Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires — This Chief of Staff Shares His Playbook

has strung together a unique set of startup experiences. He joined the cloud infrastructure automation company in 2014 as the first business hire, going on to spin up the sales, solutions engineering, account management, and marketing teams. Afterwards, he spent a few years building out the product management and education groups as VP of Product. But for the last year and a half, he’s had a different perch — as the Chief of Staff. 

written about the Chief of Staff role before

 here on The Review, of course. This increasingly commonplace startup role typically involves making the CEO more effective, prioritizing precious time, optimizing workflows and perhaps driving strategic projects. But Fishner’s mandate has a slightly different focus.

My responsibility is to treat the company like a product,

 where employees are the user. Like a product manager, I spend my days thinking about what we should build and improve on, owning the components that make the company's culture and productivity come to life,” says Fishner. “We do that by asking this question: 

What are the core systems that are the manifestation of the culture that we want to build?

 At HashiCorp, we’ve grown from a few hundred to over a thousand people, so the goal is to build scalable systems that enable employees to do their best work and contribute to the outcomes of the company. For us, that’s shaped up into three specific systems: strategic planning, knowledge management, and communications.”

In this exclusive interview, Fishner unpacks what that entails, putting HashiCorp’s operations under a microscope and open sourcing his best practices and templates. We found it to be a fascinating conversation, and we hope you agree. For starters, Fishner’s got the rare ability to flip between the philosophical and the practical — one minute he’s talking about how determinism influenced his thinking on company building, and then a few minutes later he’s walking us through the exact template HashiCorp uses in its highly-structured annual planning process. 

But more broadly, we’ve found that the mechanics and tactical ins-and-outs of how companies operate are still underexplored topics in the startup world. Most company systems evolve organically, either hastily cobbled together as the speed of scale takes over, or neglected until they’re forlorn and rather inflexible. Here, Fishner makes a thoughtful case for why the systems side of company building should get more attention, digging into the nitty-gritty details of two specific systems — how the HashiCorp team sets and tracks progress toward goals, and makes decisions through writing. 

Whether you’re eyeing a chief of staff role, or you’re a founder hoping to set the right foundation for your fledgling company, read on for a unique chance to dive seriously deep into how one company functions — and garner inspiration for your own startup systems.

So much startup advice comes down to one common element: Hiring the best people. Whether it’s Twitter threads about how the first 50 hires set the cultural tone, or blog posts recommending that a founder interview the first 100 employees, most pointers are about keeping an unwavering focus on the people who power startups.

“While I definitely agree that people are your most important asset, I’ve noticed that most content doesn't talk as much about the systems. What I don't come across as often is a read about how the 

 that those first hires build are the manifestation of the culture,” says Fishner.

In his view, it’s not an either or — it’s both. “

While early employees are of course a driving factor for the company culture, they’re only half the equation. The other half is the foundational systems

,” he says. “The comparison I like to draw is the nature versus nurture debate. Both your genes and your memes are highly influential on your outcomes. Likewise, both your people and your systems are highly influential on your company's outcomes — but the system side doesn't get as much attention as it should.”

Care about your first 10 systems as much as you care about your first 10 hires.

Fishner expands on why he thinks systems deserve equal footing. “

 norms, building systems early in a company's lifecycle sets 

. How do decisions get made? How are meetings structured? How are goals set? These systems are much easier to build when the company is small, and very challenging to put into place as the company grows,” he says.

This point is particularly resonant these days. “The shift to remote work shows us how tricky this can be. Most of the interpersonal interactions you have day-to-day are through Slack, email, Google Docs, and Zoom meetings. So it's very possible that for many employees, their only face-to-face human interaction for the day is through a meeting. If that meeting is good, then their day is good. If that meeting is bad, then their day is bad,” he says. In response, many companies are trying to encourage more writing and fewer meetings, but find it challenging to adopt this practice because it's not an existing explicit norm, Fishner says. “For an established company, implementing new systems takes top-down executive authority.”

Founders: The earlier you can understand what practices are important to you, the better. Turn those practices into systems as soon as you can.

Fishner’s conviction here surprisingly comes from his college days. “I studied philosophy. My thesis was on the impacts of subconscious advertising techniques. Theories of economics are built on the foundational belief that individuals are rational, well-informed and autonomous. But in practice, none of those things are true. For example, we’re far from autonomous — each person influences other people,” he says. 

“In my reading and research for the thesis, I came to more of a 

 that free will is overrated and our willpower is overstated. We're actually much more influenced by the environments that we're put in. These points are really well-made in ‘

.’ If you want to eat better or exercise, don't rely on your willpower. Instead, change some of your environmental influences that lead to those behaviors, such as having sugar in your house.”

Here’s where the connection to startups comes in. “

The same is true in company building — instead of relying completely on the willpower and independence of all your employees, think about how to build better systems and create the environment where people can do their best work

He extends the philosophy parallel even further. “Elon Musk 

 that gets repeated all the time, essentially saying that a company is nothing more than a collection of individuals working towards a common mission. And I think that misses the mark. It’s like the 

“Imagine you have a big wooden pirate ship and over 100 years, you replace each piece of wood. At the end of that process, is it still the same ship? There's no clear answer, but it’s instructive to think of a company similarly. Employees could come and go over the course of 30 years to the point where none of the same employees are there. Is it the same company?” he asks. “I would argue yes.” 

A company is a collection of both its people and its systems. People can come and go over the years, but the systems they put in place and gradually refine over time become part of the company — and companies ultimately compete based on if those systems are strong or not.

In the sections that follow, Fishner walks us through two of his company’s systems and how the team continually sharpens them. Fair warning — systems aren’t easy to copy and paste. “Everything I'm going to discuss is very important for HashiCorp, but I wouldn't say they're generalizable principles. So hopefully you can take them and remix them with your own ideas, — they’re not an absolute truth.”

SYSTEM #1: OPERATING CADENCE — WHY SOURCES OF TRUTH AND RITUALS ARE KEY TO STRATEGIC PLANNING

What HashiCorp vernacular dubs “operating cadence,” other startups would likely call goal-setting or OKRs, says Fishner. “The operating cadence is the quiet drum beat setting our direction and the 

 driving the business. At HashiCorp, our operating cadence has three speeds — annual, quarterly, and weekly,” he says. Each speed is built on two components:

defines success in a clear, ideally quantifiable way. 

: a consistent practice to review that source of truth and build accountability.  

Before we dive into each element, check out this quick overview below of the example sources of truth and rituals HashiCorp relies on to make progress and stay accountable at the annual, quarterly and weekly levels:

“If you get it right, this system can set clear expectations, track performance, and identify improvements to make along the way,” says Fishner. Unfortunately, for too many startups, this process tends to go sideways. You’ve likely encountered this pattern before: A rapidly-growing startup team encounters confusion about priorities, a lack of alignment, and wasted efforts, so someone suggests the company implement a goal-setting framework. After a lengthy process of setting OKRs, the wheels slowly start to come off. “

Oftentimes companies will focus on the source of truth and not the ritual — and that's one of the biggest mistakes that you can make

“After OKRs are set, there's no ritual for reviewing them, so they quickly get out of date. Then employees start resenting them because the effort to actually create the goals was a waste of time — and OKRs slowly die because no one looks at them anymore. Expectations aren’t enough. It’s the ritual that it keeps the priorities top of mind and folks focused on what's important.”

OKRs only work if there is a ritual of reviewing progress and holding owners accountable for hitting their goals.

organized around 3 executive focuses and broken down in 12 sub-scorecards. 

Brainstorming in September, resource allocation in October, then individual executive planning ahead of coming together for annual planning summit December.

“The first step for us is actually more long-term than an 

. We started by defining high-level company success metrics as our North Star goals. Look for big, ambitious goals that come from years of execution. They’re usually lagging indicators that are almost useless to track quarterly. For us, these are fixed goals that frame our annual operating plans, but they change in magnitude each year,” he says. 

“At HashiCorp, our first long-term goal is to win the practitioner (measured as a monthly active user account). Second is to enable the customer (measured through ARR). Third is to grow the ecosystem (measured as a percentage of revenue attributed to our partners). Our finance team then took those North Star goals and built a long-range plan, which is a five-year financial model with derivative financial metrics.”

With that context in place, let’s turn to the annual scorecard. “Essentially, it’s our incarnation of OKRs. Using our scorecard template, we define objectives and a set of key results for each objective, tracking progress on a quarterly basis. These objectives are at the highest level of the company, setting the overall priorities for the upcoming year,” says Fishner. “They’re the leverage points that we as an executive team think will have the most positive impact on reaching that five-year long range plan.”

Here’s how the scorecards get filled in: “There’s an executive offsite in September where we do a structured brainstorming around what 

 should be for our company objectives,” says Fishner.

But it’s not a run-of-the-mill brainstorm. “There's a few Harvard Business Review studies around brainstorming that show when you just bring people together and ask them to put stickies up on a wall, it doesn't work that well. So we give executives two weeks before the offsite to write down what they think the three focuses should be for the upcoming year,” he says. “Then, each exec gets five minutes at the meeting to talk through their suggestions. Then we put all the suggestions into a list — there's usually quite a bit of overlap so we end up with about 15. Each exec then ranks five initiatives, five being the most important, one being the least, and then we just do a sorted ranking from there.”

This process has a few benefits, Fishner says. “First, allowing everyone to think about the objectives independently means they won’t get stuck in group think. Second, folks can often be more thoughtful when there's not as much urgency to come up with ideas on the spot. And finally, each leader gets 

With those high-level executive focuses as a starting point, the team dives a layer deeper. “We break down our company objectives (level 100) into goals by four ‘plans’ (level 200) — a go-to-market plan, product plan, people plan, and finance plan. Then, the go-to-market plan is broken down by field geography (Americas, EMEA, APJ) and the product plan is broken down by product line,” says Fishner. All told, they end up with 12 different scorecards.

Interestingly, the “Level 200” plans are jointly owned. “Sales, marketing and customer success executives collaborate on our go-to-market scorecard, and product and eng executives work on our product scorecard. You don't often see that joint ownership in other goal frameworks, the thinking being that you want to have one directly responsible individual,” says Fishner. “

But software isn’t something that can be broken down into very tiny constituent parts

But that’s not an excuse to skimp on the details — hence the further breakdown by geography and product line. “It’s critical to properly segment company goals to surface insights. If goals are too high-level, over-performance in one product line hides the under-performance in another — which is well captured by 

When you only look at high-level aggregate metrics, the nuance of what's really happening in your business gets lost.

But if goals are too low-level, the signal can get lost in the noise. “Importantly, we don't force our scorecards further down than the field geographies and the product lines. Take the Americas scorecard as an example,” says Fishner. “There’s about 150 sales, customer success, engineering, and field marketing folks dedicated to the Americas. Their scorecard focuses on metrics like top-line revenue, renewal rate, expansion rate, and then leading indicators like pipeline generation and coverage. As a leadership team, we don't try to cascade it down into individual regions like New York or Texas — that’s their responsibility.”

“These draft executive scorecards get built from usually mid-October to December, which is when the annual planning summit is. We bring 70 senior leaders in the company together — this past year was remote of course, but we usually do it in person. It's two days, about four to five hours per day,” says Fishner.

What’s most unique is that the summit is focused on a 

, we run a business simulation where leaders get to ‘run’ the business for three years. Taking a simplified view of the company, we essentially build a game board based on our five-year financial model and this year’s three executive focus areas,” says Fishner. 

Here’s how it works: “We break folks up into teams of six, and they get to be the ‘CEO’ or the executive team for two days. Each round, your team gets to determine what initiatives to invest in. But there are ‘wobblers’ in the game, which are events that come up to throw you off track so you have to make a decision about how to adjust. It deepens our leaders’ understanding of not only what the priorities are for the year, but how they might play out in ‘practice.’”

Of course, this is a complex undertaking suited for bigger teams, so it may not work for your startup. “

The essence of this exercise is the notion of practice

. I grew up playing competitive soccer. We practiced four or five times a week and had games on the weekend — basically spending 90% of the time practicing and 10% of the time actually having to perform,” he says. “But when you get into a work environment, that notion of practice gets lost. So the simulation is about creating room for practice and making mistakes.” (Editor’s note: This excellent point from Fishner reminded us of 

: What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?)

To bring that spirit to your company in a more simplified version, Fishner suggests more lightweight options. “Bring a smaller group of leaders together for an 

. Create an exercise where you're sitting in someone else's shoes and going through one of their day-to-day activities, such as answering support tickets,” he says.

A setting for practice, making mistakes, and building up empathy for what other people are going through is key to any annual ritual. 

12 30-minute QBRs dedicated to reviewing each scorecard The audience is the executive team (all CEO direct reports) and extended leadership team (all VPs ), about 30 people.

With the annual plan fixed, the HashiCorp team turns their attention to their quarterly cadence. “Every quarter we review progress on all 12 scorecards in QBRs. The scorecards from the annual process get updated, filling in the columns with the previous quarter’s results. As an additional source of truth, there are Wins, Action Items, and Requests for Support (WAR) tables,” says Fishner. “The leaders review progress on the scorecard itself, read the team’s reflections and then discuss areas that might need improvement.”

Here’s what the WAR tables cover: “The team filling out the updates reflects on these questions: What are the wins? What are the great accomplishments that we should celebrate and keep moving forward on? What are the challenges and the action items? As an example, for one of our product lines, the activation rate — monthly active users divided by the signups — was low in a recent quarter,” he says.

Here are two benefits Fishner sees from this approach:

: “One of our principles is reflection not perfection. Goal setting is a process of reflecting on progress, not trying to get your goals so perfect upfront that you never need to change them. They're either off in terms of magnitude or completely misguided,” he says. “The QBRs create the space to reflect. Are we on track to hit goals? Are these the right goals? What can we do to improve?”

: “As chief of staff, I don’t have the authority or the time to hold owners effectively accountable for their goals. The ritual is what creates accountability — the owners of the scorecards know that every quarter they will review their progress to the executive team and they will also review what they said they would accomplish last quarter,” he says.

The purpose of an operating cadence isn't to dogmatically stick to goals set at the beginning of the year. It's a ritual of reflection and introspection.

One-hour meetings on Mondays, broken up into four 15-minute time slots

Now for the most granular level of HashiCorp’s operating cadence. “The corporate reporting pack is a superset of the metrics in the scorecards we review quarterly,” says Fishner. “It tracks everything from our current quarter sales forecast to our progress toward our hiring goals. It's an attempt to get as close as possible to a company cockpit where we can see leading and lagging indicators and 

know if the company is flying effectively

Fishner, along with a cross-functional group of sales operations, finance, and go-to-market folks, compiles this set of metrics every week. “The cross-functional element is important here. Take a question like ‘What is our sales forecast?’ Oftentimes the finance team and the sales team have different views on that,” he says. “After reviewing the metrics, we pull out insights — areas that are trending red that we need to take action on.”

Now for the weekly ritual. “It’s a more fine grain review of what's important for the company and how we're progressing. The exec team reviews the corporate reporting pack every Monday in a weekly hour-long meeting. For the first 15 minutes, we review the insights on the metrics. For the other three 15-minute slots, a guest speaker comes in to present on an action item that we identified in the previous QBR — another level of accountability to make sure that we’re following up on the challenges that we surfaced.”

Here’s the thinking behind this fine-tooth comb approach: 

. A quarterly look just isn’t enough. “It's hard to change renewal performance in the current quarter. A renewal happens or doesn't happen based on the past year of customer experience with our products and services. We need to track leading indicators that create a strong renewal rate — customer onboarding, account health, and implementation services usage,” says Fishner. “For every lagging indicator, we need to have a set of leading indicators that we review on a weekly basis.”

. “The science of it is making sure your weekly reporting pack is truly representative of the most important metrics of the company,” says Fishner. “This level of weekly scrutiny keeps us on track to deliver our high-leverage actions — instead of getting distracted by the flow of urgent, low-leverage escalations. If a different leading indicator is acting up, there’s an impulse to take action on it. But if it’s not on the annual scorecard, then earlier in the year we agreed that we don't think that's very important for the health of the company — so it doesn't need to be something we focus on.”

Your rituals should keep you focused on what you decided was important earlier in the year — not on this week’s shiny distraction.

SYSTEM #2: HOW TO FORGE A COMPANY CULTURE OF WRITING AND DECISION DOCUMENTATION

“HashiCorp is a remote company with employees in 13 countries and 40 states. But I like to take one step back and describe us as an open source company,” says Fishner. “It’s a subtle difference, but an interesting one, especially with our company culture of writing. When you're working on open source software projects, there's a ton of written collaboration on GitHub. The origin of our writing practice comes from that open source ethos, as well as the philosophy and principles of the early employees,” he says.

 — the company’s co-founder and namesake — was in college, he would take a notebook with him everywhere. And whenever he had ideas for software projects, he was really diligent about writing them down first. So when he and his co-founder Armon Dadgar started working together, they would create thorough 

design documents and documentation before writing a single line of code

,” says Fishner. “It was specifically on the engineering side at first, but something like 45 out of the first 50 employees were engineers, so that idea of writing the design before implementation became a core part of the company.”

For HashiCorp, their habit of writing is a way to document decisions and get buy-in before moving into implementation. Here’s how it works in practice. “We have two core documents. There’s a 

, which in most companies is a product requirement document, but we've tweaked it a little bit to be a problem requirement document. It defines the problem. The second is the 

, or request for comment. It proposes a solution or design, the implementation you want to get approval on before you start,” says Fishner.

“Most large projects start with a PRD and are followed by an RFC, but not every RFC will have a PRD. The product management team definitely writes a lot of PRDs,” says Fishner. “But more generally, we’ve found that for some of the more ambiguous challenges we're facing — especially where there are many stakeholders — it's helpful to write a PRD first to make sure everybody's in agreement on the problem we’re actually solving.”

As for the document itself, these are the core sections:

. “In order for a reader to understand the content of the PRD, they must first understand the context.”

“This is the heart of the PRD as it simplifies the user research into clear problem statements. It also includes a list of personas and how they experience those problems statements.”

. “This is more of the traditional product management PRD that you would expect, with a list of requirements that the engineering RFC should satisfy. The problem is also broken down into phases to enable iterative implementation.”

The most important component? Your mindset while putting it together. “While the introduction section is read first, it should be authored last. Writing the overview last allows the author to summarize the final content of the PRD, rather than write an introduction without knowing the end result.”

Writing a PRD is about curating information, not creating it; you should go into the process without preconceived notions of what you’ll find.

“The guiding principle that we use for whether or not you should write an RFC or not is if the time it takes to make the change is faster than writing the document itself,” says Fishner. 

Gray image of white and black connected boxes

Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires

As Chief of Staff at HashiCorp, Kevin Fishner focuses on treating the company like a product. Here, he unpacks why the systems side of company building doesn’t get as much attention and digs into the nitty-gritty details of how they set and track progress toward goals, and make decisions through writing at HashiCorp.

This Chief of Staff shares his playbook for treating your company like a product.

Making Self-Care Tactical — Why You Should Focus on Boundaries, Not Just Bubble Baths

a serious write-up in the pages of the New York Times

roundups of must-have products for “treating yourself,”

 you’ve likely noticed all of the column inches spent on the concept of self-care recently. The isolation, stress and burnout brought on by the pandemic put this practice front and center — especially now as the one-year mark approaches and most of us are scrapping the very bottom of our depleted reserves.

Self-care is a topic that we’ve danced around for awhile here on The Review. (Readers might remember the advice we shared on the adjacent subjects of 

 last year.) We’ve had our editorial eyes on a detailed guide to self-care for many months now, but truth be told, we’ve struggled to find a fresh angle that would add value and dive deeper. While the meteoric rise of self-care has advanced discussions around mental health and wellness, the conversation often stays in shallow waters and recirculates commonly-heard tips. Luckily, we got connected with an expert who immediately grabbed our attention.

“It always makes me cringe how the same information is regurgitated. When I read articles on self-care, it’s the same advice — practice yoga, drink green tea, try this latest exercise,” says 

, a licensed psychotherapist, wellness coach and mental health advocate who is publicly known as 

“By recycling the same advice, many people don’t recognize that they're creating a box and saying, ‘This is what self-care looks like.’ And that plays a role in why some people feel stuck — they think, ‘Well, I don't like these things,’ or ‘This doesn’t really seem to be helping my anxiety,’” she says. “It made me think, ‘Who's writing these articles and why is it coming from a wealthy, white-centered place?’ So I started pushing out my own experiences and sharing what I do to take care of myself, while also talking about race and incorporating frameworks from therapy.”

That attempt to open up and change the narrative struck a chord. In addition to her private practice where she specializes in treating trauma, depression, and anxiety, Archbold has cultivated a 

thriving Instagram community with over 100K followers

, where she shares helpful explainers on mental health topics. As something of a Renaissance woman, she's also penned a 

, and leads workshops at companies like Slack, on topics including building resistance to racism and sustaining work-life balance.

As we steel ourselves for yet another year of times without precedent, Archbold’s perspective serves up both the motivating pep talk and the practical advice we all need to hear, which is why we were grateful for the chance to sit down with her recently.

In this exclusive interview, Archbold challenges us to reexamine the buzzy, yet vague term of self-care and imbue it with deeper meaning. In addition to busting myths, she shares her framework for thoroughly assessing your needs and taking inventory of the tools available to you. To probe more deeply beyond commonly cited tactics, Archbold makes the case for why boundary work is at the heart of self-care, sharing archetypes for recognizing common patterns and advice on drawing lines — both with others and yourself.

DIMENSIONS AND TIERS — HOW TO TAKE ON THE DEEPER WORK AND REFRAME THE “WHAT IS SELF-CARE?” QUESTION

Setting aside the hackneyed nature of most self-care advice, Archbold points to another problem spot. “In my therapy practice, my clients are often surprised whenever I talk about self-care as a mental health practice or assign them homework. They come with different expectations — self-care is seen as what you can buy yourself, not how you can work on yourself. ‘Treat yourself’ is a catchy phrase, and whenever there’s a trend, there will be a price tag. Now self-care ideas are about booking the spa package, buying the expensive candle or adding that face mask to your cart on Amazon,” she says.

“It’s a huge misconception. Now, are we entitled to buy ourselves things we like? Of course, but if we frame it as though self-care practices start and stop with spending money on material things, we're getting it all wrong. 

 — there’s a difference between engaging in self-soothing relief from a discomforting emotion, versus tackling the hard work to take care of yourself on a deeper level.”

Sometimes self-care might look like taking a bath. And sometimes self-care might look like speaking up, erecting boundaries, being assertive and holding yourself accountable.

“We need to reframe what it means to take care of ourselves, because doing deep breathing, reading a book, listening to a podcast, and going for a walk are all forms of self-care,” says Archbold. “Otherwise, self-care doesn’t feel accessible for those without certain levels of finances. 

If I have one message, it’s this — everyone has access to self-care. It's not just about what you spend your money on, it's also about how you invest your time, your effort and your energy into meaningful work.

Dive deeper by diagnosing where you’re depleted.

Part of this more profound work starts by understanding that self-care requires a multi-faceted approach. As a primer for those just dipping their toes into those deeper waters, Archbold makes this amorphous concept more tangible by breaking self-care down into five different dimensions, with sample symptoms and solutions. “Many people struggle to figure out where to start with self-care. Assessing against those five dimensions is a great first step,” she says.

“This is all about physical wellness and taking care of your body for your overall health. If I’m struggling with fatigue, I may need a better nighttime routine. If I’m feeling sluggish, maybe I need to check in with my nutrition and eat more veggies. With back pain, maybe I’m not carving out the time to move my body around enough,” says Archbold. “Reminding ourselves not to sit for long stretches, or to release endorphins through stretching and physical activity is an example remedy.”

“This is all about community building. When was the last time you were in community with someone? When did you last reach out to a friend? Have you been sitting alone in silence for the last month or two of the pandemic? Do you find that you’re feeling very disconnected from others? That can be a sign that the social self-care area needs to be filled,” says Archbold.

“When our stress levels are rising and it feels like our mental health is suffering, these are cues to practice emotional self-care. Consider doing a mental health check-in before work, during work and after. Use grounding techniques such as deep breathing, running your hands under cold water during high stress moments,” says Archbold. “Here, the ability to disconnect is key. Practice differentiating between an urgent matter, and a matter that can wait.” 

“Meditation and prayer are obvious self-care practices here. But there are so many ways to practice spiritual self-care, whether it’s body mapping, journaling to release thoughts, repeating affirmations, connecting with nature by gardening or going on a walk, or getting lost in music.”

“This one is the most overlooked in my experience. Taking time to invest in your work through education and 

personal development is often on the backburner

. Whether it’s reading that’s unrelated to your job, picking up a workbook, or cutting back on TV and replacing it with something that invests in your skills, there are many ways to spend more time here.” 

Detangling where you’re most depleted requires regularly tuning into each dimension. “All of these dimensions are interconnected, of course. But too often we don’t take the time to assess them separately, which can make our remedies ineffective,” says Archbold. “If your body is feeling tight or you’re stressed, working out is a great option. But if you're feeling depletion more on that social level, doing a workout video by yourself isn't going to help.”

When we get more specific, that's when we really unlock the magic of self-care.

Take inventory of your self-care toolset.

With that baseline understanding in place, Archbold nudges her clients to take the next step to break self-care strategies down even further. “Pinpointing how you’re feeling isn’t enough — next you need to follow through by assessing how you can better cope, and the tools you need to utilize to take care of yourself within those five dimensions,” she says.

This is where constraints creep in. “For your emotional wellbeing, you might find that you need to go to therapy, but you don't have the finances at the moment, so you just put it off, instead of looking for accessible alternatives or making a self-care plan to get there,” says Archbold. 

“But if we better understand the spectrum of resources available and do the prioritization work, we can take longer strides. That’s why whether in workshops or in 1:1 coaching, I like to guide folks through a 

,” she says. Essentially, Archbold has created a tier system similar to a membership with different levels. “The higher the level, the bigger investment you need to make,” she says. “It helps you break down a problem, figure out where to start and pinpoint what you need.” 

“This is what’s most accessible in the short-term. When you’re feeling stressed, imbalanced or burnt out, there are some immediate mindfulness go-tos that you can utilize. Examples include using grounding exercises, engaging all five senses with the 

, deep breathing — anything you can literally do on the spot. You can download Calm or Headspace, you can take a warm bath or prepare a balanced meal. You can use one day of PTO,” says Archbold. 

“Level two requires more from us than that instant turnaround,” she says. “Going to therapy or working with a life coach is going to cost money. Whether you’re consulting a nutritionist, getting acupuncture, taking a vacation or just staying on top of your routine healthcare visits, these are all self-care activities that require an investment of your financial resources.”

. “Tier 3 is all about doing that very intentional work like problem solving, reading books, attending a workshop — anything that actually requires time and isn't instantly accessible. Maybe you’re finally eliminating or confronting the stressors by reducing your social media time or terminating an unhealthy friendship.”

With this framework as our guide, Archbold walks us through an example. “Starting off with Tier 1, if I feel dysregulated, I can do some deep breathing in the moment. But I notice a pattern of often feeling this way, so I take on the Tier 2 work of booking a session with a therapist, which requires planning and saving that money. When I go to therapy, my therapist gives me homework — now I’m in Tier 3, where I need to carve out time and space within my day to sit with these practices that I'm learning," she says.

In other words, this work can be overwhelming, but by breaking it down, it becomes both more manageable and more concrete. “Even if you’re just opening up a savings account and starting to set money aside for a Tier 2 tool, you’re making progress. And in the meantime, you can take on some Tier 3 work, like reading a book on boundaries before bed, or watching a TED talk on dealing with trauma for an hour,” she says. “Or maybe you notice that you’ve really only been taking on Tier 1 work lately, and there’s room to step it up and invest more of your energy into yourself.”

Outside of figuring out how to get the ball rolling, folks tend to run into another problem — copying someone else’s playbook. “

Self-care is subjective. You have to find what works for you

,” says Archbold. “Are there free yoga classes? Yes. But does everyone like doing yoga? No. Don’t force it.”

Taking a more expansive view of what counts as self-care is also helpful here as you assemble your own toolkit. “People are often surprised to learn what practicing mindfulness looks like. It’s most associated with engaging your breath or meditation exercises, but it can also be rooted in an activity or hobby. Once the pandemic started, I got back into baking, which I now see as an act of mindfulness,” she says. 

“When you have something in front of you, like a list of ingredients, you don't really have time to think about ‘Who am I going to call tonight?’ or ‘I need to get ahead on my inbox’ — otherwise your three-layer cake won’t turn out very well. When I’m baking, I can’t multitask. I’m engaging all five of my senses and focusing on what’s happening in this moment.”

People often think mindfulness means taking a deep breath, mediating, and then moving on. Mindfulness is learning to be rooted in the present by engaging in a specific task.

THE CASE FOR PUTTING BOUNDARIES AT THE CENTER OF SELF-CARE

To continue pulling on this thread of expanding self-care, Archbold underlines one topic that’s been particularly top of mind for her lately. “As a therapist, I’ve always talked about boundaries, but I started talking about it much more when the pandemic started. I was seeing a lot of posts and messages saying, ‘Well, everyone's home now. So there's no reason why your friend shouldn't be answering their phone,’ or ‘There's no reason why someone's not available to do this task at work.’ I was really struck by this,” she says. “Here we are in the middle of a traumatic event and people are so entitled to your energy and time that they have the audacity to say what you are and aren’t allowed to do because you're stuck at home.”

But how does boundary work trace back to self-care? “For starters, boundaries fit into all of those five dimensions. A physical boundary could look like not wanting to shake hands during the pandemic, or not wanting to give someone a hug,” she says. “A social boundary could be limiting who you want to socialize with.”

Setting up boundaries is self-care work. Full stop.

Here, Archbold gets into the details of how boundaries boost self-care: 

“When we lack boundaries, we take on things we don’t have capacity for,” says Archbold. “We get or stay trapped in draining relationships and difficult situations. That brings on anger, burnout, stress, and fatigue — leaving us feeling depleted, which can impact everything from our output at work to our finances to our physical health.”

“Boundaries allow us to recognize how enmeshed we are to others or to our work. They’re a set of limits to determine the amount of access that you allow someone or something to have in your life. They teach others how they’re allowed to treat you, and determine how you will respond when these limits are crossed,” she says. “Allowing work to take over your life, or continuing a relationship that consistently brings you negative energy isn’t taking care of yourself.”

“Healthy boundaries give us the ability to understand what we are and are not responsible for. By drawing that line in the sand, we recognize, ‘This is for you and this is for me. 

I am able to take better care of myself and others by knowing what is mine to carry and what is not

“Additionally, our own boundaries allow us to give 

 the ability to sit with what is theirs. We often carry our own emotional discomfort 

 someone else’s discomfort. If I say no to you, I often feel like I have to do the emotional labor to make 

 feel good about it, which is an added weight. 

When we feel responsible for causing the discomfort, we often carry the burden of fixing their feelings and abandon our own

I can't do the job of carrying a boundary, erecting that boundary, and then making you feel good about why I have to put that boundary in place. Because now I have to be the savior in this whole situation, while you sit back and you do no work at all.

“I spent a lot of time talking about this in workshops in 2020. I’ve always seen self-care as a way to take power back in the face of 

. On one level, racism is obviously depleting. Black Americans have to deal with physical, emotional and cognitive symptoms, and face everything from 

. Diving deeper into the intellectual dimension of self-care and investing in ourselves is critical — it enables us to build resilience and self-esteem so that we can push back against racism when it comes our way,” says Archbold. 

Boundaries allow us to recognize what we do and don’t have control over.

 None of us have the power to change other people. As much as I would like to make someone stop being ignorant, that’s a journey that they have to go on,” she says. “But I do have power in how I respond. I can walk in my power by taking care of myself, protecting my peace and erecting boundaries, whether that’s avoiding triggering social media or news, or moving on from a job because of a toxic work environment.”

Self-care is about consistently pouring back into myself. Boundaries enable us to do that work — they help us recognize that the only thing that we have control over is how we consistently choose to invest in ourselves. 

FIND YOUR TYPE AND DRAW YOUR LINES — TOOLS FOR CONSTRUCTING BOUNDARIES

With this understanding of boundaries as a backdrop, Archbold gets down to the nitty-gritty tactics of how to evaluate your current relationship to boundaries, and how to get better at drawing those lines in your own life.

Pattern match by studying these archetypes and taking this “quiz.”

Start by recognizing your own patterns. “There are four different boundary issue types and each of them approach boundaries in the workplace differently,” says Archbold. Here, she provides an overview of each type and the telltale signs:

“This person says yes to everything. They already know that their cup is full, but when someone comes up to them with a new task, they just say yes, without speaking up for themselves or pointing to their already long list of responsibilities,” says Archbold. “This comes from a fear of disappointing others, worries about rejection or abandonment, or concern about missing out on an opportunity. They feel obligated and embedded to others and their needs.”

. Their boss checks in with them and says, ‘I see you have a lot going on. How can I help? Can I get you an intern?’ And the avoidant says no. Maybe there’s shame around asking for help or a discomfort with vulnerability. There’s also a tendency to project your own ideologies. Meaning, if you feel like a burden, you believe others think that, too,” says Archbold. “These are boundary issues because when you're recognizing your limits, you need to make sure that they're 

“This is the person who wants to control everything and can veer into manipulation. They don't really want to respond to or respect someone else’s boundary, which leads them to be dismissive. They often place blame on others for their setbacks, and are unable to take ownership.”

 “This is the narcissist. They could care less about your ‘No.’ They may have the means to help you, but they’d rather take control by not responding. They completely ignore the needs of others, and are in fact judgmental of other people's needs. They tend to be self-absorbed, and make excuses for their unsupportive behaviors,” says Archbold.

It may be the case that none of these types feel like the right fit. “It sometimes requires a level of practice to recognize what category you fall in. Or even if you do see yourself as the compliant who says yes to everything, you maybe haven’t done the deeper-rooted work of figuring out 

Use emotions as your diagnostic. “With a 

 lens, we’re able to see how our thoughts and feelings are linked, and therefore, impact our behaviors. Assess the emotion that comes up for you with boundaries, whether it’s ego, weakness, or guilt,” she says. 

We tend to judge our feelings instead of investigating what caused them.

“First ask, how does this habit make me feel? When I know the answer is no, but I go ahead and say yes because I’m compliant, what was I feeling in the moment that made me say yes?” says Archbold. “Second, how can I reframe that feeling? If I’m worried about accepting help and being a burden, I need to remind myself that I can’t assume to know what people will think of me, but I can ask for what I need and give them the opportunity to express 

Of course, the last two types are hard to identify with. “No one ever wants to admit that they are the problem, but when you notice there’s always a common denominator in your relationships and it’s you, there’s power in 

,” says Archbold. “If someone comes to me with their boundary and I ignore 

, was it because I was feeling hurt? Was my ego bruised? Did I feel rejected?”

To further introspect, lean on these additional reflective questions:

•What patterns when it comes to the four types of boundaries do I often exhibit? 

•In what ways have I failed to erect boundaries when I needed them in relationships? Which pattern did this fall under? 

•In what ways have I failed to erect boundaries when I needed them regarding work? Which pattern did this fall under?

•What is the scariest thing that I think will happen if I protect myself, my space, and my mental well-being by implementing boundaries?

Draw new lines in the sand with this advice.

When the topic of boundaries comes up, Archbold is invariably asked about 

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