2ND EDITION | ISSUE #190

I can feel myself in the earliest stages of a pivot again. The stage of uncertainty. Not knowing the answers—but knowing that some things need to change. My offers and brand have supported me the way I needed them to this year—but in the back of my head, there has been a lingering question about my offers and what I want work to look like for me—the founder, the creative—moving forward. What supported me in the past season is not what is going to support me in the next one.

Here in WNY, the shoulder seasons are always a time for contemplation—a barrier between two extremes: a hot, muggy, wet summer, with long days of sunshine and so much beauty and life, vs. a cold, harsh winter, where daylight slips through your fingers and life only exists below layers of ice and snow, hibernating for the winter.

And I feel that at a cellular level.

Fall is a beautiful season and celebration—a death cycle in itself. A time for harvest, but also for preparing for a change in seasons.

With a new last name and a new era ahead, no—I’m not rebranding CJ again. But I myself have dropped 7 letters, added one more ring, and gotten myself a whole new last name.

In the past few issues of the Behind the Brand newsletter, we’ve talked about strategy, the numbers behind your brand, and how to do a quarterly reset. But what about the season of in-between? When you —the creative behind your brand—need to do some recalibrating? This week’s newsletter is for that.

Truth be told, if you had asked me a month ago, I would have said I knew what was next for CJ. But after what was simultaneously the best and worst month of business I’ve ever had, for the first time in a long time, post-wedding OOO, I wasn’t so sure.

And the thing about not knowing what the next step is when it comes to your business—well, it makes creating content and marketing said business really. freaking. hard.

This week’s newsletter is all about what the heck to do after “the thing.” The launch, the rebrand—in this case, post-wedding—when suddenly part of you needs to plan for what’s next, but the other part of you is in a creative void and really has no idea.

It’s an odd thing, reaching a goal or a precipice of some sort. Like climbing a mountain. You slog your way up to the top, celebrate at the peak with a peanut butter and jelly Uncrustable—then drift on the dopamine all the way down, just to wake up the next morning barely able to get out of your tent.

Or spending a year planning a wedding or a rebrand (or, in my case, a rebrand in the spring and a wedding in the fall)—and once it’s all said and done, you are left with a list of “after the thing” to-dos and the most brain fog you have ever experienced (I told a mosquito to “stop it” last week). In the void that is left after the circus that was you reaching that huge goal, you are left to wonder: what’s next?

It was a question I posed to my new husband on the last day of our mini-moon (we plan to take a longer trip later this year), to which he answered, “Go get pizza.”

And honestly, that is the best advice I can think of: to lean into the void, to not need a grand plan for a minute, to be okay with not having to know what is next.

As I sat in the cell-service-free solitude of our Airbnb cabin, I was reminded of the in-between—the creative hangover and the time we never seem to account for. The time we want to rush through just to get on to the next thing.

The truth is, we need rest and respite after a big rebrand or transformation, when we start a new era. We need time to embody our new identity. And I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve rushed from one thing to the next without leaving time for after the thing, it hasn’t exactly worked out in my favor.

It’s why the rebound after the big breakup is never the love of your life. And if you ask me, it is society’s fault that we are so programmed to always be working on what’s next.

You finish high school, and it’s straight to college. Graduate with your bachelor’s, and it’s off to grad school—or your first “big girl” job. Most of us—myself included—haven’t been encouraged to pause, soak it in for a little while.

Simultaneously deciding not to go back to grad school or to pursue teaching art was my first pause—and one that gave me an immense amount of guilt and anxiety nearly ten years ago.

But as a 32-year-old, now-married lady who has hit a lot of the goals she has been chasing in life and business this year, I’ve discovered that the times I am most creative, the times when I have learned the most, are the times when I am allowing myself to pause—to not know all the answers but be damn sure willing to figure them out.

I’m spending these first weeks back in the office not knowing quite what is next for CJ, questioning a lot of things, like what I want my offers to look like in 2027, and even whether or not CJ will be around forever—whether or not I’m meant to be doing something else entirely.

What I do know is how to pause, take stock, and work my way toward clarity. And my goal is that by the end of this newsletter, you will have the same tools.

I also do know that that clarity won’t come overnight; hell, I don’t really expect to have it until after the new year.

Where a lot of business owners go wrong when they get to this in-between is that, because they don’t have all the answers, they assume they don’t have anything to say. Like a lack of clarity means they no longer have any authority. Like not knowing the answers means they don’t know anything.

Maybe you are like me, and you aren’t sure what the hell to launch next. Your best-laid plan got a little off track, and now you are left trying to figure out what to do with the time left for the rest of this year.

You need a filter for your ideas because right now you don’t totally know what to talk about.

That’s where having an editorial calendar and a sales and launch calendar comes in handy.

So if you need to figure out what’s next for your brand, here’s what to do.

Rest & Respite

I didn’t learn how to truly rest until around 4 years ago. The day I picked up the book titled Rest and started highlighting and flagging like a madman, I realized just how little I knew about what rest was and my own relationship with it. I grew up the child of immigrants who earned their rest, only rested at the end of the day when the work was done, and pushed through pain, sickness, and bad days. And I have so much respect for the life I have because of them. So, as an adult, I am very much preprogrammed to do the same. But by my sophomore year of college, that had turned into bouts of burnout, days on end with migraines—a cycle that lasted almost ten years. When I did rest, my body couldn’t handle it. One of my biggest fears when it came to my wedding day—and the week of—was that I was going to burn out and be sick. And I’m not gonna lie, I was close, but I didn’t burn out because I’ve learned how to rest better, to rest as a preventative measure and not a response.

When you reach a point in your brand where you know things aren’t really working, it is all too tempting to respond, go back to the drawing board, rage-delete pages from your website, and essentially burn it all down.

Instead, I would encourage—even urge—you to just pause. Leave things as they are; sit with it. Let yourself have a little time off, maybe even read this book, and just rest.

This step could also include a Brand Reset - to help you get clear on your perception vs. the reality and data behind your brand.

Then brain-dump all of your “what’s next” vs. “what you still need to do” tasks & ideas

If you haven’t already, take a step back, have a cup of coffee, fold some clothes, do whatever—before you come back to it.

Then it’s time to start organizing your to-do list into something that feels a little more—well, manageable, actionable even.

Here are a few ways that I do this:

#1 Differentiating between tasks where I am generating ideas and creating vs. responding (inspired by this substack article).

#2 Sequencing: before the thing, the thing, after the thing. I took this from working with Mae years ago, and it has lived rent-free in my mind ever since. Trust me, most of us are forgetting the “after the thing” before we move on to the next thing.
​This project planning masterclass will live rent free In my brain for the rest of eternity​

#3 Brain-dump all of the things into Notion and then use the AI chat to have it organize and categorize all of the tasks.

Next, it’s time to play with the calendar

Get clear on the time you have now, the projects you already have scheduled, and how much you want/need to be working in this season.

• Let’s start by zooming out and blocking any time you will be OOO—especially around the holidays. I do this in my paper planner + my digital one so my scheduling and availability in HB are up to date.

Then, be sure to block out some time for your own brand—whether that is a content day once a week, a whole CCO week, or a combination (which is what I do). Another Caitie with a C—Caitie Cupples Creative—does “work on your own stuff Wednesdays.” The idea is, working on your own brand should always be a priority, but especially when you need some extra clarity.

PSA: This by no means needs to get done in a day—feel free, or better yet, encouraged, to pause + come back between these steps.

Alright, so now we have time set aside for ourselves—but what about the overwhelming urge we have to fill it? This is when you want to look back at that brain dump and categorize things. If there is one thing that has really helped me to reach my goals w/out burning out (a huge problem I had in the past), it is to limit what I am focusing on @ any given time: fewer goals with bigger impact.

When it comes to work, I create more filters and focuses: I only sell or promote one thing at a time, and I work in batch days, avoiding task switching as much as possible. And I block what time I am working for clients vs. on CJ stuff on my calendar.

Mondays are for CJ content creation, writing, planning, and generating ideas.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are for client work.

Fridays are for responding and admin.

Breaking down my tasks + time this year has helped me to bring a huge vision to life: building our own wedding venue while running two businesses and still taking some time off to travel this summer. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t burn out. It was actually a huge fear of mine that I would because this was such a huge problem in the past—and I won’t lie, I got close—but I never hit the point of being down and out with a migraine and physically exhausted for days on end, which used to be a monthly occurrence.

Despite having had my busiest season of life ever, these tactics have helped me to slow down, focus, and have the best year in business yet + what people are entirely right in calling the best day of your life.

Open yourself up to possibility, play with the numbers - and what your offers, launches, or all of the above can look like next year.

I love digital planning, especially in Notion & Notion Calendar, because it allows you to play around—and move your launch calendar and content ideas around really easily.
I’ll never forget the year I spent God only knows how long filling out a year-at-a-glance dry-erase wall calendar with all the launches I wanted to do that year, only for the entire thing to get thrown off by a couple of days—and, well, basically go to shit.

Now that you have an idea of what your time looks like, use a visual calendar like Notion Calendar (where you can have a master view with multiple databases and calendars integrated into one) to look at the rest of the year—and what offers or services you have enough time to promote and fulfill.

Once I had the next thing figured out, I was able to decide what I wanted to promote after that, and after that. Am I 100% clear on the future of my 2027 services? Nope—but instead of burning all my current offers to the ground, I am going to re-launch some things and see how I enjoy it and how the launches go.

And last but not least, take your time—the scenic route. Maybe you dedicate a whole quarter to getting clear, doing research, sitting with and playing with ideas, interviewing people, or working with a coach or mentor.

Deciding to pivot is one thing—knowing which direction to pivot into is another thing entirely.