Dani Tan: Hi, I'm Dani Tan and if you are here, you are in the right place. Welcome to the Pivot and Promotion Podcast where we say forget the rules because they weren't written for us. I'm Danny Tan. I'm your host as well as career and leadership coach and a proud advocate for redefining what success and leadership looks like. And here's what I know. You can lead at any level. You can pivot at any age and you can make moves that feel right for you whether you're climbing the perfect ladder, starting something completely new, or just figuring out your next step, I've got you covered with strategies, stories, and straight up inspiration. So let's make some moves. Hello and welcome to today's episode.

I'm talking about the business lessons I didn't expect to learn in 2025. And so there's always going to be lessons we're going to learn, but I think some of them we may think to ourselves like, Oh, I learned that lesson so long ago, or I know what to do in that scenario. And then life just kind of pleasantly surprises us or maybe humbles us and tells us otherwise. So in this episode, going more of a personal reflection. Um, about the unexpected things that 2025 have, you know, they kind of brought me in business when it came to being a business owner, a leader, a coach, and so many different levels and really setting the tone for what I want to bring into 2026. And so I'm to give you about five different lessons that I learned because there's too many.

And so I had to make sure I kept it. And then as always a little light tie in of, know, how our brains kind of interact with these lessons that I learned, and then a little bit of a reflection at the end. So the first lesson, which I thought I would have learned this one quite some time ago is delegating is important, but also it does not mean detaching, which obviously I know, but I think especially when I was working in corporate and I had big teams, was like pretty masterful, I would say at delegating, delegating, organizing, just in general, like my tasks, my teams, the projects, it was like one of my jams, I would say. And I would say going into being a business owner. I have my amazing, amazing, amazing, assistant.

she crushes it. And I also have a coordinator and I also have somebody else who helps with the blog. have so many amazing team members, but I think one of the biggest things that I had a hard time with was there are certain things you have to kind of just like surrender and let go of. So for example, like maybe everything will not be done exactly as I would do them, but they're going to get the job done kind of a thing. And to give, you know, the folks on my team, the women on my team, the Liberty. And the freedom to go ahead and do things with a little bit of twist of their own as well has been a big thing for me. And I think the other thing is too, when it comes to just like delagating or having help on your team is like the mental part of the financial part.

And so if you're somebody who maybe has a hard time asking for help or even like being able to like pay for the service of having help, right. It can feel difficult and uncomfortable to be like, why would I pay for help if I could do it myself? Or if I know how to do it myself? Or what if I'm worried if I give it to this person and it doesn't feel like me or sound like me or isn't me and I, or I would do it a different way. So that could be a thing that comes up. But the biggest thing that happens, you know, as a business owner, as a leader, as a coach, as a mentor, anything is that you kind of have to let go of being in the day to day tasks of things. And you can do that without letting go of your leadership, without letting go of your tone, yourself and all those things.

And it really is about trusting your team and trusting yourself, trusting yourself that you have picked the right people to be on your team and trusting your team so that they're going to be in alignment with like your values and what you stand for in your mission. And so I think a big part of this lesson for me has been like, delegating does not mean I'm detaching from the work that I do. I'm still like ever present and aware of what they are doing. And you know, and what is essentially gonna execute towards the vision it is of the company that I am running, the business that I am running. But I still think it's Israel. I think the financial piece too has always been this hard part of, my gosh, I'm investing in this.

I hope I get my return on investment. What if things don't result very quickly? But when you're a business owner, you're gonna have to take some calculator risks. And so for example, for me, it's just making sure I have marketing going out consistently. Consistently one, just because it's helpful content that I usually create for my audience, my community, whatever you'd like to call it. And so I always want to make sure I have helpful pieces going out, but I also want to make sure I'm having pieces that also are going to, I'm a business owner. So like they're generating marketing, they're generating interest too, you know? And so with doing that, I can sit for hours and create content. Like it's one of my favorite things to do is to create things of how could this be helpful for somebody or where is somebody getting stuck right now?

A lot of things that I write are, and I'm going in a little rabbit hole here. A lot of things that I write are things that I'm thinking about of clients and maybe some problems that come up for them pretty commonly, or they're prospective clients who have asked me questions. And so I create content off of that. And so I could do that all day. But if I didn't have my team who I could delegate to make sure it gets scheduled and sent out, it would just be sitting in a Google Doc in my computer forever. And so I think one of the biggest lessons I have is that you do have to delegate. And it doesn't mean that you're detaching from your business. Sometimes it actually means that you're helping your business get out there.

Because I have endless Google Docs of content that I have written and scripted and worked up. And so it's just about getting it out there. So biggest lesson is that it does not matter at what point in your, your levels or life where you've like, I'm comfortable with, um, delegating sometimes something new, a new challenge comes up. So my last little personal example will be this is that there were years ago, I would never hire, um, help to clean my apartment. Uh, you know, living in New York, I would never have somebody come clean my firm. I have to do it myself. Like, why would I hire someone? could do it myself. And then eventually I sort of hiring help to help clean my apartment. And I was like, my gosh, like I have more time to do the things that I want to do.

When you have help, you're able to work on things that are a bigger focus for you, whether it's like strategy, whether it's like just having time to breathe and to rest. Like it's just so crazy how when you actually remove yourselves from these things that can have support and help, well, you're actually opening up your mind and your opportunities for us. So I think that part is something that I always think to myself is like, what are the tasks that I'm doing? And are these tasks in alignment with what it is that I'm actually trying to achieve? And then the second lesson I learned is that you can slow down and still grow. Now I learned this lesson in a big way in 2024, when I quit my corporate job and went full-time in my business, I had taken basically half the year off and worked the other half.

And I wanted to reset because I'd heard a lot of business owners say that they went from having a corporate job to going full-time in their business and never having a break. So I was really intentional about having a break but the funny thing that I noticed in that year and again in this year is that anytime I slow down and I take time off, I don't know if it's like the universe or whatever, but I always come back to like calendar booked with sales calls, people looking for either workshops speaking or coaching. And so I always say like time off is sacred for me because time off actually generates revenue time off brings me new clients, brings me new partnerships. And so I actually love taking time off because it just means that there's room and space for things to percolate.

So I usually have natural times throughout the year where I block time off. I usually take a block off in the summer and a block off during the holidays, and then I try to sprinkle some throughout. But I usually have two big segments where I'm taking a good chunk of time off. I think before, and especially if we are conditioned or used to my output, excuse me, input, equals X, Y, and Z output, we're like, we always have to do more, more, more. It's never enough, right? And so the biggest thing that I learned is that when I travel and I get to be restful and there's less urgency and I just like lead with the ability to kind of have some easefulness in my day, that's actually when growth comes.

It's actually because I've created space for it. And so that's a lesson that I continue to learn even this year, this year. So like I was saying, in 2023, so excuse me, 2024, I took like six months off throughout the year, not all at once, like sporadically throughout. And then this year I had taken some months off, but I actually started grinding. I got back into that like old energy that I had before of like always work, work, work, work, work. It kind of, I tapped accidentally back into it for too long. Like it's good to have temporarily, but I tapped into it for too long this year. And then I started to get a little burnt out, like the feelings of burnt out. So I was like, this isn't the energy that we want in our business.

This is why this is the reason why we started a business was to not feel like we had to be in this urgency energy all the time of always doing my work. So I had to like create space in my calendar again. I had to cut back, um, you know, some of the partnerships that I had because I was like, no, you know, this isn't who I want to be. And I don't need to do that. Um, I have for any reason, except for that, I'm just doing it to do it. So I started to scale back again. And then when I did that, it opened up space for projects that were more aligned again. So I think for anyone here who is hearing this piece is I always tell my clients, because my clients are very ambitious, very high achievers, very over indexers.

And the idea of taking like a break or rest is like very scary to them. And so I always remind them like, you know, slowing down actually allows you to speed up and not that we have to be speeding up, but slowing down actually allows you to speed up because you've taken the break. I think a lot of us see it as if I stop, I'm going to have this huge gap delayed to my next step. in reality, when you stop and you take a break, I swear it's like you speed right up. It's like an accelerator where you shoot right up to it at a faster pace a lot of the times. And so I always like to say that and that your nervous system is like, honestly, I'll talk about it more is a big piece to your business as well as your life.

I always talk about business and life as one picture holistically because they are all intertwined. And so the next one that I will go ahead and share is number three is not every pivot needs to be public. I feel like, and I have a lot of entrepreneur, friends and I feel like we talk about this as like, it's like everything doesn't have to be announced. Everything doesn't have to be on display. Like you can have shifts quietly happen behind the scenes as you see fit. You don't have to announce everything in this huge grandiose way. and so for example, it's just nice to have quiet shifts behind the scenes. Those can be the most powerful versus being like, you know, my program is changing. My pricing is changing.

This is changing. Like it's okay. Like just doing you to do it's fine. I think that's something that's been really important. So like an example could be like, if you're reworking one of your offers or how your team is structured or like what the client journey looks like, or what is included with server and services. Like I realized like, wait, I don't have to make an announcement. Every time I make a change to my business, it's going to be okay. Obviously like if you have something major that happened, go for it, but it's not necessary and it's okay. And I love that. I love that piece of being like everything doesn't have to be a big announcement. It's going to be okay. So I touched on this a little bit before, but the fourth one is like your nervous system is your leadership tool because your nervous system is you.

And so it's about leading yourself. I mentioned this many times before I worked with an amazing, I mean, I've worked with two amazing somatic coaches. But the one that I work with most recently is also a dear friend. And I would say the biggest thing for me is that I have done cognitive behavioral talk therapy my gosh, majority of my life. But if you are a talker and an over-thinker, really someone who's overly analytical, you can get like stuck and trapped in the loop of the thoughts versus actually sitting with the emotions. so semantics in general and tapping in and understanding your nervous system helps you really work through the emotional piece of it, which is what really gets trapped in our bodies.

And so we are probably hearing nervous system way more than we ever have before, because I feel like I see it a lot like on social media. But in reality, it's just like checking with your body. Like we don't have make it that dramatic, but it's just checking with your body in general, understanding what these different feelings and emotions look like for you and being able to like help identify them. think, UD, my somatic coach says it so beautifully. We are not striving for a perfectly regulated nervous system. So if you see that, like, no, we're not striving for a perfectly regulated nervous system. We are just striving for nothing. First of all, we're just opening up space to actually experience and witness our emotions and sit with them and to understand how we can support ourselves when they are going through maybe the waves of emotions that we're in.

So how can you create a support plan for yourself, which is something that she has taught me, which I will have for the rest of my life of like, if you're having a down day, what can you pull from your support plan to kind of help you during that day? And if you're having an up day, how can you like bottle up and like keep the memories and the evidence of that day that went well? I think this has been so important because this has grounded me when it comes to traveling nonstop and moving around a lot. How can I reground myself? What are the tools that I go after to make that happen? And then it's also helped me in my business when I'm like kind of spiraling out and I'm worrying about something.

It could be that I'm worried about a client. I want to make sure they're okay and they're getting what they need. Or it could be about business in general, about like a partnership of like, it gonna go the way that I want it to go? that is the ultimate tool because if you can like really learn how to lead yourself, identify patterns in yourself, when these things come up, it just helps you be able to support yourself and your business. And I think that's the biggest thing is that from when I started the idea of trying to build a business to today, you know, the first few years I always had a coach and then this year in what year are we in? My gosh, 2025, I did not have a business coach going into this year.

And I actually didn't even get any coaching until like a month ago. I was like, You know what, I could do a tune up. Let me get a tune up coaching call. But I was like, so happy and impressed with myself. Not that you should go without coaching, but I was happy to impress myself because I felt like I had taken all the tools that all the coaches had taught me before. Like I had a digital nomad coach, I had a business coach, I was in a mastermind, I did somatic coaching. I feel like all of these coaches from like the years prior, I had finally really like grown and integrated the things that they taught me. So when coming into this year, I was like, I think I could do this and I have and it's been beautiful.

And so now I'm in like my tune up season. I'm doing this. I like to tune up here and do tune up next month. And like, just a good check in because sometimes, you know, we need that. And so nervous system is a great place to be. And I feel like my capacity emotionally has changed immensely. I feel like I would have been avoided and hiding and running in so many ways to Sunday previously. And that in 2025, of course, these are going to have our tendencies, but I'm much less. So, I'm hiding from things, or letting myself get like kind of pulled into things. And so I'm super grateful for that. That's an amazing thing, but I don't think I realized like what level of importance it has until you start to identify those patterns.

So I love that lesson that I did not expect this year. And then the last one, which is it's kind of like cheeky, but you don't have to monetize everything. And I don't think I am a person who thinks everything must be monetized, but I definitely think and believe that it's out there. They're like, that's an idea, monetize it. That's an idea, monetize it. And so I think that I sometimes like have this like little thought in my mind of like, my gosh, I should be monetizing this and this and this and I should change the software and this program and blah, blah, blah. But then I remember why I built my business and why it's important to me and what is the focus of it and what do I actually need financially to be comfortable and have options and security and making everything into something that's monetized is not the vibe for me.

I don't need it to scale everything and it could be a really cool idea, but maybe it's just not aligned with what it is that I want to do in this season. Like I've had so many fun ideas, but I think the biggest thing that I have, I had set myself as a goal last year in this year is I want my business to be boring. I want my business to be like simple. want to be able to anticipate the needs of everyone because that's how you fine tune and become really awesome at what you do. And then I can always go ahead in another year or two and elevate and change things. know, of course I always take feedback and I iterate off of that, but I don't think everything has to be like the next best thing. What do you think has been an overarching theme for me of like not wanting to bring the energy in on so many different ways of that.

Like you can have growth in exactly where you are right now. So those are some of the lessons I learned in 2025 when it comes to business and maybe some of these lessons surprised you or maybe they didn't, but I'm super curious for you. What lessons have you learned most about yourself this year? 2025, what lessons have you learned about yourself and what do you feel like you're gonna bring into 2026? So for me, I'm bringing in all these things to 2026. So it's been great and I'll talk to you soon.