Before you say yes to anything this week (the board seat, the conference, the role, the relationship) run these three questions first:
What am I actually putting into this?
What am I actually getting back?
What is this preventing me from doing?
You will know within ten minutes whether you are making a real investment or just a comfortable habit.
I know. That sounds almost too simple. Let me show you why it isn’t.
I spent an entire day driving across three states to pick up secondhand furniture for my kid’s college apartment. My husband and I both took a day off work. We rented a van. We drove to Connecticut, loaded everything, moved it into a storage unit because the landlord needed to redo the floors before move-in day. Two weeks later, we reversed the whole thing.
I was proud of us. Resourceful. Practical. Smart with money.
Except when I actually sat down and ran the numbers – my time, my husband’s time, the gas, the van rental twice, the storage unit – it was 40% more expensive than ordering similar new pieces from Wayfair and having them delivered and assembled professionally.
Forty percent.
Here is what I had actually done: I optimized for the feeling of being a good mom and called it a financial decision.
Those are not the same thing.
That moment is when I started applying ROI thinking to my real life. And I have not been able to unsee it since.
Every senior leader knows how to evaluate a business decision. We build cases. We weigh costs against projected returns. We measure outcomes and adjust. We do not sign off on a major commitment without understanding what we are getting back.
And then we go home and make decisions based on guilt, habit, loyalty, and fear of judgment – and call it strategy.
We are trained to make business decisions analytically and personal decisions emotionally. There is nothing wrong with emotion in decision-making. But when emotion is doing all the work and we are calling it logic, that is where we get into trouble.
The other obstacle: personal ROI feels harder to calculate because not everything has a dollar sign.
How do you measure joy? Purpose? Connection? Energy?
How do you put a number on confidence, or on health, or on the specific way a Thursday night feels when you are not dreading Friday morning?
Here is the answer: not perfectly. But far better than you are doing right now.
In business, ROI has two sides: what you put in and what you get back. Your personal ROI works exactly the same way. The inputs just look different.
What you put in:
Time. Energy. Money. Attention. And the one nobody counts – opportunity cost.
What are you NOT doing because you are doing this thing?
Where could you be?
What could you be building, resting into, or investing in if this commitment were not on your calendar?
What you get back:
Return does not have to be financial – but it does have to be real. Returns can be visibility, joy, connection, purpose, learning, freedom, or yes, actual money. The key is being honest about which return you are actually getting versus which one you are telling yourself you are getting.
That gap between what you are actually receiving and what you are rationalizing?
That is where the most expensive decisions live.
The Non-Profit Board Seat
I have had this conversation with myself more than once. The question is never whether the cause is worthy. The question is whether the time, the meetings, the asks, the committee calls, and the energy are coming back to you in some form that actually sustains you. If you are showing up depleted every single time, that is not an ROI. That is a donation.
Donations are wonderful. They just need to be conscious choices, not accidental ones. Could you be just as impactful – or more – by writing a check instead of sitting in the meetings? That check, even a substantial one, might still cost you less than the calculated value of your time and expertise. And you just freed up dozens of hours.
The Conference You Attend Every Year Out of Habit
Three thousand dollars and two to three days out of the office. Every year. Because you always have. When did you last actually calculate what came back from that investment? Not the feeling of being there. The actual return. There is a real possibility that the law of diminishing returns kicks in when you attend the same event with the same people year after year. That deserves a real number, not a default yes.
Staying in the Wrong Place Too Long
This one is quieter. And it is the most expensive.
Every month you spend in the wrong role, the wrong partnership, or the wrong situation accumulates a cost. It shows up in your energy, your health, your confidence, your mojo, your willingness to take a risk on something that actually excites you. These costs are invisible because they do not appear as a line item. But they are real, and they compound.
I write about this in my book, The 7 Secrets to Creating a Life You Love – specifically around spending your time intentionally and making choices one at a time. The women I have worked with who finally made the hard call consistently say the same thing: I wish I had done it sooner. Not one of them said the math got better the longer they waited. (Available on Amazon) https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Creating-Life-You-Love/dp/B0CLHV526G
The hardest ROI calculation I ever had to make was not about furniture or conference fees. It was about how I was spending my time and energy on relationships – both professional and personal – that had stopped being reciprocal.
I kept investing because of history. Because of loyalty. Because walking away felt like failure. But when I actually looked at what I was putting in versus what was coming back, the math was brutal. And clear. And once I saw it, I could not unsee it.
ROI thinking did not make me cold. It made me honest. There is a meaningful difference between those two things.
You do not need a spreadsheet. You need three questions – and you need to answer them without hedging.
1. What am I actually putting into this?
Not what you intended to invest. What you actually are. Time, money, energy, attention. Be specific.
2. What am I actually getting back?
Not what you hope to get. What you are getting right now. Real or intangible – are you feeling charged up or put upon? That answer is data.
3. What is this preventing me from doing?
That is the opportunity cost. That is the number most people never calculate – and it is often the biggest one.
Run that on one decision you have been avoiding. Just one. You will know within ten minutes whether you are making a real investment or just a comfortable habit.
The women I know who are genuinely building something – in their careers, their companies, their families, their lives – they stopped treating personal decisions like they were exempt from strategic thinking. They started running the numbers. Not because they became transactional. Because they became intentional.
There is a version of your life you designed on purpose, with the same rigor you bring to your most important professional decisions. That version is available to you.
What are you putting in?
What are you getting back?
What is it costing you that you cannot see yet?
Those three questions change everything. They changed everything for me.
~ Monique
Whether you are navigating a career pivot, refining your leadership identity, or repositioning your business, clarity comes first.
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