What I’m realizing: people don’t scale.

For years, I had to limit how many people were in each session of In Your Element (maybe you knew it as Lift to Get Lean). Even though we had instances of THOUSANDS of people showing up, I knew that even with my team we could only realistically help a few hundred women at a time. And even then I wished I could give every one of those participants even more of my attention.

Even though I had done enough, even though I knew we had delivered more than those women would have gotten anywhere else, I felt guilty that I hadn’t done more for them. Yet, I am but one person, one woman.

This is the risk we take in the growth mindset that has seeped into every single corner of our culture. If you want to start a business, great! Now, you have to make sure you can create something that will SCALE. Then, you have to automate everything and keep scaling so your stuff gets in front of as many people as possible so you can keep your business running. And it gets exhausting.

Because people don’t scale. There is only so much you can do. Even if you have the best team in the world and the smartest people working with you (which I do!), there is only so much any of us can do.

Because people don’t scale.

Think about your family doctor. They want to do their best to keep prices low for their patients. To do this, they ultimately have to take on more clients to spread out the costs of their business. This means the amount of time they can deliver to any one patient is drastically limited. Even with all of the front office staff, nurses, assistants, and interns they might have working with them, the buck stops with the doctor - and they can only do so much when they see you for five minutes every few months.

If you want to give people your best you have to find fewer people to give your best too. This means getting serious about the kind of people you keep in your life. This means getting serious about what you spend your time doing.

I recently had a few women who flat out unsubscribed from all of the Elemental Coaching emails - which stung a little. That is, until they were in my Instagram DMs an HOUR later asking me all kinds of questions about their health. You can see how that’s rude, right?

Looking at it from the other side: if you expect the best out of the service providers you work with, be ready to work at their level. This might mean it is more expensive or you are talking with them at odd hours. This might mean doing something totally unconventional. This might mean finding someone else entirely.

As the saying goes: pay peanuts, get monkeys.

Sure, it may feel like you want a million followers on every social platform. But ask yourself, really - what are you going to do with that kind of audience? They’re probably just going to waste your time. What if you thought of it like your text messages? If a million people were texting you (or you, to them) your phone would explode. You would throw it into the sea and never look back.

People don’t scale. We weren’t meant to think in millions.

When it comes to people you can help, think in dozens. Or, hell, think in ONES.

Because people don’t scale.