Your Energy Sets the Tone (Even When It’s Just You)
My first proper leadership job was running a Customer Service team at Amazon through peak season — the kind of stretch where the volume doesn’t let up for six weeks straight. I learned something fast: the team could read me before I said a word. If I walked onto the floor after a bad night’s sleep, tense and short, the whole shift got tenser. If I walked on calm, people asked questions instead of guessing. I didn’t announce my mood. It just spread.
I used to think that was a big-company problem — too many people, too much watching. Then I got made redundant, and built Your Virtual Organizer from nothing. No team. Just me, my laptop, and one client. Turns out the lesson didn’t go away. It just changed shape.
There’s no team to absorb a bad day anymore. If I get on a call with a client distracted or rattled, there’s no colleague quietly picking up the slack behind me. They get exactly what I bring. My energy isn’t a private thing I manage before the “real work” starts — it is the work, most days.
Here’s what actually helps, from someone learning this without a team to hide behind:
Notice your own patterns before you plan your day. I know from years of early Amazon shifts, and even earlier days teaching English in Japan, that I think best in the first two hours after I’m properly awake — not the first two hours after my alarm goes off. Those are different things. Know yours.
Give yourself a real transition between tasks. Five minutes of nothing between a stressful call and the next thing changes what you bring into that next thing. I didn’t believe this until I started doing it.
Decide what’s actually urgent before you let it feel urgent. Most of what lands in my inbox isn’t an emergency. Treating it like one all day is a choice, and it’s an expensive one.
None of this is about being calm all the time — I’m not, and pretending otherwise would be exhausting. It’s about noticing that your state isn’t separate from your business. It’s the first input into everything else.