Mindful Strategies for Creating a Life, Business, and Brand That Feels Good

Making decisions is a pretty significant part of running a business. What should you offer? What should your brand look like? Is it time to rebrand? Should you pursue this opportunity? Is everyone else doing something because it’s actually a good idea—or have you just convinced yourself you’re supposed to do it too?

And the more stressed you become about making the right decision, the harder making that decision can feel.

I sat down with mindful productivity and mental fitness coach Jeni Raitsin, founder of Leisure Hacker, to talk about how mindfulness can help business owners make decisions, separate what they actually want from all the external “shoulds,” and build businesses that support the lives they want to live.

We also got pretty deep into how all of this applies to branding and rebranding—which, naturally, I was VERY into.

Meet Jeni Raitsin of Leisure Hacker

Jeni Raitsin is a Mindful Productivity & Mental Fitness (PQ) coach and an international keynote speaker. Her work combines neuroscience and practical time and energy management strategies with positive psychology and modern-day mindfulness, intentionally designed to help busy women find better, less stressful ways to create greater income and impact without sacrificing their relationships, health, or happiness.

Connect with Jeni: leisurehacker.com | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn

Interview Highlights

• From architecture to mindful productivity coaching
• What does mindful productivity actually mean?
• Your business vision should include your life outside of the business
• The “shoulds” can get REALLY loud when you own a business
• Your brand doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s to work
• The client is the expert on her business
• Using mindfulness to make branding and rebranding decisions
• Start with your core values instead of obsessing over the perfect mission statement
• How do you want people to feel when they experience your brand?
• Rebranding and Jeni’s “sailor’s mindset”
• Entrepreneurship has a way of showing you your own patterns
• Why stress can make business decisions even harder
• Mindfulness doesn’t have to become another task on your list
• A few more things to know about Jeni

From Architecture to Mindful Productivity Coaching

Before Jeni founded Leisure Hacker, she spent nearly a decade as an architect. She loved architecture and design, had a great job, and eventually became a team lead. From the outside, there wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with the career she had built.

Internally, though, something felt off.

“I thought if I just did more, worked more, and achieved more, it would solve all these problems and make me happier. But it just made me feel burnt out.”

Eventually, Jeni realized she didn’t want to continue down that path, although she didn’t immediately know what she wanted to pursue instead.

Her interest in productivity, well-being, and mindfulness initially existed as a side project. She had always been interested in productivity, so she started a blog and began learning everything she could about finding easier ways to manage the things she wanted to do alongside everything she needed to do.

That side project was called Leisure Hacker, and over time, Jeni said it became increasingly difficult to ignore how strongly she felt pulled toward it.

She eventually studied coaching and positive intelligence, combining those disciplines with her existing interest in productivity and well-being to develop the work she does today.

What Does Mindful Productivity Actually Mean?

When I asked Jeni to define mindful productivity, she made it clear that she doesn’t consider it another productivity method or system.

For her, it’s a way of living.

“How can we both achieve the things we want to achieve in our business, with our family, and with our personal goals, and still feel good about it?”

There are plenty of people teaching productivity, performance, and how to accomplish more. There are also plenty of people teaching mindfulness, meditation, and stress management. Jeni became interested in what happens when you bring those two areas together.

Rather than treating well-being as something separate from productivity, she looks at how reducing stress and caring for ourselves can actually help us pursue our goals more effectively.

That feels especially relevant for small business owners because most of us aren’t building businesses where profit is the only thing that matters.

We want the business, sure. We also want relationships, family, hobbies, homes, interests, rest, and lives that we actually enjoy living.

Jeni’s approach asks how we can pursue both rather than assuming success requires sacrificing one for the other.

Your Business Vision Should Include Your Life Outside of the Business

One of the things I wanted to talk to Jeni about was how business owners determine their vision and values when the business is only one part of a much larger life.

Jeni believes that larger vision needs to come before a lot of the action we’re tempted to take.

She sees people start businesses, invest in branding, pursue goals, and take action only to eventually realize that what they built doesn’t actually align with who they are or what they wanted.

That’s why she advocates for creating a cohesive vision that includes both your personal life and your business rather than developing the two completely independently.

For a small business owner, the bottom line usually isn’t simply profit. You probably started the business because there was something you wanted from it beyond money. Maybe that’s more autonomy, a particular lifestyle, meaningful work, time with your family, creative freedom, or the ability to make an impact in a particular way.

There isn’t one universally correct version of that.

“It’s going to look different for everybody. Understanding what is important to us and what values lead us can help us create a business and a life that feels good.”

Jeni also believes that alignment can make it easier to take action. When you’re pursuing something you genuinely care about and enjoy, you may have more energy for it and spend less time forcing yourself toward goals you’ve adopted simply because they seemed like the goals you were supposed to have.

The “Shoulds” Can Get REALLY Loud When You Own a Business

When I asked Jeni about the mental blocks that make it difficult to align our goals with our values, she brought up people pleasing, perfectionism, hyper-achievement, and overthinking.

But for our conversation, she grouped much of it under one larger idea: external noise.

Or, as she calls it, “the should.”

I should do this.

I need to do it this way.

I shouldn’t have done it that way.

Those messages can come from social media, society, family, other people in our industries, or our own internal fears and expectations.

And I see this CONSTANTLY with branding.

A client starts looking around at what other businesses are doing and decides, “Oh, that’s what I should be doing. That must be what my business should look like.”

The problem is that seeing someone else doing something successfully doesn’t automatically mean the same decision makes sense for you.

It’s a little like looking at someone on social media with a huge following and assuming the follower count proves that her business is wildly successful. You don’t actually know what’s happening behind the scenes, but now you’ve decided that whatever she’s doing is the standard you should be trying to reach.

Jeni called following those external “shoulds” a recipe for constantly feeling like a failure because you’re operating according to somebody else’s compass.

There are absolutely strategies worth learning from other people. But eventually, you still have to determine what success looks like for you and what kind of business supports that.

Your Brand Doesn’t Have to Look Like Everyone Else’s to Work

Jeni had a particularly relevant example of this from her own business.

Before Leisure Hacker became her primary work, she had done freelance graphic design between her career in architecture and coaching. She had learned design while at university, enjoyed it, and ultimately created her own branding and website.

As she moved into coaching, though, she began wondering whether her website looked like a coach’s website was “supposed” to look.

She looked at successful coaches and brands around her and started questioning whether she needed to follow the same visual patterns.

“There was this little voice in the back of my mind telling me, ‘No, Jeni. Make it yours. Make it aligned to you and your personality.’”

So she did.

Her website was different from the typical coaching websites she was seeing, but it also became a remarkably accurate representation of her personality.

“If you want to know my personality, just go to this website and see it. It’s very much me.”

And people noticed.

Jeni said she frequently received comments about how unique the site was and how much it felt like her. More importantly, the people who resonated with the website often became the kinds of clients who resonated with her.

The takeaway here is NOT that everyone should go DIY her website. We actually stopped during the interview to make that distinction because Jeni had legitimate design experience and genuinely enjoyed doing it.

She even laughed about the stage of business where you think, “Oh, I can do everything myself,” only to grow a little and wonder why on earth you didn’t hire someone.

What I loved about her example was the reasoning behind her design decisions.

She had taken the time to understand her values, personality, vision, and what Leisure Hacker represented before translating those things visually.

And I think that work belongs to the business owner regardless of whether she is creating the brand herself or partnering with a designer.

The Client Is the Expert on Her Business

This led us into something I’ve always believed about my own role as a designer.

I’m not the expert on somebody else’s business.

She is.

Yes, I have expertise in branding and design. I know how to take strategy and turn it into a visual system. I can help identify what needs to be communicated, ask questions that pull out ideas a client may not have articulated yet, and make design decisions based on what we’re trying to accomplish.

But the client brings something to that process that I never could: her knowledge of the business.

She knows her customers, her goals, her history, her experience, her mission, and the things she wants to build next.

The strongest branding process brings those two forms of expertise together.

Jeni agreed that the business owner has to do some of that internal work first—understanding her vision, values, and what she wants to represent—and then a designer can help translate those ideas visually.

That brought us to the question I really wanted her perspective on: How can mindfulness help someone make those decisions in the first place?

Using Mindfulness to Make Branding and Rebranding Decisions

Jeni’s answer came back to the external noise we had already been talking about.

Mindfulness can help lower the volume on the fears, expectations, “shoulds,” conditioning, and limiting beliefs that make it difficult to distinguish what you actually want from everything you’ve absorbed around you.

That becomes particularly useful during branding or rebranding because there is SO MUCH available for you to react to.

You can look at competitors, browse Pinterest, save Instagram posts, follow design trends, read advice about what your industry supposedly needs, ask ten friends for opinions, and very quickly reach a point where you have no idea what you think anymore.

Mindfulness gives you an opportunity to quiet some of that input and come back to more fundamental questions.

What do you actually stand for?

What are your values?

What are you trying to build?

What matters to the people you want to serve?

What should someone understand about this business when they encounter it?

Once those things are better defined, you have something meaningful to translate into visual decisions rather than simply choosing colors, fonts, or imagery based on what everyone else seems to be doing.

Start With Your Core Values Instead of Obsessing Over the Perfect Mission Statement

I asked Jeni whether there were specific exercises I could use with branding clients who know what their business does but are struggling with the strategic pieces underneath the design.

Her recommendation was surprisingly simple: start with values.

There are plenty of familiar branding exercises that ask questions like, “If your brand were a person, who would it be?” or “If your brand were a place, what would it feel like?”

Those exercises can be helpful because they give us more concrete language for something that initially feels abstract. But underneath them, Jeni sees the same fundamental question: What do you represent?

That can be especially useful for business owners who are getting completely tangled up trying to create the perfect mission statement, define the perfect target audience, write the perfect bio, or find exactly the right words to explain what they do.

Jeni admitted that she spent an enormous amount of time doing this herself early in her business.

Her advice now is to zoom out.

Understand what you stand for first.

Then use that foundation to answer the more specific questions.

That doesn’t mean messaging, audience, positioning, or mission don’t matter. It means you don’t have to solve every one of them independently while staring at a blank document and hoping the perfect sentence magically appears.

How Do You Want People to Feel When They Experience Your Brand?

Jeni added another question that I think is particularly useful in branding:

How do you want your ideal client to feel?

Business owners can get incredibly focused on information. What exactly should this page say? What should the service be called? Which sentence belongs in the bio? Which shade of green should we use?

But people aren’t experiencing your brand as a collection of isolated decisions.

They’re experiencing all of those decisions together.

Maybe you want someone to feel supported. Maybe the experience should feel exciting, comforting, fun, sophisticated, energizing, welcoming, or peaceful.

Once you understand the feeling you’re trying to create, you can begin asking how each part of the brand contributes to it.

The words matter. The colors matter. The typography matters. Photography, graphic elements, website interactions, imagery, and even tiny choices like the emojis a business uses on social media can contribute to how someone experiences it.

Each piece carries its own associations, but the real magic happens when they work together to create the larger feeling you intended.

That gives you something much more useful to return to than endlessly asking yourself whether you’ve chosen the “right” font.

Rebranding and Jeni’s “Sailor’s Mindset”

Of course, even after you’ve developed a strong vision, things are going to change.

That’s business. That’s life.

And a rebrand is a pretty significant example of that kind of change.

Jeni uses a concept in her coaching that she calls the sailor’s mindset, and I thought it was such a useful way to think about what happens when a business has to adjust.

Imagine sailing toward a destination.

You know generally where you’re trying to go, and you have navigation tools to help you get there. But you don’t control the ocean.

The wind changes. Waves come. Conditions shift. You probably aren’t going to travel in one perfectly straight line from your starting point to your destination.

A good sailor knows how to respond to those changing conditions. If the wind changes direction, she adjusts the sails rather than insisting that the ocean cooperate with the original plan.

Jeni sees business owners—and humans in general—doing the opposite all the time.

We develop a plan and assume that if the strategy is good enough, we work hard enough, or we simply want it badly enough, everything should unfold according to that plan.

Then the conditions change and we try to push harder.

Her sailor’s mindset asks us to keep the larger direction in view while remaining willing to change how we get there.

I immediately saw the connection to rebranding.

Sometimes the business itself has changed. Your audience is different, your services have evolved, your goals have shifted, or you’ve simply learned enough through years of running the business to know that the original approach no longer makes sense.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the entire vision was wrong.

Sometimes the wind changed and you need to adjust your sails.

Entrepreneurship Has a Way of Showing You Your Own Patterns

Our conversation about adapting to change eventually moved beyond branding and into one of the stranger realities of entrepreneurship: owning a business has a remarkable ability to expose your own habits, fears, and patterns.

Jeni doesn’t approach personal development from the perspective that we constantly need to become different people in order to succeed.

Instead, she sees much of the process as removing the layers of fear, conditioning, limiting beliefs, and external expectations that make it harder to operate from who we already are.

Entrepreneurship gives you PLENTY of opportunities to encounter those layers.

You make decisions with incomplete information. You put things into the world and let people respond to them. You have to sell. You have to decide what your work is worth. You have to change course when something doesn’t work.

And eventually, you start noticing where you tend to overthink, people please, chase external validation, avoid decisions, or insist on doing things the hard way.

Sometimes awareness is enough to begin changing those patterns. Other times, Jeni pointed out, they’re difficult to see on your own precisely because they’re happening below the level of conscious thought. That’s where outside support from a coach, therapist, or other practitioner can be valuable.

Why Stress Can Make Business Decisions Even Harder

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Jeni what advice she would give someone who was struggling to make a decision about her business or life.

Her first answer was self-compassion.

When we become stressed about making the right decision, Jeni explained that our thinking can narrow around the problem. Then we respond by trying to think about it even harder.

You know the loop.

I need to figure this out. I need to make a decision. Why can’t I make a decision? I should know what to do. I NEED TO FIGURE THIS OUT.

And now you’re not only trying to solve the original problem; you’re stressed about the fact that you haven’t solved it yet.

Jeni recommends doing something that feels almost counterintuitive when you really want an answer: put the problem down for a while.

Go outside. Work in your garden. Read. Swim. Dance around. Take a drive. Take a shower.

Give your brain something else to do.

That’s why so many of us have experienced an idea suddenly appearing while we’re showering, walking, or driving after spending hours unsuccessfully trying to force it at our desks.

As I told Jeni during our conversation, I can personally confirm the effectiveness of the long-shower decision-making method.

Mindfulness Doesn’t Have to Become Another Task on Your List

When I asked Jeni about the mindfulness practices she uses in her own life, I appreciated that her answer wasn’t another elaborate routine for everyone to add to the morning checklist.

For Jeni, mindfulness is less about having one designated mindfulness practice and more about bringing mindful awareness into the things she’s already doing.

That might mean paying attention while drinking her coffee, brushing her teeth, or taking a walk.

She doesn’t want mindfulness to exist only as a meditation session or journaling exercise that happens for a designated amount of time and then ends.

It’s more about how she moves through the rest of her day.

That brings the entire idea of mindful productivity full circle. It isn’t another system for doing more things correctly. It’s an approach to how you make decisions, pursue goals, respond to change, and experience the life happening around the business you’re building.

A Few More Things to Know About Jeni

What does Jeni love doing outside of work?

Jeni loves baking, both because she enjoys it as a hobby and because she finds it to be a great stress reliever.

At the time of our conversation, she had also recently gotten an old handwritten Russian recipe book from her grandmother and was attempting to recreate some of the recipes with help from her mom.

The challenge was that her grandmother was an extremely intuitive baker.

Her instructions tended to be along the lines of, “Just put some sugar. Just put some flour.”

Jeni, understandably, wanted to know whether “some” meant a tablespoon or a cup.

Apparently the inability of grandmothers to provide actual recipe measurements transcends both continents and cultures, because that sounded VERY familiar to me.

What books does Jeni recommend?

Jeni recommended two books that have been particularly influential for her.

Discover Your Destiny by Robin Sharma helped her think about purpose and vision during the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey, and she especially recommended it for someone who is starting out and trying to determine what she wants to pursue.

She also recommended Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine. Jeni trained in Positive Intelligence and described the framework as one of the most significant practices she has personally learned and taught.

What does being a homemaker in business mean to Jeni?

When I asked Jeni what being a homemaker in business meant to her, she connected it back to an idea that had really been underneath our entire conversation: creating your own reality.

There isn’t one correct definition of what homemaking, business ownership, family, or a fulfilling life has to look like.

“I think each of us gets to do business our way or do life our own way. There’s no right or wrong. It’s just about doing life your way and feeling happy about it.”

And honestly, that’s a pretty fitting place to end a conversation about separating what you genuinely want from everything you’ve been told you should want.

Connect with Jeni Raitsin and Leisure Hacker

You can learn more about Jeni and her work at Leisure Hacker, follow her on Instagram, or find her on LinkedIn.

And if you’d rather listen to our full conversation, tune in here > Apple | Spotify | Other