Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

This episode is shorter and more off the cuff than usual. I talk through what I've been calling my slowest, smooth season: restructuring HmntyCntrd, stepping back from high-touch consulting work, and getting ready to move abroad. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾

Sustainable business growth gets sold as a formula. Ten strategies, a five-step framework, a checklist promising the version of growth that never breaks anything on the way up. I've read those lists too, and none of them mention the part where growth actually requires you to stop first, to sit still long enough to find out what you're building toward and whether the pace you're keeping can survive contact with it. I'm writing this from the middle of what I've started calling my slowest, smooth season, a stretch of restructuring my consultancy, stepping back from work that used to define me, and relearning what pace actually protects a business instead of just protecting appearances.

The Motto I Didn't Expect to Borrow From the Navy SEALs

The phrase I keep returning to isn't mine. It's the Navy SEALs' operating motto: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. It was built for high-stress, high-consequence environments, the kind where moving too quickly gets people hurt, and I think about how closely that maps onto business during chaos or crisis, when the instinct is to react immediately to whatever just landed on your desk. I started HmntyCntrd in the spring of 2020 as something closer to a passion project than a business, a way to connect with people who were also questioning the status quo of what it meant to be human-centered at work. It became a real consultancy. Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients, HR leaders and executives trying to build trauma-informed cultures instead of ones that just demand more resilience from people already running on empty. That work has been genuinely good. It has also had a cost, and slow is smooth is what I've been using to figure out what to do about that cost instead of absorbing it indefinitely.

What It Actually Takes to Grow a Business Without Burning Out

Since 2019 I've been doing a specific flavor of consulting: sitting with organizations that over-index on resilience and under-index on the systems that make resilience necessary in the first place. That's real work, and it's also work I recently admitted I need distance from, at least in its highest-touch form. So we did something unglamorous. We audited it. Five years of frameworks, trainings, and intellectual property, over 230 pieces of it, all sitting in folders while we kept building more without ever counting what we already had. Growing a business without burning out, in my experience, has almost nothing to do with adding capacity and almost everything to do with taking inventory of what already exists and restructuring it so it can serve more people without requiring more of you. We're turning a lot of that IP into packaged offerings now, ones that are more affordable and less dependent on me being in the room for every hour of delivery. A couple of consulting clients I'll keep working with because the fit is genuinely right. The rest of that bandwidth is going somewhere else.

The Boxes in Storage

I'll tell you where some of that space went, because it wasn't all business. I'm moving to a city outside Mexico City at the end of May. Temporary residency visa secured, no return date in mind, and a kind of deep peace about the decision that surprised me given how big it is. What I wasn't prepared for was what happened when I started going through the boxes I'd been keeping in storage, the ones that move with you from place to place without you ever really opening them, tucked in the closet of a second guest bedroom you don't think about until you have to. I went through mine last weekend expecting logistics. What I got was grief. Photos of friendships that don't exist anymore in the shape they used to, memories of family members I've become estranged from, entire chapters of a life I hadn't looked at directly in years. Zero out of five stars, genuinely. And underneath the grief there was something else too, a kind of clearing, room opening up for whatever comes next because something that no longer served me finally had somewhere to go besides a box in a closet I never opened.

Why Slowing Down Is the Contrarian Move Right Now

Watching other people ramp up while you're deliberately slowing down is uncomfortable. Everyone around you looks like they're in motion, launching, scaling, posting the wins, and the temptation is to read your own stillness as falling behind. I don't think it is. Slow is smooth so that smooth can be fast, and that was never really about speed. It's about clarity, about being far enough along in the process of knowing what you actually want that when you do move, you move without stutter-stepping or re-litigating the decision every few days. Fast becomes possible because the direction stopped being a question. That's the part hustle culture skips. It sells urgency as commitment and mistakes constant motion for progress, when what actually compounds is knowing exactly where you're headed before you sprint toward it.

How to Slow Down Before You Try to Scale

If you're craving more clarity and less chaos in your own business, here's roughly what this season has looked like in practice, none of it complicated, most of it just unfashionable. I audited everything I'd already built instead of assuming I needed to create something new. I got pickier about which consulting engagements I said yes to, which meant saying no to work that used to be automatic. I started taking longer pauses before responding to things, in meetings and in email both, mostly so I could hear my own intuition before reacting to someone else's urgency. And I started treating my body like part of the business strategy instead of an afterthought to it: sleep, water, the unglamorous maintenance nobody puts in a growth deck. None of that is a hack. It's just what happens when you stop treating speed as the default and start asking what pace the thing you're building can actually sustain.

I'm still mid-season on this one. Come the end of June, I expect to be back in a building phase, and I'll probably tell you what that looked like once I'm through it. Until then, if you're already in motion, running a business that's further along than the deciding-whether-to-start stage and mostly need help getting more of the right people on the phone, How to Book Your First 10 Discovery Calls is built for exactly that part of the season.

Originally aired as Episode 16: Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.