Bianca Best is an award-winning global business leader, two-time best-selling author, and renowned female inspirational speaker helping leaders and organisations achieve sustainable performance without sacrificing wellbeing.

As CEO and Founder of The Better Business, she has revolutionised how individuals and teams approach productivity, focus and resilience through her pioneering Energy-Scape™ framework.

With a career that spans founding her own company and holding senior roles at major global agencies including Publicis Groupe, Bianca brings rare depth and practical insight to her work on time, energy and the art of graceful productivity.

She is also the host of The Big Impact Show, where she amplifies the voices of inspiring leaders, and author of Flourish and Big Impact Without Burnout, books that provide actionable strategies for meaningful impact and sustainable success.

In this exclusive interview with the Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, Bianca Best discusses how to redefine our relationship with time, prevent burnout and navigate the myth of balance in a culture of constant demand.

You often speak about transforming our relationship with time. What does it actually mean, in practical terms, to “fall in love with time”?

Well, we have this relationship with time where we only ever look at it in a chronological way and we chase it. And the number one complaint I have in my clinic from high-performing clients who work with me, or in the workshops that I host, is, “I don’t have enough time”. But it’s our approach to time. It’s the relationship with time that is wrong.

So I teach how we step into time with more presence, more awareness, and we step into what I call chyros time, which the Greeks used to call God’s time, which is where we’re fully present. We stop multitasking. We stop creating multiple work streams that we pay diluted attention to sequentially, and instead we focus on subjective attention.

Because when we’re in a state of subjective attention, we are in control of what it is that we’re focusing on, and we shut out objective attention. We silence the noise, the distraction, which just dilutes our ability to produce, but also creates disharmony in the nervous system. So I teach how to form an entirely new relationship with time that is based on focus, flow, and presence.

Burnout has become increasingly widespread across modern working culture. Why do you think it is so prevalent, and what does effective prevention really require?

Sadly, burnout isn’t just common amongst high achievers. Today, our modern society is encouraging this sway of push, push, push hustle culture, and Western society is always on. So we have to push against that trend and start to tune into natural rhythms, natural cycles, and honour ourselves against the sway of modern culture.

This will take courage and confidence, and it’s about learning our individual responses to stress. Stress manifests differently in each and every one of us. But understanding our risk tolerance to different situations, or people, or tasks, or environments that create stress, is also really key.

So building and architecting a plan for self-management is absolutely critical in modern society today, because sadly the task list is going to continue to get longer and longer and longer. And there is no ethereal tomorrow where we’ve nailed it and we’ve done everything, because there will always be more to do.

So it’s about how do we stay present, focused on the right tasks that have impact in the areas that matter most, and ensuring that we have the self-awareness to navigate those different challenges in a way where we can rest and recover from stress, to then be able to continue being productive and happy.

You challenge the idea that balance is achievable in everyday life. If balance is a myth, what mindset or framework should people be aiming for instead?

Well, balance is physiologically absolutely possible. Our bodies are always bringing us into homeostasis. So we can have physical balance. But in life, there are always going to be different areas that we’ll be focusing on at different times, with different amounts of intensity.

Whether it’s young family, whether it’s focused work projects, whether it’s our own health or fitness, whether it’s forming a new relationship, whether it’s planning a wedding, whatever it might be, there will be these different elements of life that are constantly undulating. So it’s impossible to assume everything will be balanced, work, wealth, family, health, all at the same time. That just isn’t a reality.

So understanding that we can organise life very conscientiously to focus our attention on what matters most at a particular time is absolutely possible. If you’ve suddenly got a very intense work flurry, organise to decrease the social responsibilities, the domestic responsibilities. Shrink those so that more attention can be in this imbalanced state, focused on work for a period.

If perhaps it’s health and fitness that needs to take a priority, shrink the work. And it’s organising our lives to prepare for imbalance. That’s what I mean.

What do you hope people take away from your public speeches?

I really hope I inspire a sense of pragmatic optimism, because I really believe that life shouldn’t be the struggle that it is today. None of us have ever been taught at school how to self-manage in this realm of frenetic productivity and this push culture that the world has normalised today.

So I hope I can inspire a sense of, this is how to manage it. This is how I can solve it. It doesn’t need to be a struggle. And I’m ready and motivated and optimistic about the future.

This exclusive interview with Bianca Best was conducted by Sophia Hayes of the Motivational Speakers Agency.