Can You Build a Business and Still Take Time Off? I Tried.

June and July were big months for me. 

In June, I officially launched a partnership endeavor, and in July, we hosted our first partner workshop. 

To make that happen, I’ve written nearly 53,000 words: project plans, emails, promotion, landing pages, a new slide deck, a new website, a new assessment, a white paper.

And that doesn’t even include the newsletters I send here—those added another 13,135 words in June and July alone.

For reference, the average non-fiction book is anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 words. 

I say all of this not as a humble brag but to share context about the following:

Because in June and July, I also took a two week vacation. First to the beaches of Florida with my husband, kids, and his side of the family and then to the beaches of Maine with my mom, aunts, cousin, and sister. 

To do both—launch this new venture and step away from it—I had to challenge every working pattern I’ve used for the last 15–20 years.

The question I’ve been sitting with is this:

Can I build something meaningful, support my family, and stay emotionally and physically well—without burning the candle at all ends?

It’s the question I think we all need to be asking—if we’re privileged enough to even consider it—especially if we want to be part of building collective change.

Because none of us are free until all of us are free.
And if we’re self-oppressing—upholding extractive, exploitative patterns in our own lives—we will, consciously or not, project them onto everyone around us.

And so, I’ve spent the first six months of this year in a deep personal process. I have dedicated myself to questioning, investigating, & deconditioning myself from so many beliefs, behaviours, and business norms I used to treat as truth. Patterns that haven’t served me— or anyone else, really.

So yes, it felt good to hit the halfway mark and take a break. To rest with my family. To eat well. To put my feet in the warm ocean and white beaches of Pensacola and the ice cold ocean and gritty beaches of Ogunquit.

And yes, I still worked on that vacation.

Let’s not romanticize it: this wasn’t some laptop-on-the-beach lifestyle flex. I worked overtime before we left. I worked early mornings. Late evenings. I had my phone out communicating with the team at Nubble Light. I poured a bottle of water all over my computer because I was scrambling so much. (She lived. So did I.)

But here’s the truth: it was my choice.

And for the first time in a long time, it felt like it.

Agency. Dignity. Sovereignty. That’s freedom. That’s what I’m working toward. That’s what I believe we all deserve.

Especially as I hold my mother and sister close—both survivors of aggressive cancers—I’m reminded just how fleeting and sacred this time is. We don’t know how long we will get. So I’m savoring what I can, while I can.

Because working to make one person wealthy?
That just doesn’t hit the way it used to. I’m no longer here to prove myself as an upstanding citizen of Capitalism. I’m not trying to win Monopoly. 

Instead, I’m here to practice a new way of leading. For myself. For anyone else I work with. For my kids. For our collective future.

I used to think that if I just found the right framework, the right operating model, the right language for what I was trying to lead—then I’d finally feel steady. Like I’d cracked some kind of code for conscious business.

But that illusion only held until I realized this work doesn’t resolve. It repeats.

It’s not a problem to solve. It’s a practice to return to.

This year has been an enormous exercise in what it really means to practice leadership in a time that doesn’t want you to slow down long enough to notice what you’re practicing.

Leadership isn’t something you think your way into. It’s something you live into—over and over, even (especially) when your nervous system is screaming for the certainty that only control can give.

THAT is what I dedicated COO-fessions to. It’s a love letter to all the versions of me who felt broken and wrong and not enough, and it’s my love letter to anyone else who has felt that way, too.

That’s the shift this series was always pointing toward:
We don’t need more content. We need more integration.

Not a five-step method. Not a brand-new framework. But a way to stay inside the questions, to notice when our behaviors drift from our beliefs, to recalibrate—not perfectly, but consistently.

Leadership isn’t clean. Alignment isn’t a checklist. And evolution doesn’t happen because you read one great book or attended one retreat.

It happens because you kept noticing.
Kept reckoning with what wasn’t yours to hold.
Kept coming back.

The dominant systems we’re all leading inside were never built for nuance.

They were built to reward urgency. To praise over-functioning. To reward those who can hold everyone else’s chaos without ever revealing their own.

So if you’ve felt like leadership is hollowing you out, like you’ve built something meaningful but can’t quite feel the meaning anymore—you’re not imagining it.
And you’re not failing.
You’re waking up.

You’re noticing the ways your ambition has been shaped by exhaustion.
The ways your power has been conditioned into control.
The ways your systems still quietly extract—time, energy, labor—even when your values say otherwise.

And that noticing is your invitation, not to perfection, but to practice.

It looks like choosing a slower timeline when urgency would be easier.
It looks like telling the truth, even if it complicates the brand.
It looks like auditing your ambition: “Is this coming from fear… or from fullness?”

It looks like naming what’s misaligned—not to shame yourself, but to shift.
It looks like redesigning systems so emotional labor isn’t invisibly subsidizing your sense of safety.
It looks like leading from capacity, not performance.

And maybe most of all?
It looks like choosing community over rugged individualism.

Because this work—this real, often slow, deeply confronting work of leading differently—isn’t meant to be done alone.

That’s what COO-fessions asked of me. 

In the final episode of COO-fessions, we revisit the four core themes that showed up again and again across the entire series:

→ The myth of clean leadership
→ Energy is not infinite (and extraction isn’t a strategy)
→ Power requires reckoning
→ Ambition needs an upgrade

We name the truths that kept humming underneath it all:

→ The systems aren’t broken. They were built this way.
→ Most of us are complicit. (Hi. Me too.)
→ You don’t need to be perfect to practice differently.

And we walk through five practices that can hold you steady when the old ways start calling:

→ Audit your ambition.
→ Locate your power—and redistribute it.
→ Practice capacity-aware leadership.
→ Interrupt extraction.
→ Choose community over individualization.

Come listen.

This episode isn’t a lesson. It’s a living question.

What if the future isn’t something we figure out—but something we practice into being?

🎧 Episode 8: Practicing the Future, Now

This one’s just me, Brittany Martin. No guests. No interview. Just a slow, honest conversation about what COO-fessions really asked of us—because the truth is, there are more questions than answers here—and how we carry those questions forward into a different kind of future.

Because the future of leadership isn’t a role, it’s a relationship.

And it’s one we practice every day.

xo,
Brittany