Donn King on Protecting Your Professional Identity, Defeating Perfectionism, and Keeping Your Business Alive Through Caregiving (The Price and Value Journey, Episode 167)
Donn King joins host John Ray on The Price and Value Journey to discuss one of the most underserved challenges facing solo practitioners and expert service providers: how to maintain a professional and creative identity when caregiving takes over your life.
Donn spent more than two decades caring for his daughter Hannah, who had a rare neurological condition requiring round-the-clock attention, while also caring for his partially disabled wife Janet. During that time, he continued writing, podcasting, pastoring, coaching other authors, and teaching college. His book Creating While Caring is a field guide for the roughly 50 million unpaid caregivers in the United States, many of whom are trying to run an expertise-based business at the same time.
Donn and John explore the genuine challenges that caregiving poses for professionals accustomed to managing their time in this conversation. Donn explains why standard productivity advice falls apart under the weight of a caregiving life and what it actually takes to keep going. Topics include distinguishing your identity from your methodology, why perfectionism is a thief rather than a virtue, the critical difference between consistency and persistence, and the practice of treating your schedule as aspirational rather than a measure of success or failure. Donn also shares the personal chapter he navigated after Hannah’s death in December 2024 and what it means to suddenly face open time at age 70 when you spent two decades simply doing what had to be done.
The Price and Value Journey is presented by John Ray and produced by North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of the Business RadioX® podcast network.
Key Takeaways You Can Use From This Episode
- Separate your professional identity from the way you carry it out. When caregiving changes what is possible, the methodology has to flex while the identity holds.
- Perfectionism is a thief. It steals joy, it steals time, and most importantly it steals value from the people you could be serving. “Done is better than perfect” is not a cliché here; it is a survival principle.
- Treat your schedule as aspirational, not as a pass-fail test. When life interrupts, dragging a task to tomorrow is a tool, not a defeat.
- The difference between consistency and persistence matters. Consistency demands a regular pattern. Persistence simply requires that you keep showing up. For caregivers and for many solo practitioners, persistence is the more honest and more achievable standard.
- Decide what to protect, not just what to pursue. Knowing which professional activities are essential to your identity helps you make the hardest trade-off: what not to do.
- You have more resilience than you realize. Donn tells caregivers that their coping skills are often better than they think.
Topics Discussed in this Episode
00:00 John Ray introduces the show and guest Donn King
02:21 Donn on why caregivers are more likely to run expertise businesses than traditional jobs
05:08 How Donn kept his professional and creative identity intact through two decades of caregiving
06:05 Accepting you won’t accomplish everything you’re capable of
08:11 The apocryphal Warren Buffett story: 25 goals, pick five, scratch off the rest
09:14 Focusing on one project at a time instead of scattering energy
10:06 The subtle perfectionism caregivers face and the 10-year writing shutdown
11:21 The reversal: he was not depressed because he stopped writing, but stopped writing because he was depressed
11:52 Why this is an identity issue, not just a productivity issue
12:31 Separating identity from methodology: same writer, different work style
13:39 Background on daughter Hannah and wife Janet and the round-the-clock care demands
17:14 The decision to move Hannah to a specialized nursing home
19:08 The typical day exercise from the book and what it revealed
19:53 How Hannah’s birth ended Donn’s professional speaking career
21:27 Why standard productivity advice doesn’t apply to caregiving lives
22:06 What actually works: aspirational scheduling, bite-sized tasks, bags packed for ER visits
24:34 Separating principle from application: dependability as the principle, flexibility in execution
26:10 Flexibility is not weakness; it is resilience
28:45 Consistency vs persistence: why persistence is the more honest standard for caregivers
32:09 Perfectionism as a thief of joy, time, and value
34:24 On dignity and identity: more than a caregiver, still a writer
35:01 The oxygen mask principle applied to professional identity
39:51 Adam Grant’s research on creative procrastination
42:19 Life after Hannah: open time at 70, Medicaid financial constraints, finding new priorities
47:03 Tools and tips are examples, not answers
49:26 On AI: “I want the AI to do dishes so I have more time to write.”
53:34 What Donn most wants caregiving professionals to hear: you are not alone and more resilient than you think
55:42 Where to find Donn and Creating While Caring
57:51 John’s closing thoughts for the audience
Donn King
Donn King is an emeritus professor of communication studies at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, a pastor in the United Methodist Church, a speaker, and a communication coach. He calls himself “The Confidence Cultivator,” and for good reason: his work consistently comes back to helping people show up fully, speak clearly, and build a professional life that reflects what they actually value.
He is the author of several books, including two business fables in The Sparklight Chronicles series and Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One, which grew from his own experience as a family caregiver. He hosts The Alignment Show podcast and runs Hidden Mentor Media, where he helps independent authors publish with confidence. He has spoken to audiences across the United States and spent more than 40 years teaching college students and business leaders the skills of effective communication.
Donn and his wife Janet live on the quiet side of the Great Smoky Mountains.
John Ray, Host of The Price and Value Journey
John Ray is the host of The Price and Value Journey.
John owns Ray Business Advisors, a business advisory practice. John’s services include business coaching and advisory work, as well as advising solopreneurs and small professional services firms on their pricing. John is passionate about the power of pricing for business owners, as changing pricing is the fastest way to change the profitability of a business. His clients are professionals who are selling their expertise, such as attorneys, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers, consultants, coaches, marketing professionals, and other professional services practitioners.
John is a podcast show host and the owner of North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of Business RadioX®. John and his team work with B2B professionals to create and conduct their podcast using The Generosity Mindset® Method: building and deepening relationships in a non-salesy way that translates into revenue for their business.
John is also the host of North Fulton Business Radio. With over 900 shows and having featured over 1,300 guests, North Fulton Business Radio is the longest-running podcast in the North Fulton area, covering business in its region like no one else.
John’s book, The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices
John Ray is the author of the five-star rated book The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices, praised by readers for its practical insights on raising confidence, value, and prices.
If you are a professional services provider, your goal is to do transformative work for clients you love working with and get paid commensurate with the value you deliver to them. While negative mindsets can inhibit your growth, adopting a different mindset, The Generosity Mindset®, can replace those self-limiting beliefs. The Generosity Mindset enables you to diagnose and communicate the value you provide to clients, which allows you to price your services more effectively in order to receive a portion of that value.
Whether you’re a consultant, coach, marketing or branding professional, business advisor, attorney, CPA, or work in virtually any other professional services discipline, your content and technical expertise are not proprietary. What’s unique, though, is your experience and how you synthesize and deliver your knowledge. What’s special is your demeanor or the way you deal with your best-fit clients. What’s invaluable is how you deliver outstanding value by guiding people through massive changes in their personal lives and in their businesses that bring them to a place they never thought possible.
Your combination of these elements is unique in your industry. There lies your value, but it’s not the value you see. It’s the value your best-fit customers see in you.
If pricing your value feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar to you, this book will teach you why putting a price on the value your clients perceive and identify serves both them and you, and you’ll learn the factors involved in getting your price right.
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