Ep 67 - Summer Reset Series 2 - Clear the Business Fog: What to Keep, Kill or Evolve

Episode Show Notes

Running a business as a clinician often means juggling the needs of your clients, your inbox, and your inner critic — all while trying to remember if you've already reheated your coffee.

So if your brain feels like it has 37 tabs open and you're stuck in a loop of overthinking, you're in good company.

Welcome to Week 2 of the Summer Reset Series, where we’re pressing pause on the noise and gently unpacking the mental clutter.

This week, I’m introducing a practical little framework I use myself (and with many of my clients) when things start to feel foggy: Keep, Kill, Evolve.

This is not about burning down your business and starting over. It’s about creating just enough clarity to exhale — and make space for what matters.

What Business Fog Actually Feels Like

Clarity is a buzzword, sure. But let’s talk about what a lack of clarity really feels like:

• Starting the day with a plan... and ending it deep in Canva rearranging fonts
• Opening your laptop to “work on your business” and ending up doom scrolling instead
• Constant guilt for not doing enough — or not knowing where to start

If that sounds familiar, you’re not lazy — you’re overloaded.

Every clinician I’ve worked with is incredibly hardworking. But when your to-do list has no clear focus, even the most diligent brain can start to stall.

Let’s change that.

The Keep, Kill, Evolve Framework

Grab your Summer Reset Planner or a notebook, and draw three columns:

Keep

These are the things in your business that are working. They feel good. They create results. They don’t drain your soul.

Examples:

• A 1:1 package that consistently sells
• An email list that opens and clicks (even if it’s small!)
• A content format you actually enjoy creating
• A boundary that’s protecting your time or energy

Ask: What gives me energy? What belongs here?

Kill

This is your business decluttering zone. What needs to go?

Not because it’s bad — but because it no longer fits you, your goals, or your current season.

Examples:

• An offer you dread delivering
• A funnel that doesn't actually bring you clients
• A content channel that drains you without giving you much in return
• Old freebies that don’t reflect your voice or values anymore
• Tasks you’re doing because some Instagram guru told you it was the next best thing (hint: unless you work for Mosseri directly, no-one really knows!) 

Ask: What am I tolerating that’s quietly draining me?

Evolve

This is the “worth tweaking” pile — the things that could work beautifully with a little care.

Examples:

• A funnel that needs a fresh pair of eyes to spot the bottlenecks an optimise its potential
• A freebie that’s delivering too much value and cannibalising your sales
• A weekly newsletter that your audience loves that could become a podcast
• A programme that needs an extra module as your clients always ask the same question

Ask: What would feel easier, lighter, or more aligned with a bit of love?

Real-Life Example: Penny

One of my clients, Penny, was doing everything right — a successful course, a revamped website, a new membership, consistent content everywhere.

But her income hadn’t moved.

We used Keep, Kill, Evolve — and she:

• Paused her membership - it wasn't bringing in much of her revenue
• Focused on 1:1s (and hired help to deliver them!)
• Gave herself space to plan a live launch for her already successful course, properly

Result? She made more in one quarter than the previous two combined. And the following October? £43k from her properly planned course launch, that she actually enjoyed.

Clarity doesn’t always come from doing more. Sometimes it’s about doing less - but better.

Reflection Prompts to Unpack the Fog

Use these journaling questions to gently guide your own clarity reset:

1. What have I been tolerating in my business that’s quietly draining me?
2. What’s something I used to love that I want to bring back or evolve?
3. What would feel lighter if I gave myself permission to stop?
4. Where am I following someone else’s blueprint instead of trusting my own?

You Don’t Have to Carry It All

Think of your business like a heavy rucksack. Every half-finished offer, old PDF, or 'should-do' strategy you’ve outgrown — it’s all weighing you down.

You’re allowed to tip it out. You’re allowed to repack only what’s aligned. You’re allowed to evolve.

Your business isn’t static — and neither are you.

Follow along with our summer special six-part podcast series and download the free accompanying Summer Reset Planner. This will walk you through your own Keep, Kill, Evolve reset — with prompts, planning space, and a whole lot of clarity.

Sarah Almond Bushell is a Registered Dietitian and business mentor for health professionals, creator of Accelerate Mastermind and the founder of Sarah AI. You can learn more at sarahalmondbushell.com.

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Connect with me:

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

Episode transcription:

Hi there and welcome back. We are in week two of the Summer Reset Series and if you haven't already, make sure you download your free Summer Reset Planner. It's a printable guide with reflection prompts and planning pages and space for you to map out your next season with clarity and calm. You'll find the link in the show notes. So last week we opened this Summer Reset Series with a real softer, more compassionate look at your year so far.

It wasn't about goals and it wasn't about data, but it was about checking in with you, your energy, your mindset, and what you truly need right now. So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, I highly recommend going back after this one. It's like wiping the condensation off a folded mirror to let things come into focus again.

Now today's episode is going to be like a breath of fresh air for those of you who are feeling a little mentally cluttered or overwhelmed in your business. If your brain feels like it's got too many tabs open, you're not the only one. In fact, this episode is for the clinician who has 19 ideas, half a funnel and a Google drive that looks like a virtual junk drawer. Maybe you're just not sure which offer to focus on, or you're feeling pulled in too many different directions. Maybe you're someone who's constantly rewriting your to-do list, but never feeling done. Or perhaps it's dipping in and out of your visibility efforts, like not posting consistently on social media and wondering where even to start with it all again.

And yet, I know you want to feel lighter. I know that you might be craving clarity. You just want to stop spinning plates and start moving forwards again. So in this episode today, I'm going to walk you through a gentle pressure-free method that I use myself when I feel like I'm drowning in overwhelm. It's called the Keep Kill Evolve Framework. And it's not about burning down your business to the ground and starting from scratch.

It's about creating just enough clarity to exhale and make space for what matters. And it's of work can do from anywhere. You can do it from the beach, you can do it from your bed, you can do it from sitting in the car while your kids are finishing football practice. It's totally reflective. It's not prescriptive. So with that said, let's dive in, shall we?

So just to set the scene, a few summers ago, one of my one-to-one business coaching clients, Penny, came to our session. We have them every single week, looking totally frazzled. She was really ambitious. She was extremely driven, the kind of client who goes away after our calls and implements everything you have advised to the letter, my ideal client.

She spent the first half of the year creating and launching a brand new course. She had revamped her website to match. She was supporting her clients one-to-ones and she was also trying to grow a backend membership originally designed for ongoing support for her one-to-ones and her course clients once they'd finished. But now it was going to be open to new members. And of course she was doing her marketing. She was posting daily on Instagram. She was writing blogs. She was emailing her list every single week.

But she confessed to me on one of our calls that despite all of this effort, her income hadn't budged. She said to me, I feel like I'm literally doing everything that I should be, but actually, you know what? It's not working.

So we paused right there and I asked her to take a breath. I introduced this simple exercise. What if we put your entire business into three piles? We've got keep, we've got kill, and we've got evolved. She laughed and she said, can I burn the whole thing down? I feel like applying for a job at Marks and Spencer's.

But by the end of our session, she'd made a decision that actually changed her trajectory. She paused her membership. That actually wasn't driving profit. She opened up more spaces for her one-to-one clients and she actually hired other dietitians to see them and she started planning a live launch campaign for her course three months ahead of the launch date. And it was that actually that truly lit her up. So after that reset, she made more money than the previous two quarters combined. And it was mainly from the one-to-ones even after paying for the freelancers, but she was working less.

So the following October, when she launched her course, she actually made £43,612 and it wasn't because she worked super hard. It was because she did work super hard, but it was because she cleared the fog. She just let go of what wasn't really working for her. She doubled down on what was and she created space in order to be able to plan properly. And you know what? She fell in love with her business again.

Now, I know the word clarity gets thrown around a lot, almost to the point where it feels a bit woolly and a bit vague, but let's actually talk about what a lack of clarity actually feels like. So it feels like starting the day with good intentions and still doom scrolling through social media an hour later. It feels like sitting down to work on your business and spending two hours rearranging your Canva folders. It feels like the constant guilt: guilt for not doing more, guilt for not knowing where to start, guilt for not being more productive.

But the truth is, none of the clinicians I've ever worked with are lazy. They're just overloaded with too much to do. They're overstimulated with loads and loads of ideas and often emotionally saturated from carrying everybody else's needs. I had one client, Emma, she used the phrase she was starting 10 projects and finishing none. So when we explored what was actually behind that, we found that she was actually afraid of choosing the wrong thing. And so what she did was a little bit of everything, but not thoroughly enough. And so got nowhere. Now that is not actually failure in my eyes. That is fear masquerading as productivity.

We think more effort brings more clarity, but often the clarity comes before the work. When you're clear on what you're doing, those decisions that you have to make feel easier. Your messaging flows, your offers land with people, your content creation takes much less time. You stop second guessing yourself and maybe most importantly, you trust yourself a little bit more.

Okay, let's get practical now. So you'll find a page called how to clear the business fog in your summer reset planner to help you work through all of this. It's where you're going to brain dump all the parts of your business that feel messy, outdated or uncertain. And then you're going to start sorting them into keep, kill or evolve. Now, if you don't have the planner, just grab a notebook and just draw three columns and label them keep, kill, and evolve.

So let's walk through what goes into each column. So keep, as you can imagine, these are the things that are working really, really well in your business. The things that feel good to you, the things that actually create results with relatively little effort. So for example, you might have a package of one-to-one consultations that consistently converts. Your email list, now this is your own private audience that no algorithm is going to affect. So even if it's small, you've got to keep this on your keep list. It might be a content format that you actually enjoy creating. Maybe you love dancing on reels or maybe you love podcasting. It might be a boundary that you set that's improved your energy, like not checking your DMs after 6pm. It could be client feedback that energizes you or makes you feel proud.

And of course it could be the tech tools and the automations that can save you so much time and reduce the admin stress. So I want you to ask yourself what feels like it belongs? What gives you more energy and not drains it? They're the things that go on your keep lists.

The second column is your kill list. So this is the decluttering cluttering column. What needs to go? So maybe it's not because it's not working. Maybe it's because it just no longer fits. So for example, it might be an offer that you feel resentful about delivering. And that was me with my dietetic one-to-ones. I had just had enough. It might be that you have a content platform that drains you and doesn't even bring in leads. It might be that you've got old freebies that you created ages ago that actually don't align with your current business direction or your values these days.

It may be social media strategies that you learned from someone else that don't really feel like you. It might be marketing tasks that you dread every single week, even when someone has said to you, you should be doing them. Because sometimes it's not just about whether something works in the way that you'd planned, but whether it works for you. Put those on that list.

And then the third column, this is your evolve column and this should be everything else. And it's kind of like the re-imagining zone. So what do you have or do you do that's worth tweaking, that's worth updating or spend a bit of time on to upgrade or to optimize. So really common one I see with a lot of my clients is an underperforming funnel.

Often it needs someone like me who knows what they're looking for to identify the bottlenecks in that funnel and optimize it so starts working again. It could be a lead magnet that people love, but it delivers far too much value. So people then don't go on to buy your main offer because they're still working through the freebie. That actually could become a low cost offer that you might sell that might work beautifully in a front end funnel.

Maybe you write a weekly newsletter that your subscribers love. Could that evolve? Could it turn into a podcast or a YouTube show? Perhaps you've got a visibility strategy that needs a bit more automation. So if you're still replying to comments and DMs on Instagram, there is an easy fix for this. So ask yourself, what would make this feel easier or lighter or more aligned if I just gave it a little bit of love and a bit of attention?

So I did this exact same keep, kill, evolve, exercise myself last summer. I realized I was clinging to a long nurture email sequence that took me about a day to update every time I live launched and brought in a bunch of new subscribers. So it was written in an old voice that didn't really sound like me anymore. It was a bit formal, a bit strict, but it worked and I kept telling myself, just tweak it and use it again.

But I killed it and that decision gave me back about eight hours and about half a bottle of rescue remedy. And in its place, I created a much shorter story based email series that I wrote with the help of Sarah AI that felt more like me. It took about 90 minutes. It actually gets more opens and more clicks. And it made me not want to throw my laptop out of the window every time I launched.

So it reminded me that sometimes clarity is about giving yourself permission, permission to stop doing what you've outgrown, permission to simplify, permission to start again if that feels like the right thing to do.

So think of business fog like a heavy rucksack that you didn't realize you were wearing. Every offer you've half built, every template you've downloaded but never used, every idea you've told yourself that you should do, it's all in the bag and it's heavy. But you don't need to carry it all. You get to take it off. You get to tip it out and you only repack what you actually want to bring with you. This exercise is your permission to empty that backpack. It's the unpacking of all the stuff that helps you see what's actually worth carrying into the autumn and what just needs to stay behind.

So as you work through your own keep, kill, evolve list this week, here are some reflection prompts to guide you. What have I been tolerating in my business that's quietly draining me? What's something I used to love that I want to bring back or evolve? And what would feel lighter if I simply gave myself permission to stop?

And actually this is a good one. Where am I following someone else's blueprint instead of trusting my own pace and vision? Let yourself just answer these honestly. There's no guilt, there's no pressure. It's just gonna bring you clarity.

So you do not need to do this all at once. In fact, this might be something that you scribble on your planner one day, come back to it later in the week and just refine it as you go. If clarity feels hard, it's to be expected because you're human and your business is a living, evolving thing. It's supposed to change. You're allowed to change as well.

So this week, create a little space to unpack that fog, write out your lists. Your future self will thank you for it, I promise. And if you haven't already, don't forget to download that summer reset planner. There's a dedicated worksheet inside to walk you through this very same exercise. I designed it to be really simple, to be calming and a bit intuitive. So you'll find the link in the show notes. And then next week, we're going to be talking about this summer CEO date.

It's one hour a week that can radically improve how you feel about your business. But until then, give yourself permission to stop carrying what no longer fits. Bye for now.