Scaling Up Insights: Stress, Think Time, Pivoting, and Trends with Three Coaches

Executive overview

Three experienced Scaling Up coaches — Lisa Ridley, Cheryl Biron, and Kristin McLane — join host Bill Gallagher for a wide-ranging panel recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2020. The conversation moves through stress management, think time, remote work adaptations, client engagement tactics, and long-range trend spotting. The core thread running through every topic is the primacy of mindset: how leaders choose to interpret adversity determines outcomes more than the adversity itself.

The belief that stress is harmful — not stress itself — is the primary driver of its negative health effects; reframing stress as energy is both physiologically and strategically powerful.

Stress management and mindset

• Kelly McGonigal's The Upside of Stress is cited as a top-five required read: stress harms you only if you believe it does.
• A 30,000-person, 8-year study found that people who believed stress was harmless had a lower mortality risk than those experiencing low stress — lower even than the low-stress group.
• Mo Gawdat's seven-step reframe: ask "what is the worst that can happen?" to move the brain from the reptilian fight-or-flight response to the prefrontal cortex, then reason through it.
• Visualising stress as energy (sweating palms before public speaking reframed as the body gifting adrenaline) demonstrably improves performance as rated by outside observers.
• Athletes deliberately seek stress as a strength-building mechanism — the same reframe applies to business leaders.
• The Stockdale Paradox (face brutal facts while maintaining optimism) has seen a marked resurgence during the pandemic; coaches are actively using it with clients.
• Suffering is a function of resistance; avoidance behaviours (overwork, alcohol) amplify stress rather than reduce it.
• Practical tool: write two lists — things you can control vs. things you cannot — burn the latter, post the former on your screen.

Think time and deep work rhythms

• All three coaches report that existing think-time rhythms were disrupted in March 2020 and required active rebuilding.
• Day-parting is the foundation: identify the 90–120 minute window when your mind is sharpest and protect it in the calendar.
• Cal Newport's Deep Work framework is recommended: interruptions can cost 15–20 minutes of recovery time, so blocks must be defended with door signs, team communication, and phone silence.
• Lisa's approach: "Strategy Fridays" — four to six uninterrupted hours reserved for thinking about the business, not in it. Clients are pre-briefed not to expect contact on Fridays.
• Bill's approach: loud, driving music to sustain concentration and counteract ideation-driven distraction (Clifton Strengths: Ideation).
• Cheryl's approach: a mid-afternoon playlist ("Liven Up") to re-energise the 2 p.m. slump.
• For those with disrupted home environments (children, shared spaces), early-morning walks before the heat or noise builds can substitute for office-based quiet time.
• Physical movement — walking, biking, running, mini-trampoline, balance boards, sit-stand desks — is inseparable from cognitive performance; building movement into the workday is non-negotiable.

Training yourself and your team: remote engagement tactics

• Daily huddles gained new importance during remote work; several clients added an afternoon closing huddle to provide end-of-day structure and connection.
• Suggested huddle additions: a round of brags (intentional pride, not passive bragging) and a round of gratitude — both proven to elevate mood and help team members actively look for positives during the day.
• Personal updates in huddles (homeschooling struggles, living situations) create psychological safety and camaraderie that purely task-focused standups miss.
• Celebration rituals matter: pizza and beer delivered simultaneously to everyone's home during a Zoom session creates shared moments; shout-outs still work when the team is dispersed.
• ELMO (Enough, Let's Move On) is a practical facilitation tool for keeping sessions on track — introduced via a physical Elmo toy on-screen.
• More cowbell: teams often under-celebrate; building deliberate celebration rituals counteracts Zoom fatigue and disengagement.
• Team energy checks in Zoom sessions: if energy drops, call a break, send people outside for a walk, or run a round of jumping jacks — same principles as in-person facilitation.

Adaptive execution and process improvement

• Mural (virtual whiteboard) has replaced in-person Post-its and flip charts for many coaches; some clients prefer it because typed notes are legible and easier to export.
• Planning sessions have been restructured from full-day to two half-days to prevent Zoom fatigue.
• The Scaling Up Scoreboard (powered by Align Today) keeps critical numbers, quarterly rocks, and themes visible for distributed teams; new Zapier integration allows connection to SaaS tools in team workflows.
• Asynchronous video learning segments are now layered into engagements alongside live Zoom sessions and in-person (outdoor, distanced) planning sessions.
• Growth Institute online courses are being bundled into hybrid coaching engagements to extend learning between live sessions.
• Cash flow visibility is critical right now: if a client cannot articulate their runway in weeks, they are operating on blind optimism — coaches must address this directly.
• Pragmatic optimism vs. blind optimism: leaders must keep teams energised while simultaneously facing brutal facts; the two are not mutually exclusive.

Pivoting: finding opportunities in disruption

• Core reframe for pivoting: separate what you do from how you deliver it — the delivery mechanism may be broken but the underlying value and skills remain intact.
• An office furniture client pivoted to: buying and reselling used furniture from vacating tenants, home office setups, physical barriers for returning offices, and virtual 3D fly-through design services — extending from regional to national reach.
• A transportation brokerage pivoted during the 2008 recession from owning trucks to pure brokerage — a permanently better business model born from crisis.
• The SWAT framework (Strengths, Weaknesses, and Trends — a strategic variation of SWOT) is the primary tool used in client planning sessions to find where to direct resources.
• Event planners and others in hard-hit sectors have skills (organisation, logistics, digital tools, vendor management) that transfer to different delivery formats or adjacent markets.
• Coaching demand has increased since the pandemic began — more new clients added than in the prior seven years combined, driven by leaders seeking strategic partners and advocates during uncertainty.

Remote work and the future of offices

• Hybrid work (some in-office, some remote) is already emerging: offices reopen for those without adequate home workspaces while others stay home, reducing density and enabling safer working conditions.
• Commercial real estate faces structural pressure; landlords of vacating tenants may need to convert to live-work spaces, hot-desk / flexible-lease models, or experiential uses.
• Travel frequency for sales and coaching will decrease permanently; when in-person meetings do occur, they should be higher quality — more connection time, less rushed agendas.
• Outdoor meeting venues (backyards, outdoor theatres, open-air spaces) are a viable and preferable alternative to windowless hotel conference rooms — likely to persist post-pandemic.
• Personalization is identified as a high-conviction long-term trend: customers want à-la-carte options, not bundled packages; companies that offer a menu of services will win.
• Consumers consistently pay premiums for two things: convenience and peace of mind (citing Hermann Simon's pricing work) — these should anchor any value proposition review.

Trend spotting and the strategic outlook

• Lisa's method for staying ahead of trends: Flipboard — aggregate sources well outside your industry (The Economist, Popular Science, technology, fringe publications) to surface ideas that industry insiders cannot see.
• Most major innovations come from outside the industry in question; leaders should actively seek exposure to ideas from unrelated fields.
• Major macro trends in play (2020, with medium-term relevance): IoT device proliferation (seven devices per person by 2025), telemedicine, virtual learning, remote delivery services, AI, home health and robotic care, economic polarisation between knowledge workers and in-person workers.
• Retail is undergoing structural collapse for undifferentiated commodity offerings; experiential retail (dining, entertainment, discovery) has a durable future.
• Best Buy is cited as a bricks-and-mortar turnaround example: pivoted to service, expertise, and in-person consultation — value that Amazon cannot replicate.
• Remote work removes geographic constraints on hiring; it also removes constraints on which clients coaches (and other service businesses) can serve — Lisa has coached a Taiwan-based client for two years without meeting in person.
• The key forward-looking question for every client: what trends represent an opportunity if we are aware of them, and what will sink the business if we are not?

Illustrated models as a capture and action tool

• Kristin McLane introduced illustrated models — real-time visual synthesis using integrated images, words, and colour to capture the essence of a session and make it actionable.
• Distinct from graphic recording (which tends to be large-scale and comprehensive), illustrated models compress content to its core and are designed for future reference and decision-making.
• The panel session itself was illustrated live, with the final image shared at the close of the episode.