266: The Importance of Showing Up as Prepared and Professional In Your Business: Fan Favorite Replay

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady podcast. I’m your host, AliceAnne Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life. Starting now. Lead yourself. The rest will follow.

The Importance of Being Prepared and Professional

Hi there, leading ladies. Welcome to today’s episode. I am going to share with you a recent experience I had with another professional woman that got me on a little bit of a rant about the importance of being prepared and professional, regardless of what’s happening in your life. We, as women especially, need to understand our bandwidth.

We need to be aware of what’s going on in all facets of our life so that we can be prepared and professional and really show up as our best. As a somewhat new podcast—really, my podcast is only about six months old—I am still looking for great guests: women who share my values and my mission, who are out there building their business, building their brand, and feel that they have a strong message that other leading ladies or my listeners, or anyone in our leading lady community, would benefit from.

I get a lot of requests from individuals to be on my podcast. Before you can be on the podcast, I like to have a conversation with you. I like to learn a little bit about your business and really make sure that it’s a good fit for our listeners and the leading lady community.

The Guest Request Process

A few weeks ago, someone’s assistant reached out to me and said that her boss wanted to be on my podcast and wanted to know how she could set that up. So I responded to her—this was all through email—that I would really love to speak to her boss. Thank you for your interest. I’d love to speak to the woman who would like to be on my podcast and just see if we have good chemistry or if it aligns with the Leading Lady mission and vision.

She responds to me and says, “Well, her schedule’s kind of in flux. So what we’ll do is you’ll schedule with me, the assistant, and I’ll tell you all about her, and then you can decide if it’s a good fit for you.” And then I respond—oh my gosh, it’s like this back and forth, back and forth. I’m thinking, wait a minute, you’re reaching out to me, and I’m asking to speak to her to see if she’s a good fit, and now you’re telling me she doesn’t have time for me?

Okay, so I got my ego in check and wrote back to the assistant: “Well, sounds like she’s got a lot on her plate right now. I never have anyone on my podcast that I don’t know, that I haven’t spoken with, that I don’t know about their business, that I haven’t seen how we talk back and forth. So when her schedule calms down a little bit, go ahead and have her schedule with me. But until then, thanks, but no thanks.”

A few days go by, and she emails me again and says, “Well, I forwarded the message to my boss and gave her your scheduling link, and she’s going to go ahead and schedule with you for a phone call.” Great. Glad that worked out.

The Scheduled Call

This week was our scheduled phone call together. She was ten minutes late. I am like the queen of punctuality. It is so important to me to be on time for professional things. I’m usually late to a workout or something like that—usually late to something where it’s just myself. I think all of us have a quirk or something like that. Maybe I procrastinate putting my workouts off, but when it comes to business or meetings, I am extremely punctual. I teach time management and priority management workshops, so you can probably guess that when it comes to time management and punctuality, I don’t take that lightly.

She called ten minutes late to a twenty-minute phone call. I said, “Hi, I was just emailing you. Our appointment started ten minutes ago, so I wasn’t sure if you were still interested in being on the podcast.” She did not even apologize for being late. She just said, “Yeah, hi, I’m so-and-so, and I’m really excited about being on your podcast.” And I’m like, okay, hold on, let’s just have a conversation.

Unfortunately, I do have a call after you, and being that our meeting is now starting ten minutes later, I just want to get right into it to see if you’d be a good fit. So then I asked her if she had listened to my podcast, and she said no. She said, “Actually, no, I haven’t. I’ve been really busy running my business, and I have a two-year-old that doesn’t sleep, so I don’t really listen to podcasts.”

So then I ask her, “Well, then how do you know you want to be on my podcast? What do you know about Leading Ladies? What do you know about the community?” She says, “I don’t really know anything. I’m running my business, and I’m a working mom. I don’t have time to listen to podcasts. I’m just trying to work my business and get my business out there.”

Professionalism and Preparation

I’m kind of at a loss for words, and this is exactly how I responded, because why would you ask to be on someone’s podcast if you hadn’t even listened to it? If you yourself don’t have time or are not prioritizing listening to podcasts, then why would you use that platform to put your business out there? I had so many questions. I probably would have continued the conversation a little bit more to get into depth as to what was her real goal.

But my background as an early childhood educator and as a working mom—the minute she threw her two-year-old under the bus and said, “I can’t show up as a professional, I can’t be prepared because I have a child”—that is a hot button for me. Clearly, she did not do her homework on me, because she would have known that my entrepreneurship journey began ten days before I gave birth to my first child. I’ve always been a working mom. I’ve always been balancing building my business and raising young children, and I don’t know a single mom out there, working or not working, that hasn’t struggled with a two-year-old that doesn’t sleep or changing sleep patterns or teething. That’s part of being a mom.

So the minute she used motherhood as an excuse to be unprofessional and unprepared, I just started to shut down. I didn’t really know how to respond to her. I didn’t want to mom-shame her. I was really just quite dumbfounded. I’m thinking to myself, this individual is really struggling to understand what it means to professionally build your business and how to balance these different parts of her life.

So I said to her, “Well, it sounds like you haven’t really done your research to see if I’m even a good fit for you, and I don’t want to waste each other’s time. So I would suggest that you do a little bit of research on anyone that you’re trying to pitch yourself to, and that you come to meetings on time and prepared, because that’s really what’s going to set you up. At this time, it doesn’t sound like you’re ready to make this move in your business.” I thanked her and wished her well, and then I hung up the phone and got on my Facebook group and ranted about it.

Lessons Learned

It was such an odd and disappointing exchange that it left me feeling pretty sour for a good bit of time. I was frustrated because I felt like my time had been wasted—the back and forth with her assistant, she was too busy to meet with me, didn’t really want to talk with me. The whole time I’m thinking, you reached out to me. I know nothing about you. It’s not like I was trying to get Brene Brown or Oprah on the podcast. I was just really surprised by the whole exchange with the assistant, surprised by the woman calling late and being unapologetic about it. She just had this air of her life and her schedule being more important than anyone else’s, and that was a really big turnoff for me.

So I emailed her assistant back afterwards and said, “Your boss showed up late and was unprepared and unprofessional. My advice to her and to you as a working mom entrepreneur is that she really think about what her goals are and how she can move forward in a more professional manner. If she’s using an assistant, then the assistant should have at least prepped her or given her some key points so that she might at least sound like she knew anything about Leading Ladies, the podcast, or the community. I think there were a lot of lessons there.”

I’m not sharing the story to rip the woman apart. I actually feel for her. I feel that oftentimes, as women, we stretch ourselves so thin that we can’t do everything and we can’t do it all at the same time. It sounds like this woman doesn’t have a realistic understanding of her bandwidth and doesn’t have her priority management or time management under control.

The Lesson

Really, from the story, what I wanted to pull was the lesson: when you are going out there as a professional, make sure that you understand what you are putting out there. How are you showing up? What excuses are you making to downplay the need for professionalism?

I will say there have been many times in my life that I wasn’t my best self. I remember I was speaking at a Junior League open house and I was going through a really rough time in my business, my childcare business. I was just at a really dark, low place in my life and I was trying to push forward and trying to show up in my community and in this volunteer position, really giving it. I was faking it. I was faking it when I knew that I was overextended, mentally drained, physically drained, emotionally drained, and yet I didn’t just say, “Hey, this isn’t the right time. I can’t do this right now.” I pushed forward because I wanted to come off as totally put together and I didn’t want to let anybody down. I just kept pushing myself, even though all of my internal cues were telling me, “AliceAnne, this is not working for you. You are overextended.”

So I was at this Junior League event, at the podium, my notes were a mess, a room full of women staring at me waiting for this presentation. I look up from the podium and say, “I can’t do this. I’m not prepared,” and I end up just walking out of the room. I then took a leave of absence from the Junior League. I was mortified. Many women in the community talked bad about me after that. They said I had a nervous breakdown or was totally unprofessional, a total flake. There were all kinds of rumors flying around.

Because I kept trying to push myself through, I had this huge blunder publicly, and I ended up having to take a leave of absence and really get myself pulled back together. So when I see women like this woman with the podcast interview, I have a little bit of compassion and a little bit of grace for her in that she doesn’t realize that she’s taking on too much. She doesn’t realize that she is overextending herself, and what that’s doing is causing her to show up and look unprofessional and unprepared. I’m sure she’s a lovely woman, a high achiever, and when push comes to shove, she works really hard.

Having the ability to recognize when you can’t take something on—that’s a gift, a talent, a skill you have to really fine-tune. Especially as women, we don’t want to let anyone down. We try and push ourselves to the max. Being a mom is hard. Being an entrepreneur is hard. Balancing both at the same time is hard. I’m not diminishing that, and I’m not saying that just because I started a business with a baby all in the same month and was doing all those things, I had it all together. I didn’t have it all together.

I was at a meeting with the Maryland State Department of Education, dressed all professionally, in their boardroom trying to get my licenses for my childcare. I’m in a skirt and blouse, so professional, so put together, and then my milk lets down and here I am in this meeting with stains running down the front of my blouse. I don’t know how to impress upon women that, yes, it is hard, but don’t use it as an excuse. Don’t use it as an excuse to be unprofessional. Don’t use it as an excuse to be unprepared. If you are not prepared, if you can’t show up the way you want to show up, that shows your best abilities and skills and self, tell people that. Tell them that it’s not a good time. Tell them you need more time or that it’s not a good fit for you.

Forcing yourself to move forward when you are out of alignment or out of balance—maybe some women can pull it off, but at what cost? Ultimately, there’s going to be some damage, either internally with you or, like me, you’ll have a very public blunder, or like this woman, who showed up and I—I’m sad. I’m sad I didn’t get to know her, sad I didn’t get to know what her business is, but I also needed to set the precedent that I expect people, if you’re trying to pitch yourself to be on my podcast, or if you want me to promote your business or share your message, then you need to have the respect and courtesy to be professional with me as well.

Final Thoughts

So, lots of lessons here. I invite you to look at the areas of your life that are suffering. If you are feeling overextended, if you are not showing up as your best, either professionally or personally, reassess your priority management and be honest with yourself. I always say balance is a verb. Balance is not a destination. Women are always telling me, “I just want to reach balance in my life.” Well, balance is not a destination. Balance is a verb. Balance is the action of taking deliberate and meaningful shifts to keep yourself from falling over.

So my invitation to you is to look at the different ways that you show up in life—as a wife, as a mother, as an entrepreneur, as a friend—and if something is suffering, what can you do to make a deliberate shift or movement to align yourself so that you don’t fall over or feel that panic, that overextension? It’s raising the awareness in yourself that I would much rather have someone call me and say, “You know what? I really wanted to do this interview with you, but I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and I think I’ve overextended myself, and I don’t want to waste your time or my time, and I’m going to reach back out when I’m feeling a little more settled.” That is professional. Canceling a meeting with me or anyone and being honest with yourself and with that person is a thousand times more professional than showing up unprepared.

That’s all I have for today. An invitation for you to look at your life: Where are you overextended? Where are you trying to push yourself, and what shifts do you need to make so that you can show up as your best self in any situation? So until next time, ladies, take the lead.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the Leading Lady podcast. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at www.leadingladycoaching.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss any future episodes. While you are there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. This will allow me to help other high-achieving women find inspiration, connection, and develop strategies to live and lead with purpose and intention. See you here next week.