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Fill Your Own Cup First with Lisa Poslusny
Information overload isn’t just inconvenient, it’s triggering a nervous system response our brains haven’t evolved to handle. Lisa Poslusny rejoins John Randolph for part two of their unscripted, candid conversation on Episode 90 of CPA Life, and this accountant turned mental fitness coach breaks down why knowing everything about everyone creates the kind of stress our ancestors reserved for encountering tigers. The remedy starts with what you do the moment you wake up: Getting out of bed to feel your feet on the floor, focusing on those first few minutes, you’re building the capacity to control where your attention goes instead of letting worry hijack the day. John admits he guards his first three and a half hours like a vault, refusing to apologize for what someone once called selfishness. You can’t pour from an empty cup, and most people battering their way through tax season are running on fumes. Lisa’s “accept or convert” principle cuts through the noise, and she says you just need to find one small step forward or make peace with reality and move on. The hardest part? Self-love. Even serial givers struggle to extend themselves the same grace they offer everyone else. Race car drivers pit stop for the same reason we all need to: you can’t cross the finish line if you spin out before you get there.
Important Links:
About the Guest:
Lisa Poslusny spent 25 years in accounting and finance, leading audit teams at KPMG, managing billion-dollar mortgage servicing portfolios at PHH, and handling complex financial reporting through mergers and regulatory changes. She was the reliable problem-solver who always delivered, but that same drive left her mentally overloaded and emotionally drained. Even after leaving corporate life in 2019, the exhaustion followed, revealing that the real issue wasn’t her workload, it was lacking the tools to protect her energy and well-being. Now a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, Adapt Certified Functional Health Coach, and Positive Intelligence Mental Fitness Coach, she guides accounting and finance professionals through the same transformation using science-backed strategies that address the root causes of stress and burnout, helping high-achievers handle pressure without sacrificing their energy, relationships, or success.
Transcript:
Thanks for tuning in to CPA Life, where today we conclude John Randolph’s unscripted conversation with accountant-turned-coach, Lisa Poslusny. In part one, they explored challenges facing today’s accounting professionals, and now they dig into how information overload and social media are impacting everyone in the profession. Welcome back to CPA Life!
I don’t believe that the culture is any different in public accounting than it was, and I keep talking about public accounting because that’s the space we play in.
Sure, yeah.
I don’t believe the culture, large scale, is any different than it used to be in public accounting 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago. I believe it’s the same. The only difference is that between Going Concern and Reddit and #TaxTwitter and all of those other platforms, everyone has a voice. You know, the way that I put it is that 50 to 100 years ago, we had a finite number of microphones in this world, and you had to prove worthy and responsible to have one of those microphones. In the world we live in today, everyone has a microphone and you do not have to prove that you are worthy of it. You have a voice and you can use it to say whatever you want to say on any platform you want to say it on.
So we know about things so much quicker in a higher volume. Do you think that plays more into the higher level of stress and anxiety and frustration and unease that we’re dealing with in the world today, because you might have felt like your peers were working harder or not harder than you at KPMG—it was KPMG that you worked at, right?
Yes, yeah yeah.
You may have also felt that they might be making more money down the street at EY or Deloitte, but you didn’t know. But today, I won’t say that you know it, but somebody from those other firms is posting on Going Concern or Tax Twitter or Reddit that they’re making more money or they’re working less hours, or they’re working more hours, so you know about all of it, or in theory you do.
You know, John, that is an absolutely outstanding point, and it also lends to the fact that this information overload and knowing everything about everyone, that is a demand that is placed on our nervous system. And that is a demand that will set off those saboteur thoughts like nobody’s business. It’s like lighting firecrackers underneath them. So exactly, it’s so true. There’s just an unlimited amount of information, and your mind can run away with it. And you know, the problem is, the mental fitness program that I use, it’s very science-based. I always say, especially to accountants, it’s not woo, it’s neuroscience. Like, I’m going to tell you something and I’m telling you it’s not woo, it’s neuroscience. But you know, our brains really haven’t evolved to catch up with the fact that there’s all this information coming at us. Our brain is still seeing it as, oh my God, it’s a tiger, you know, and that automatic reaction, we just, evolution hasn’t caught up.
So how do you coach people through that when you’re working with people that are stressing and sabotaging themselves? What are some things that you kind of lean into or talk to people about to help clear the field, get that crap out of your life? I call it selective ignorance, meaning I’m not on Facebook, I’ll see stuff about Reddit, and I’ve got a Reddit account, but I can’t tell you the last time I ever hopped on Reddit; I’ve removed all news apps from my phone, from my computer, I don’t watch the news, I’m somewhat plugged in with some sports stuff, but not like I used to be, nothing. It’s that selective ignorance.
Yeah. We’re creating boundaries. So, well, there’s a lot of things we do, but the two most important things, and simple things, that we start with is, number one, we build a habit: That first thing in the morning, the first 15 minutes of the morning is what we start with. Before you pick up your phone, before you read the news, before you check your email, I have people tell me what their morning routine is from the time they open their eyes to the time they are making their coffee downstairs, and we practice focusing on all of the sensations, the bodily sensations of doing those things, “feeling my feet on the floor, listening to my toothbrush,” to really ground ourselves in connecting with ourselves before we let the outside world in. And that, for a lot of people, we start very small, and sometimes that can be tough, but when they do it consistently, it becomes a game changer because you’re really, you’re setting the stage to not kind of let your mind go off in the worry and ruminating about things that have happened, and you really build this ability to control your responses to what the day is going to bring. So that’s one very important thing.
The other thing, I mean the core around our coaching is, you know, this awareness, then bringing yourself into the present moment to recognize where are the thoughts running away and getting in your way, and then making a choice: making a choice based on, we use a few different tools, like kind of questions you can ask yourself how you want to respond to a situation, what boundaries you want to set. When you talked about bringing the two people together to kind of see the whole big story, am I seeing the whole story? There are different strategies that we use there and practice. It’s not about each individual problem coaching them around, it’s about helping them build an internal operating system to get through the day in the best way possible so that they’re showing up as the best version of themselves. I mean, that’s what it is. It’s the practice. But one of the most important practices to deal with chaos around you is we practice, accept or convert.
So when something’s coming at you, you have a choice. The choice that never works well is to stay frustrated, annoyed, yell, scream, be stressed about it. That is doing nobody any good. Recognize it, acknowledge it, “I feel strongly about this,” and either choose to accept it or choose to convert it into some type of opportunity. Is there some small step that you can take that is going to make this situation better? And you know, to the extent that you can’t do that or you don’t have the time to do that right now, you need to accept it and move on. And there’s more to that, but those are kind of the two big things that in today’s day and age, I think are very impactful practices for people to start to build.
You know, going back to the marriage coaching and marriage mentoring that my wife and I do, one of the things that we talk to people a lot about, and it doesn’t matter in this context, it doesn’t matter if someone is a believer or not a believer, but I’m a believer, and one of the things when I lean into God’s word that it consistently tells me is that everything—from a positive standpoint—everything that I’m going to give, love, peace, patience, goodness, happiness, joy, contentment, whatever I’m going to give to other people, I have to do it from one simple place: an overflow of my heart. The only way that I can have anything in my body and in my being that overflows is I’ve got to fill it up. And so I love the thought process that you’re talking about in the morning, regardless of what that looks like, whether it’s just 15 minutes, I’m going to focus on being present in my life and the sensations you’re talking about, or that’s journaling or it’s writing down the 30 things that you’re grateful for today. Whatever it is, I’ve got a systematic morning ritual routine that for the first three and a half hours of my morning, there is nobody in the outside world other than my wife that I allow to step into it. That is my time. And I had somebody years ago say, you’re really selfish about that time in the morning. And I said, look, I’m selfish about that time in the morning and I’m not going to apologize for it, and I do that so that I can be fully present for you after 8:30 in the morning. Because you don’t want me to not do that because this isn’t a nice person most of the time.
So if I’m going to give and give, and give, it’s got to be from a place of where I have filled my cup up, and usually when we start talking to couples, and again, we’re talking from a marriage context, but when we start talking to couples that are bickering and fighting and butting heads, and we start talking about, hey, talk to me about what you do individually, not as a couple. Not as parents. What do you do individually to fill up your cup? And so many times that answer is, I’m busy, I’m traveling. I don’t have time. And at the end of the day, really what it boils down to is, yeah, you do have time, because we all have the same 24 hours. It’s do you make it a priority, and win the battle of mind over mattress and roll your butt out of bed 30 minutes early to make sure that you can be fully present for your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your clients, your employees?
Exactly. It’s an investment. Now, you know, I say 15 minutes. Some clients it’s two minutes. You know, I have a similar three hour gap. If I need to be somewhere, I’m backtracking three hours because there are things that I need to do in the beginning of the day for me so that I can show up as my best self. You know, that’s never selfish. And just to add to that, another thing that comes up with just about every client is, you know, you talk about having to fill up your cup and have the love to be able to give to others. People have the hardest time loving themselves. You know, I always question like, you know, what kind of content to put out on LinkedIn? I want to bring people in. I don’t want to, some people, like if I said, hey, I have a three hour routine every day, they’d be like, well, I don’t want to work with her, she’s going to make me do that. Right? But the self love? every time, every client, no matter what they come in for, some of the exercises that we do, the self empathy exercises are the most difficult. And I tell people over and over again. And a lot of the times it’s the people who are always giving their time and their energy to others, and I tell them the greatest contribution you can make to the people you love and to the world is to love yourself unconditionally. And sometimes that is the hardest step for them to practice.
Yeah. We’re pretty good at beating ourselves up.
Yes! It takes practice to stop doing it. Again, that’s the way our brains are wired. So it’s to recondition them.
Yeah. I don’t remember the context of it, but years ago when my dad was alive, we were arguing about something and he nicely said, you know, I just need to know, are you done beating me up? Because if you are, that’s okay, but I really don’t need any help with that because I do a pretty good job of doing that myself. In fact, you’ll learn as you get older, son, nobody’s better at beating yourself up than you are.
Yep. So true.
And I think there’s just a lot of truth to that. So we’re right in the middle of tax season. How do you work with people that are in the midst of something like tax season or audit season, you know, in the middle of a big project? How do you work with people to get them to just, for lack of a better way to put it, roll with it? You know, it’s kind of the mindset. I don’t know how much in your life you’ve been around water and, you know, looked at when you walk out on a beach and there’s a riptide going on, and they’ll say, hey, don’t try to swim against the current kind of thing. And it’s just that kind of mindset, I think, that there gets to be a point in the midst of the battle where you’ve got to tell people, hey, it sucks, you’ve kind of got to lean into it right now.
Yeah. Well, what it comes down to is most people have more choice, and I don’t want to use the term “suffering.” Well, I’m going to use it for lack of a better term. You have more say in the suffering than you realize. There are going to be circumstances that you cannot change, but the way that we respond to those circumstances makes such a difference in how we perform, how we feel, how our energy is, how much energy we’re expending to get through those circumstances. Yes, things are going to be tough, we want to prepare for them as best we can. We want to set ourselves up to remove as much friction from getting those things done as we can. When things don’t go the way we plan, which is going to happen every busy season, something is going to be wrong, some audit issue is going to come up that you didn’t expect. To have the resilience to be able to bounce back to quote unquote “surf the wave,” can’t control the wind and the waves, you can learn to be an excellent surfer. I mean, that’s kind of the message. And combined with the power of small power breaks: You know, I say all the time to people, it feels like you got to go, go, go, go, go, and you can’t take that two minutes to take a few breaths to feel the weight of your body and your seat, whatever it is that gives you that little mental reset and recharges you. Think about it. A race car driver, they pit stop. Their whole purpose is to cross the finish line first, and they still take a pit stop so they don’t spin out.
So trying to get people, it’s a hard sell in our brains. “I don’t have time. I don’t have time. I don’t have time.” And it’s also a hard sell in our brains, in our hyper achiever brain to say two minutes is not going to make a difference. But it doesn’t matter if I’m thinking about my meeting or if I’m thinking about the feeling of the toothpaste in my mouth and the bristles on my gums, that’s not going to make a difference, but it does. And, you know, the science proves it. I try to bring the science into it for the rational minds so that they can understand.
For those left brain people?
Yeah! Yeah. So, you know, like you said, I think you said at some point it’s meeting people where they’re at, so it’s a matter of seeing, everybody needs a little bit of a different perspective and a different type of habit to build in. But really those power breaks and just expecting that you’re going to need to do some surfing is a big part of how we work through these busy, challenging times.
Yeah. As you were sitting there talking about that, all I think about was I’m training for an event in October and part of my training every Tuesday with the trainer I’m working with is, right now it’s going to increase over time, but right now it is 2.25 miles on the treadmill at a 15 degree incline. And when he first told me that—and we started with two miles, we’re now 2.25—when he first told me that, I was like, Eric, you’re out of your mind. And he said, “Look here, it’s real simple, okay? I don’t care how long it takes you to do it, I really don’t. But here are the rules: Don’t grab the side rails. Don’t step off the treadmill. If you need to slow the treadmill down to literally 0.01 speed, that’s what you do. But you do not stop. You don’t completely stop. You can slow down, you can catch your breath, if your heart rate gets too high, if your legs start hurting, slow it down to a point that you can catch your breath and it’s comfortable, and then speed back up. But I don’t care. At this stage of the game, just do it.”
And as you were talking about that, that’s kind of what I thought about. You know, you’re in the middle of tax season, April 15th is the deadline, it’s not going to move. So it’s not an issue of getting there first, you just got to get there. You just got to get there. So if that means that you need to unplug and catch your breath, I was talking to a candidate the other day and they said, you know, we’re talking about how it’s already crazy at their firm. She said, “Yeah, I went into my boss’s office the other day, who’s a senior manager on the job that I’m working on, and I said, ’Look, I’m leaving. It was three o’clock. She says I’m leaving. I’ll be back early tomorrow morning, but I’m done. Every number is starting to look like every other number to me, and I just can’t do it.’” And you know, she said, “Luckily I didn’t get pushback, but I showed up the next morning at six o’clock ready to go, but I just needed that reset and that refresh.”
Yep. And I would’ve never done that years ago. I would’ve never. I’ve been there, and where you’re finally bleary eyed and you lay down in bed and you’re still seeing the numbers that you couldn’t figure out going on. Like as soon as you said that, I kind of had a little flashback there.
A little PTSD?
Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s funny because you know, my daughter, she works some of the time at home. She’s not here today. I have the whole house to myself. Occasionally she’ll pop her head in, you know, she started working at Deloitte in July and she does a lot of work with some complex spreadsheets, and she knows that I’m a little bit of an Excel geek, so she’ll peek her head in, she’ll be like, so mom, if you were to have—I’m like, you know, I have to look at it. And she’s like, all right, but I don’t want you to get sucked into it. Like, just look at it for a second and before you know it I’m like, nope, we’re going to find this last little bit, come on, we can do it. She’s like, I know this really jazzes you up. I’m like, yeah, you know, sometimes I do miss it. I do miss a good Excel reconciliation.
Yep. Some old habits die hard, right?
Yeah, they do.
So, Lisa, so much of what I talk about on our podcast is really just simply how can we impact the industry positively? Our focus as a firm, as a recruiting firm, as a talent advisory firm, our focus is what I refer to as locally owned CPA firms, advisory firms and consulting firms. So we don’t do any work with any Big Four. We don’t do any work with any top, largest firms. Small to mid-size local CPA firms. Now, I would say probably 40% of our clients are fully remote, 50% are hybrid in some way, shape, form, or fashion, and then 10% are a mixture of the two. They fall into what I refer to as firms that buy into the one size does not fit all world that we live in today. We’ve got a client in Buffalo that’s got 130 employees and I’d guess probably 50% of their employees are hybrid in some way, shape, form, or fashion, and then there’s 25% of their staff that’s in the office five days a week because they choose to be, and then there’s another 25% of their staff that is completely remote. And their mindset is, we’re going to have the best people in the marketplace. If they sit in Buffalo, that’s great, but if they don’t, we don’t care.
I say all that to say, through that process on our podcast, we want to give those firms a platform to kind of talk about who they are. But then the flip side of that is talking to people like you and other teachers, trainers, coaches, mentors in the space that really are sowing back into the industry and the people to make it better than it was 20 years ago.
Yeah, no, I love that. I’ve listened to some of your episodes and I’ve seen the different topics, and so when you reached out and said that you wanted to chat, I was like, absolutely, because I could tell and I could tell from our conversation that, you know, we’re very like-minded and very mission aligned for sure.
I think there’s a lot more people, and there are a lot more firms out there that are, as you call it, mission aligned with you and I than we know that there are. My, again, hypothesis is the reason why is the people that have the majority of the biggest microphones and megaphones, and the biggest platforms to shout into them are the Big Four firms and the Top 100 firms. They have the financial resources, they have the people resources. They can throw money and they can throw people at the problem. The firm with 14 employees, the firm with 84 employees, they don’t have the excess dollars and the excess human capital to throw at the problem. So they’ve got to figure out a way to solve the problem themselves, and I think too many times those owners are carrying that weight by themselves. And they either one, from my side of the desk believe that the resource that I lean into, i.e. Robert Half, Kforce, Adecco, anybody else, is going to charge me way too much money to solve this problem for me. They don’t know that there’s someone like me out there that focuses in this space and has built a business, honestly, part of our platform is we can offer those exact same resources with that exact same talent and ability at a fraction of the price, because I’m not sitting in Dallas, Texas paying stupid money for real estate that I need you to pay for, and 15 off-book managers and leaders that I need you to cover salary for.
Then the flip side of that is from your side of the desk, they don’t understand that there’s people out there that they can partner with to collaborate, to teach, to mentor, to mold, to take some of their employees that are pulling their hair out and they don’t have the time to coach them, and say, “Hey, there’s a resource here in this person at this company that I would like for you to get in touch with and talk to. And oh, by the way, I’ll pay for it because I want the best you that I could possibly have for the next two years, three years, five years, eight years, whatever it is.”
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are so many companies that have taken the leap and have brought programs. I mean, well, there’s lots of programs out there. I’m biased because I really like the program that I facilitate! But, you know, it’s simple. It’s science-based, you know, out of the, what is it, 23 emotional intelligence competencies, it covers 22 of them in a much slimmer framework that’s easy and doable. So that’s kind of why I’ve stuck with it. And, you know, like I said, sometimes you add some more bells and whistles depending upon the person and what they’re willing to explore. So it’s really been an exciting journey for me, and I’m looking forward to spreading it more, spreading mental fitness to more people to just help bring more ease and flow into life. I mean, that’s what everybody deserves.
Absolutely. If people wanted to reach out to you, get to know you better, learn more about you, where are the best places for people to find you?
LinkedIn for sure. I’m very active on LinkedIn and, you know, I pick up those DMs every day. And then Lisa@LisaPoslusny.com is my email address so people can reach out there. And LisaPoslusny.com is my website.
Perfect. I’ll make sure we add all of those links into the show notes.
Fantastic! Well, this is so exciting. I mean, it was, I was very excited to meet you, but I had no idea we were going to accomplish so much in our first discussion, so glad this worked out!
I didn’t either. I’ve jokingly said to people, I’ve done training and coaching and teaching for 20, 25 years, I’ve hosted some live stuff, done live music for years, I hosted a singer songwriter event once a month for about eight years in our local area. And I’ve taken that same mentality there when people were afraid to come to that, especially, you know, most songwriters are behind the scenes people, and they’re not out front people. So there was always that hesitancy about, yeah, I don’t know if I want to do this. And I’ve talked to people about the podcast, they’re like, I’m not that great on a podcast. And I always tell people, look, I grew up playing baseball, played it all my life, all through high school, all through college, a couple of years out. You know, it takes a special person to throw batting practice to people because they want to throw the perfect pitch and just let people get great hits. And so I always tell people, look, my job is real simple in this role as a podcast host or as a host of a singer songwriter event: I’m the guy basically sitting on a bucket putting balls on a tee, and my job is to tee up everything I can for you to hit homeruns and try to make it as simple and just a free flowing conversation as possible. So hopefully, without even talking about doing that, that’s what we were able to do.
Well, your questions were great. I think you, you know, you have a real talent for this, so I really appreciate it.
Well, if I could get all of my recruiters to lean into a simple mindset that I call just “general curiosity,” I think it’s something that we all could use a little bit more of in this world.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I truly appreciate your time, Lisa. Thank you so much.
Thanks so much, John.
Talk to you later.
Bye bye.
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