On Being Full
Alignment, capacity, and staying intentional as things grow
We talk about being busy like it’s a badge of honor.
But busy and full aren’t the same thing.
And even being full has its limits.
Read more on what it means to be full, and how easily it can tip into something else.
If you’d asked me five, ten, twenty years ago whether I’d one day lead the clinical practice at an executive search firm, I would have laughed. And yet here I am — completely, genuinely, in the right place. The work feels aligned. Purposeful. Needed. The thesis that a former operator could move into search, and help reshape how we think about clinician executives, is working.
But success breeds success. It has a way of compounding. I planted the seeds, watered, weeded, tended the garden. And now the lilies and daffodils and peonies are in full bloom.
As winter turns into spring, I’m seeing that the garden is spilling over. I know too much of a good thing, in theory, is a good problem to have. But it doesn’t make it less real.
My days are full of deep and enriching conversations. With current clients and prospective ones, with clinician execs navigating career transitions and contemplating their next moves, with candidates actively weighing the opportunities and tradeoffs of the searches we’re running, and with my incredibly bright and driven colleagues eager to learn and grow. I get non-stop requests to meet, and much to my executive assistant’s chagrin, my most common response is “of course, I’d love to.” And balancing the external work is a recommitment to stepping up into my internal leadership role. We are running a business here after all and have to do OKRs, individual goals, reconfigure our compensation strategy, and build our brand and marketing presence.
There is nothing on my calendar I don’t want to be doing. But herein lies the challenge… I’m at the precipice of stepping from full to overextended.
For a while, I’ve been searching for the right word. “Busy” is used so often as a sort of modern currency for success. But busy doesn’t quite capture what I am feeling. Busy feels reactive, fragmented, and signals a lack of alignment. What I'm feeling is different — a fullness.
Now “full” is intentional. It’s chosen. It’s what it feels like when the work you’re doing actually fits, when the pieces come together in a way that makes sense.
For many people, the first challenge is getting from busy to full, crossing what I think of as the alignment threshold. Busy without alignment is just fluttering about. Busy with alignment is fulfillment. Finding work that’s actually aligned with who you are, how you want to spend your time, and what brings you energy. These are questions I get to ponder all the time with executives considering their next move. It’s that journey from just doing work to doing the right work. It’s its own kind of labor, and a whole essay in itself, honestly.
But if there’s a difference between busy and full, there’s also a second inflection point: the moment fullness begins to spill over. Like a glass filled to the brim, surface tension just holding. You can see the next drop coming. And you know: one more, and it breaks.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Even the right things, in sufficient quantity, can exceed the space you have to hold them. Meaning doesn’t disappear. It gets diluted. Not because you’re doing the wrong work, but because you’re doing too much of the right work. The garden, lush and gorgeous and full of everything you planted, starts to grow faster than you can tend it.
It’s not a binary. It’s a curve. Picture an inverted parabola. On the left: busy. At the peak: full. On the right: overextended. You can fall off the curve from either side, from too little alignment, or from too much of even the right things. And right now, I’m sitting at the apex, aware that without the right next moves, I risk sliding down the wrong side.
So here I am. The garden I worked so hard to build is lush and gorgeous. Colors everywhere. But I’m so busy arranging the stems I’ve clipped into beautiful vases that I worry I can’t get back to tending the garden itself. There’s no space to pull up. No room to think, to be strategic, to ask the questions that actually matter right now.
I’ve spent real time thinking about the difference between busy and full and overextension. I even have this framework for it. And yet, ironically, I don’t have a single quiet hour to actually use it. That’s the trap.
When I think about how to stay at that point of fullness, without tipping over, I keep coming back to three moves.
I could do less.
I could create more capacity.
Or I could do the same work… differently.
Doing less means pruning the garden, reducing its footprint even. It means saying no, letting some things go, being more selective with the work you choose to do. Let’s be honest, I’m terrible at this.
Creating more capacity is about growing the garden. This one is tempting, especially when the current garden is growing so beautifully! The work here is different. It requires building systems, creating leverage, and ultimately building in more capacity. If 18 months ago, I was at seed stage seeking product-market fit, this now feels like a series A investment problem, shifting from product risk to execution risk.
The question here isn't whether to grow.
It's how to scale without losing what made it work in the first place.
Doing things differently is about changing your relationship to the work itself. It isn’t about doing less or doing more. It’s about redefining what good looks like at this stage. Loosening your grip. Leaning on your team and learning to delegate. Trusting that you’ve trained the people around you to do the work in the way you’d want the work done.
The right answer is really that that there’s not actually a single answer. I think you can need all three approaches, in different measures, and at different moments. Right now, I’m not looking to reduce. I’m looking to build. And I probably need to do the third option, redefinition, to buy myself time and space to do option two, grow and scale, and do it well.
Ultimately, what ties all of it together for me is one word: intentionality. It’s my word this year. Intentional leadership. Intentional hiring. Intentional growth. Intentional choices about how I spend my time.
Busy is unintentional accumulation. Things pile up without scrutiny, and before you know it, the calendar owns you.
Full is intentional alignment. You’ve chosen what fills your life, and it fits.
Overextension is what happens when that intentionality fades. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Old yeses linger. New yeses stack. The garden grows untended.
These are two different thresholds. The first is about alignment. Are you doing the right things? The second is about capacity. Can you still hold it all well? Intentionality is what keeps you near the peak of the curve.
I’m not writing this with an answer. I’m very much in the thick of it. And I don’t have a clear resolution to offer you.
What I do know is this:
The garden is gorgeous. I want it to grow.
But growth without tending becomes unruly.
And right now, my job isn’t to plant more. It’s to create the space to tend what’s already there, so it can grow without running wild.