. And even built an assessment that people can use for my website, where you can actually analyze your energy output across these areas. So you can start to see, oh, I'm leaking energy here. This is where I should start first. So it's just helpful to do that assessment.

9:45Carrie McMahon: I still do it every quarter because I like to make sure that I'm monitoring my energy effectively. But a leak is when something inside of one of those buckets is quietly draining you, whether you know it or not, and you're not really getting the return you should be. Just as an example, one of the biggest leaks I discovered after doing my own assessment a couple of years ago was that I had back-to-back meetings with zero recovery in between. I don't think this is an abnormal problem, but I would feel completely wiped. And that just kept compounding over time because I wasn't really doing much about it other than trying to time block and time manage, but it only got me so far.

10:20Carrie McMahon: So I started building in many resets throughout my day. It would be like a two to three minute breath work before a call or even at the beginning of a call because I wasn't talking and some simple chair movement. And I was very consistent with these exercises. That's the big piece here. It is a practice. It's not something you can try once and then you're instantly, you know, feeling calm and grounded. But consistently doing it has then changed how I was showing up in the afternoon and how I was showing up day to day. I felt calmer. I felt clearer in my decisions. And I was able to make sort of better decisions because I wasn't foggy in my brain because I had just been draining my energy the whole day.

10:57Is it something that is easy to recognize in other people that you're working with? So the assessment obviously is for yourself. how do you spot signs burnout across, say, your leadership team or other members of the company? Do you just encourage them to take the framework? Or is it something that you kind of build up a bit of an intuition for?

11:17Carrie McMahon: Yeah, for non-clients, I will not give them the assessment. I mean, I might suggest something, but it's not something that I would push on them. But I would say you definitely start building an intuition for it. So you have to embody the practice, right? So the more you do it yourself, then the more you can start to see it in others. and I'm big on embodying anything that you do that especially you want to give to others. I would say in other pieces, with pretty much every call I have with an executive and a senior leader at the company, I mean, I always start out, I'm not saying like, how was your day or how's your week been?

11:50Carrie McMahon: I'm like, how are you feeling? That's pretty much the first question I ask them. Just it's very open-ended and I'm not probing, but they'll end up just giving information. Like I'm just stressed, tired, anxious. And then I kind of know how to tailor the conversation knowing that they're in a space where they're feeling tense or they're feeling anxious or wired, you know, how I can help even throughout that 30 minute conversation, just support their energy levels or like emotional wellbeing in that moment. So yeah, a bit of intuition, but also, you know, asking a different set of questions that maybe they're not used to hearing in every call that they're in.

12:23I like the, um, I think the framework comes from co-active coaching, the question that they recommend you ask in a coaching setting, but it works in a professional environment is what's on your mind, right? A very simple open-ended question because that question can be taken both in a personal direction or a professional direction, depending on truly what is on that person's mind. Asking something too black and white or too yes-no doesn't quite give you the detail that you need to then take that conversation in a direction that's actually helpful for that person. Those types of questions are really interesting.

12:57And I think for a chief to staff to apply in everyday scenarios, both to understand like, all right, where is this person's mindset right now? How do I judge whether or not they're in a position to make hard decisions or if they truly have, to your point, the energy to give back to me to make this meeting worthwhile? So yeah, I think it's a good point.

13:16Carrie McMahon: Yeah. Your framework obviously borrows a lot from yoga. I know it's a practice that you have adopted for a long time and also something that you teach. and yoga of course is all about balancing you know active and restorative energy what's the plain english version though for someone who is like never quite set foot on a mat or maybe skeptical of you know mindfulness or yoga oh yeah i was one of those skeptical people 100 so most people think yoga is movement on a mat which it definitely is but that's really just one piece of it right you're probably used to seeing like yoga class you sign up you know you're making shapes on your mat.

13:52Carrie McMahon: You might think it's just stretching or whatever. But really, it's one of eight practices of yoga. Yoga is so much more than that. But the true essence and the larger goal of yoga is to quiet the mental noise, quiet the mental chatter. That is the goal of yoga. And when I say noise, I mean the running to-do list, the dinner plan, the email you marked on red, the drafted Slack note to your boss. That constant chatter in your mind puts your nervous system in a low-grade state of fight or flight and your body is just constantly bracing. And so these practices, breath work, mindfulness, yoga, they can help bring that down so that you can be with whatever's happening at work or your personal life without it completely taking you over.

14:35Carrie McMahon: You can sit with the chaos, you can move through it, and you can come out the other side feeling steady. That's the transformation that this work provides. And typically when I share that outcome, that resonates more with the audience, especially chief of staff, strategic operators, because we do deal with a lot of chaos and noise. And now we can have a practice to quiet that noise and allow ourselves to move through it with that grounding, with that steadiness that we need to be doing in this job. It's an important point that you made about what yoga truly is. The way that we have adopted it and perceive it, certainly in the West, is very much that I spend an hour after work, I go to a class, I get told what to do, I lay on my mat for five minutes after the class ends and attempt to quieten my mind.

15:23And that's not quite really what yoga is all about. I've always been a big fan of Ashtanga Yoga, which is very connected to the breath. Every movement comes with breath, and it's on a very strict kind of rhythm. The poses never change. you always kind of go through the same sequence. And I love that because I don't have to think about what I'm doing next. I just follow the rhythm. I'm curious, if I'm sitting in an office, I'm obviously not going to break out into a stronger sequence. How does it get applied for yourself and in real life situations? And to the chair exercise that you said you did, like, do you find yourself finding moments during the day to pause and practice some kind of breath work or with your eyes closed for a few minutes before the next meeting?

16:07Are those the things that have made a difference for you? Absolutely.

16:10Carrie McMahon: It sounds small. And honestly, to your point, I was very skeptical of yoga for a lot of my life because I thought it was honestly a waste of time. Why am I going to be stretching on a mat if I'm going to spend an hour to do movement? I wanted it to be high intensity. I wanted to make the most of it. That's kind of So that was kind of my mindset at the time. But yes, absolutely. You can do yoga style exercises at your desk. So for me, and what I teach a lot of my clients is breathwork techniques, sort of in between meetings or the beginning of the day and the end of your day. And then chair yoga as well.

16:44Carrie McMahon: It can be super simple, like inhaling, raising your arms up to the ceiling, exhaling, doing a gentle twist to the right, inhaling up, exhaling to the left. It's really about movement to your breath because that's signaling to your nervous system. It's okay to calm down. But yeah, it's very simple things. And you could even do breathwork while you're in a meeting or presentation. If you're not speaking, you can do some of these techniques too. So yeah, it's throughout the day that's really helpful. I do recommend that people take maybe 20 minutes out of their week, at least to do more of a movement session.

17:16Carrie McMahon: And then when I work with clients, we have a full hour to work together. But just for the day-to-day, it is absolutely impactful to incorporate these techniques consistently throughout the day. We opened up our Chief of Staff Connect conference in New York last year with some breath work and simple movements. Love that. And we did that throughout the day. Obviously, the theme was heavily focused on AI and speed, but we also really wanted to get back to what makes us human, what builds relationships, how do we center ourselves. Honestly, I was very surprised by the number of people that came up to me after the fact and said that they had never done something like that before.

17:52They had never taken a few moments of their day just to sit and breathe, find a way to relax or follow a guide on stage. We got an amazing woman from Othership meeting it. And that was really surprising. Like it's become so common for many is still a minority, I think, among the number of professionals out there that are stressing themselves about the next decision or the next meeting that can't find that time. It certainly can find that time, just need to make that time. Yeah. I think what's also interesting is as much as we're talking about slowing down and kind of finding ourselves through some meditative activity, what we're not talking about is slowing down holistically, right?

18:31We are still moving faster. One thing that you said to me in our first call is that kind of the leader's energy obviously directly affects the team. And how you present yourself, how you show up to your team makes all the difference in terms of how they're going to react and kind of operate throughout the day. Let's talk about the kind of negative version of you showing up with no energy. What does that look like? What does the cheapest staff running an empty do to people notice? How have you found your ability to operate when your energy levels are super low?

19:01Carrie McMahon: I would say the first thing, just more from what's happening within your body, the first thing to go is, and it's not completely leaving, right? You still have your prefrontal cortex, but the optimization of your prefrontal cortex goes, right? And this is where you're making sound decisions. You're solving complex problems. It's where you're creatively thinking. So when you're really depleted, you start to become more reactive. That's typically, personally, what I had experienced and what I hear from others that I work with. You start making fast calls without the analysis to back them up because you're also trying to get something off your to-do list.

19:36Carrie McMahon: You're trying to just make a decision so you can move forward and your system cannot hold more. So you just feel this sort of reactivity within you. I would say people definitely notice I've worked with individuals where I can feel they're very reactive to everything that's coming at them because they simply don't have the container or the space to allow something to come in and allow themselves to hold space for that. So as chief of staff, we are the backbone of the exact team and we hold the container. So if we're spiraling, if we're not able to absorb the chaos and actually do something with it, then there's nowhere for everyone else to land.

20:14Carrie McMahon: So truly, I think that energy regulation, as much as it is not talked about in the workforce, is a performance strategy. And it is something that companies and leaders should be taking as a proactive training assessment of their people on a regular basis, because it is what's going to allow people to sustain in the ebbs and flows of corporate world, tech world, AI boom. I mean, it's already feeling very overwhelming and it's just going to continue to do so. Anyone that has kids, especially those in the toddler year, though I'm going through this myself right now, probably as true, prefrontal cortex are in active development.

20:55That's exactly how you're showing up to the office when your energy levels are so low. I mean, they're not quite apples to apples, but it can feel that way sometimes. Yeah, very true. You also make the case that kind of energy work improves decision-making speed. And I think your last point here that you were just saying, those that show up to the office, ready to work with the right mindset, are going to be much more productive, right? Not just in the short term, in the long term, right? I think what we continue to fail to realize is that this is always a marathon. It's very rarely a sprint. There are certainly moments to sprint.

21:29And in the startup ecosystem, it kind of always feels like we're sprinting. But the companies that really do have longevity have found ways to keep their employees, right? Build a culture that helps drive long-term growth for their headcount. And that can't come at a pace that is like a constant barrage of new projects and ideas. Conversation that we just released on this podcast with Eric Neerlich, who's the former chief of staff at Google, working on the ad side of the business. He also did six years as chief of staff and ended up burning out. And his story goes, he ended up going back to his principal and saying, hey, I can't do this anymore and convinced the team that he was going to work at halftime, take lower pay.

22:13And that ended up making a world of difference for him, for his family, and for what he now does as an executive coach. But it took hitting that brink to get him to realize that he needed to do something else that was not sustainable. You made a really good point that all companies should be embracing this. Why aren't they? If we think that energy and the energy work that we're suggesting here improves decision-making speed, it's an important connection. But why do you think more companies don't see it this way?

22:40Carrie McMahon: I can see it from my experience and then others I have worked with and sort of what they've said who very much resonate with the work that I do. Simply put, I don't think they see it as a priority. I just don't think they maybe have done the research or gotten the education to see that there are real physiological effects of this on their people. And that in turn causes them to be less productive and not be able to sustain the workload. I don't quite think that that connection has been made. And I do think from someone who came from feeling very skeptical around the breath work and thinking it was kind of woo-woo and out there and not for me.

23:23Carrie McMahon: And I didn't have time for it. It just was something extra that I didn't want to add to my plate. I understand it because I don't think we've maybe as a society made the connection between that yoga, breath work, somatic work, and the workforce and how we can support our people as a result of it. And what I'm used to seeing, which I think is kind of dying out of the concept is companies will put together some kind of wellness stipend, which obviously is a great, great thing in theory. And I appreciate that there is effort there, right? There's a yoga class you can attend on a weekly basis, or there's like some like educational program.

24:00Carrie McMahon: You can go through some course you can go through to learn how to breathe. Awesome in concept, but we're not actually like integrating this work into the workforce, right? We're holding engagement surveys with our employees, which is an assessment of how they're feeling about the company and how they're feeling about their manager. But how are they feeling about their own energetic self and how are they supporting themselves? We never assess people on that. We don't have conversations with our leaders on how they can manage their own energy and their nervous systems and then in turn can support their people and spot signals of burnout or spot signals of dysregulation.

24:33Carrie McMahon: We don't have those types of conversations. We don't have that training embedded into our ways of working. And I really want that to change. And I want to see that change. But I understand why it just hasn't been something that is talked widely about or is prioritized enough. And I think people just see it as something they don't have time for. But at the end of the day, it is a strategy. You just got me thinking that there's also some cultural norms here that are worth exploring where, I'll speak broadly, but Americans put a lot of faith and part of their identity in the companies that they work for, right?

25:10It's not just a paycheck at the end of the day. It's very much where their community comes from, where their relationships come from, and how they think about their own goals and success. And that's not to say the same is not true for Europeans, but many Europeans, I'm living in Spain right now. I've been living in Germany the last six years, and I've seen this firsthand. The company is not the end-all be-all, right? And this doesn't come from just one year of telling them that don't put all of your eggs in one basket. It comes from just the cultural identity of we're going to find moments to relax, real vacation, things that are integrated into the systems that don't prescribe their entire being to the business that they're working for.

25:52Now, you can argue if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but my only point is, I think for companies where their employees are kind of expected to put everything into that business, right? And they're 40, 50, 60 hours a week, right? Almost their entire time on earth is being dedicated to the business that they're working for at any given moment. It's kind of beholden on the business to help them also find those moments to kind of calm their nervous system, refill their energy, right? because that is where all the time is going as it is.

26:24Carrie McMahon: Absolutely. Your point about like giving the gift cards essentially for mental wellness or yoga or a wall map or something. I think it has the right intentions, I agree, but it has not really followed through to have the right impact. Kind of like the easy way out in a lot of ways. Within the organization, it's a cultural shift of talking about these things more openly, talking about what's working or not working for employees. And it's not necessarily about the next strategy or the next goal that needs to be achieved, the next OKR. It's about how that person is able to show up and actually do those things better.

26:59Carrie McMahon: Yeah. You have to be vulnerable in order to look within yourself and say, Hey, you know, I'm struggling a bit internally in my inner world. I'm not connected there. I'm not supporting my systems. I'm not supporting myself. Like that's hard to do. And it's interesting, you know, what you're saying, because when I got started in doing this work with clients, I had a lot of people that I used to work with just reach out to me and say, Hey, I'm struggling with this too. And there are people that I wouldn't have guessed that or have thought that because we don't really talk about it. It's not something we feel like we can openly talk about with our leaders, our peers.

27:35Carrie McMahon: Yeah, anyways, it's interesting, but hopefully it can be more a part of the conversation over time. That's what I'm hoping to shift here with some of the work that I'm doing. I think the old adage of like, fake it till you make it. That's kind of like, who cares about that? It's actually people are just faking being constantly on and having all the energy to keep going. And that's actually the discussion that needs to happen more often. For a chief of staff who's kind of skeptical, but super exhausted, where do they start? What's the one thing that you'd have them try first? Is it a conversation with someone else?

28:08Is it finding some meditative practice that they can do on their own without any external guidance? Is it having a conversation with you? Where would you start?

28:18Carrie McMahon: Always open to have conversations with me. I can help with putting together more structure to some of the techniques and actually having a longer term program that compounds over time. I think that's the value that I bring to my clients. But I'd say if you're just trying to start out in your own space, I would recommend people to try to incorporate two breathwork techniques in the middle of your workday for four weeks consistently. Consistently is the main key here, right? It is a practice. And after each one, take a moment to notice what's happening in your body and just jot something down. Even if it's a word, that's really helpful because you're starting to connect to your bodily sensation.

28:59Carrie McMahon: And I think that's something that people aren't maybe used to doing, especially if you have never done like a yoga class or any mindfulness or breath work and start asking yourself over time, right? Am I showing up differently? Do I have more to give at the end of the day? So typically, you know, when I do work with clients, we have sessions, we go through some of the work, but a lot of what happens after the work is observing in your body, how that felt, observing what feels different, like starting to connect to your body and your inner world is what's going to help you build your own practice over time.

29:31Carrie McMahon: So you have something sustainable when you start feeling that tense feeling or you start feeling your chest tighten right now, you know what that feeling is and you know some practices to help work through that and get yourself to a more grounded and calm state. More specifically, I would say one of my favorite exercises that is really easy to do at your desk. And again, you can do this if you're in the middle of a meeting and you're not speaking is box breathing. This is a very sort of well-known technique, but all you need to do is ground your feet on the floor, keep them about hips width distance.

30:03Carrie McMahon: And then you're just inhaling for a count of four. And you're going to pause at the top for a count of four. Then you're going to exhale for a count of four. And then you're going to pause for a count of four and repeat that cycle for about two minutes if you can, or at least four cycles of that box breathing. And as I mentioned, once you do that, just observe how you're feeling in your body, sit with it for a moment, jot down that word. I'm still feeling wired. I'm feeling calmer. I'm feeling confused, whatever it might be. And do that over time and just see the transition and the sort of transformation as you incorporate this practice into your workday.

30:39Keri, thanks so much for sharing your practices with us today. I really appreciate the time. For all those listening, please take a few minutes now to follow Keri's box breathing technique. This is your moment to make a difference. Thanks for having me, Scott. Thanks again to Keri for joining us on this week's episode. The thing that stuck with me most from this conversation was pretty simple. Energy management is a performance strategy, not a wellness bonus. The box breathing technique she shared with us at the end is as good a place as any to start. Two minutes, four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out, four counts hold.

31:15Try it before your next meeting and see what happens. If you want to go deeper with Keri's work, her energy assessment, and the client programs are all worth exploring. We'll drop the link in the show notes below. And if this conversation resonated with where you are today in your chief of staff journey, here are two ways that you can keep going with the community. If you're actively in the role and want to connect with more verified chiefs of staff across 25 plus cities, access peer programming and sharpen your practice alongside people doing the work every day at the highest level, Chief of Staff Network Pro membership is built for you.

31:47There's a link in the show notes below. And if you're just exploring the chief of staff path or working through landing your first role, our Chief of Staff Launchpad program is a cohort-based course that gives you the skills, frameworks, and network to get there with confidence. Also in the show notes. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

32:22You