A little while back I wrote about how I couldn't find a fitness app that actually fit my life, so I figured I'd just build one myself. That post was the why. This one is what's happened since.
Because I've been at it a few months now, building the thing and living off it at the same time, and a few things have started to stand out. Not about fitness, weirdly. About work. The deeper I got into building my own little coach, the one that's meant to keep me pointed at the thing I've always been bad at, staying consistent, the more I kept thinking, wait, I've done this exact thing before. At Emerson. At Ulta. In a conference room with a deck and a dozen people. I was quietly running my old strategy playbook on myself and hadn't even noticed.
Here are the few that really stand out.
Chase the Right Number, Not the Loud One
Back at Emerson I worked on a profitability push, and the thing we found was a little uncomfortable. A lot of our biggest, most exciting deals, the ones everyone wanted to celebrate, weren't actually that good. Big revenue, thin margin. They looked wonderful on a slide and quietly ate the profit they were supposed to make. So we gently changed the question. Less how big is this deal, more how good is it. We built the whole review around margin instead of the headline number.
I'm doing the same thing to myself now, just smaller. The scale is the loud number. It's the one that wants all my attention. But early on I made a quiet rule that my actual health comes first, and the scale never gets to win against it. Same move, honestly. Pick the number that truly matters and protect it, even when a louder one is yelling for the spotlight.
Commit, or Stop, but Try Not to Live in the Middle
At Ulta we took a hard look at our services portfolio to understand what was actually working for us and our guests, and what wasn't. Some of it was clearly worth doubling down on. And some of it was just as clearly something we needed to stop completely. So we finally committed to stopping those. That was the hard part, honestly. Not the doubling down, that's the fun bit. The hard part was letting ourselves walk away from the thing that wasn't working, instead of propping it up forever just because we'd already started.
Turns out I do the same little dance with my own goals. I want about four things at once, and they sort of fight each other. So instead of doing all of them halfway, I pick one to really commit to and let the others wait their turn. And when something isn't landing, I try to actually stop it, instead of limping it along just because I already started. Easier said than done, in a salon or in your own kitchen.
Drift Is Quiet, So Check In on Purpose
Here's one that genuinely surprised me. At Emerson we looked at some of our biggest long-standing accounts and realized their pricing had basically been frozen for ages. Not because anyone made a bad call. Just because nobody was reviewing them on any kind of schedule, so the question never got asked, and the margins slowly drifted. The fix wasn't some clever new price. It was a standing review, so the drift couldn't sneak up on us again.
That's so much of why I've struggled with consistency, now that I think about it. I never fall off in one dramatic, obvious moment. I drift. A skipped day here, a loose week there, and suddenly I'm pretty far off and not totally sure how I got there. So I built a gentle weekly check-in into the whole thing. Nothing intense. Just a regular moment to look honestly at where things actually are, while the drift is still small enough to nudge back.
Change One Thing at a Time, or You Learn Nothing
The last one is the nerdiest, I'll admit. When we ran those store tests, we always picked matched comparison stores, so we could actually tell what the change did versus, you know, the season or the weather or whatever else was going on. If you change a bunch of things at once and sales move, you've got a nice result and no real idea what caused it.
So with myself I try to only change one thing at a time and just watch. If I tweak my food and my training and my sleep all in the same week and something shifts, well, good for me, but I've learned nothing. One lever, give it a beat, see what happens. It's slower. It's also the only way I actually figure out what works for my body instead of guessing.
What gets me is that none of this was on purpose. I didn't sit down and decide to strategy-ify my fitness. These moves just showed up, because it turns out they were never really corporate things at all. They're just what you reach for when you've got a goal, some real limits, and a few wants tugging in different directions. A company is really just a bigger, louder version of that.
The levers are the same whether there's a whole team in the room or it's just me and a coffee early in the morning. A team makes them noisy. Lots of people, lots of opinions, lots of slides. On my own it's quieter, and I'm playing every part at once, the analyst and the strategist and the person who actually has to go do the boring thing anyway.
Strategy was never really about the size of the room.
And honestly, doing it on myself has made me a little better at the work version, not worse. There's no team to tuck a sloppy call behind. If I chase the loud number, refuse to stop what's failing, ignore the drift, and change everything at once, I feel it pretty quickly. It's just having a goal, being honest about what's in your way, and picking the next small thing to try. Works for a company. Works for one slightly tired person and her kitchen.