If you lead people in construction, there's a good chance you're really good at what you do. And tired in a way you can't quite explain.
That's the leader Stacy Gissal works with every day. Stacy is a stress specialist, executive coach, and the founder of Evolve Beyond Limits. She started her career as a nurse and has spent more than 15 years helping people reframe stress, build resilience, and take radical responsibility for their health and wellbeing.
Her work rests on one simple, radical idea: stress is not your enemy. It's a signal. It tells you where you need to grow, what needs to change, and what's holding you back from the next level.
Stacy doesn't teach this from theory. She has rebuilt every area of her own life (physical, mental, spiritual, financial, and relational) using the same six pillars of stress mastery she teaches her clients. Today she and her husband run a coaching firm together, working 1:1 with executives and with leadership teams across industries, including construction.
On October 19, Stacy returned to the CFMA Virginia conference to speak on the leadership track. Her session, Lead Yourself First: The Counterintuitive Path to Higher Performance Without Burnout, took on a habit many construction leaders wear as a badge of honor: putting everyone else first.
Right after the session, Caroline Raffetto, editor of Constructionowners.com sat down with Stacy for a live, in-person episode of COP Pod to dig into what leading yourself first actually looks like in practice.
Caroline: Tell us a little about yourself. What do you do, and what brings you to CFMA Virginia?
Stacy: I'm a stress specialist and leadership coach. My husband and I run a coaching firm together. We both spoke here last year, and we serve clients who are part of CFMA. It's such an amazing group of human beings, and they brought me back to speak on the leadership track this year.
Caroline: This is my first time at this conference, but it feels like I've been coming for years because everyone is so welcoming.
Stacy: So welcoming. Something I noticed last year, coming from outside construction, is that in this industry, people are your product. Your people are so important. You feel that when you come here. They want to invest in their people, and they're just good people.
Caroline: Speaking of people, you just did a session on how to lead yourself first. We all know it matters to take care of yourself before you can help others. But what does that really look like in practice?
Stacy: We all know it conceptually, but a lot of people struggle to put it into practice. In the session, we talked about one leadership pattern we all have within us that leads to the most burnout: the self-sacrificing leader. This leader holds a core belief that to lead other people, they have to put themselves on the back burner.
Even though we know we have to lead ourselves to lead others well, most of us habitually fall into being that self-sacrificing leader. We think we're doing something noble. But really, we're giving people a half-hearted version of ourselves.
If we don't make the conscious decision to show up every day and lead ourselves well, we'll struggle to lead others well. We might give them something, but it's not the best of us. They're getting the leftovers. And nobody wants that.
Caroline: Burnout is one of the biggest things I see in construction leaders. They're so focused on giving 100% all the time that there's no tea left in their cups. How do you see construction leaders change these habits?
Stacy: The first thing they have to do is change their perspective, their core belief. They have to be able to say: by taking care of me, I'm not giving somebody less of me. I'm giving them the best version of me.
And you have to keep thinking about it that way, over and over. The things that let you be a self-led leader are always the easiest things to push aside.
Caroline: So easy. That goes on the to-do list for tomorrow.
Stacy: There's always tomorrow. I'll take care of myself later. I'll do the workout later. I'm skipping lunch today, but I'll eat great tomorrow. We bypass fun and play because there's work to be done. That's where we end up in very reactionary patterns.
In the session, we used two acronyms: CLEAR and FILL. First, we have to clear out the things that drain our energy. That means:
Then we have to fill ourselves with the things that actually give us life:
Caroline: Boundaries! God forbid we have white space on our calendar.
Stacy: Exactly. Now, the people who actually make this work do something specific. They pick one thing to clear and one thing to fill. They put it on their calendar. And they get accountability: they make sure the people around them know, don't let me skip this.
I joke about my husband all the time. If he gets a workout in the morning, he's a completely different human as the day goes on compared to when he doesn't. I want the version of him that took the time to work out.
So the biggest thing is having support. Make sure people know what you're trying to do, and that they'll hold your feet to the fire when it gets hard. Because that's the version of you we want.
Caroline: That's why a strong support system in your business matters. As a leader, you're not in this alone.
Stacy: And if you try to be in it alone, I'm sorry, but you're going to fail every single time. Or at least be miserable.
You also have to realize that as a leader, the people around you are looking to you for permission. They're watching how you act. It's our responsibility to do these things even when they're hard, because that gives the people who work for us permission to make them a priority too. Then we get the best version of them as well.
But you can't ask them to do it if you're unwilling to do it yourself. If you keep saying it's important but keep putting it off, nobody cares what you say. "Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't work. People pay attention to what you're doing.
Caroline: That's an incredible lesson. Anything else you'd like to add, from your session or the conference?
Stacy: If you're listening to this but you're not going to things like this, not getting in the room with people who are striving to grow and get better, that's part of being a self-led leader too. Be with the right people, in the right environment. Go join CFMA. Go find your group. Especially in this day and age, it's so important to have places to come and connect with people in real life.
Construction runs on people. The leaders who hold those people together are often the last ones to take care of themselves. Stacy's point is that this isn't noble. It's costly. When you run on empty, your team gets the leftovers.
Leading yourself first starts with one belief: taking care of yourself doesn't give your people less of you. It gives them the best of you.
From there, the practice is simpler than most leaders expect. Don't overhaul your life. Pick one thing to clear, like an open loop or a task you can hand off. Pick one thing to fill, like a morning workout, a real lunch, or a block of white space. Put both on the calendar, and tell the people around you not to let you skip them.
Then remember who's watching. Your crews, your office team, and your fellow leaders take their cues from what you do, not what you say. When you protect your own energy, you give them permission to do the same. That's how one leader's habits become a healthier, higher-performing team.
And don't do it alone. As Stacy put it, the right people and the right environment are part of self-leadership too. Find your group, and show up in person.
Stacy Gissal is a stress specialist, executive coach, and founder of Evolve Beyond Limits. She offers 1:1 executive coaching, Stress Mastery workshops and programs for leadership teams, and custom retreats for individuals and teams. Her new platform, Greenhouse, where business growth and personal growth meet, is coming soon.
Want to see where your stress is coming from? Start with her free Stress Assessment.
