You Have a Plan for Every Business Risk. You Skipped This One.
You stress-test your financials. You have insurance for your building, your car, your key person, probably your dog. You have a business continuity plan, or at least a version of one living in a Google Doc somewhere. You are not the guy who ignores risk.
Except for one specific document. The one that protects the people closest to you when you cannot protect them yourself.
Why Your Brain Specifically Keeps Skipping This
This is not a discipline problem. It is a neurology thing, and it is worth understanding before you beat yourself up about it.
Unconventional thinkers who have many of the ADHD traits, the ones who built something real through sheer force of will, pattern recognition, and an ability to operate in chaos that would flatten most people, run on a specific kind of fuel. Urgency. Deadlines. Stakes that are visible and immediate. When those elements are present, this brain is extraordinary. When they are absent, even important tasks stall.
Healthcare directives have no built-in deadline. No alarm fires. No consequence lands today if you skip it again. For a brain wired around urgency, that means the task exists in a kind of future fog, acknowledged but not felt, important in theory but not yet real enough to compete with everything that is on fire right now.
There is also a piece called task initiation. Starting something with no immediate payoff, no clear finish line, and real emotional weight attached to it is genuinely harder for this brain to launch. It is not avoidance in the way most people think of it. It is a neurological gap between intention and ignition. The thought fires. The start does not follow. The tab gets closed and the day moves on.
This is exactly why the 30-minute AI-assisted approach matters for people wired like you. It removes the blank page. It removes the ambiguity. It gives your brain a structured conversation to respond to instead of an open-ended task to initiate from scratch. The urgency is borrowed from the format itself.
You are not lazy. You are not irresponsible. Your brain just needs the right entry point. This is it.
The Story That Prompted This
A close friend of mine just watched her brother fight for his life from inside a curable condition, and the medical team had their hands partially tied because his healthcare directive was outdated and vague. His wife was hours away from pursuing a court injunction just to authorize the breathing tube that would save him.
He recovered. But the near-miss was not the disease. It was the paperwork.
I started asking my clients about this after that. Not one of them had an up-to-date directive. Most had none at all. These are founders. Senior leaders. People who build operational frameworks for a living. People who understand risk better than almost anyone.
The document existed on the “important but not urgent” list, which is the list that never gets touched.
Why High-Performers Specifically Keep Skipping This
The brain that built your business is excellent at triaging. Urgent gets done. Important but not urgent gets scheduled, then rescheduled, then pushed until a deadline forces it. Healthcare directives have no built-in deadline, which means they keep losing to things that do.
There is also something else at play. Thinking about your own incapacitation requires you to slow down and sit in a scenario your executive brain categorizes as low-probability and high-discomfort. So you process the discomfort in about four seconds and move on to the next thing on the list.
That is only weakness if you don’t do anything about it and let it run your life. It is the same cognitive pattern that makes you excellent under pressure. It just has a blind spot here, and the people who pay for that blind spot are not you. Now that you have awareness it is time for you to make a new decision.
What Happens When the Directive Is Missing or Vague
Medical teams are not equipped to wing it. When your directive does not exist or is too general to give clear guidance, your family is placed in an impossible position. They have to make decisions under the worst possible conditions, with no confirmed understanding of what you actually want, and sometimes in direct conflict with a medical team that is following a document you wrote 12 years ago.
This is not a hypothetical. This is what happened to a real person, someone’s brother, someone’s husband, someone’s father. And the version with an injunction-filing wife came within half a day of becoming the actual story.
The 30-Minute Fix
Here is what has changed. This used to require a lawyer, a notary, and three hours of paperwork. It still requires a notarized state-specific form, but the preparation for that form is dramatically faster now.
Pull up the directive form for your state. Open an AI. Tell it to ask you every question it needs to ask to help you fill that form out with clarity. Tell it your medical history, your family history, your preferences around recoverable versus non-recoverable conditions. Let it help you think through scenarios you have not considered. Copy your answers into the form. Done.
Need an AI PROMPT to get you started, see the bottom of this article, I created one for you.
Thirty minutes. Maybe less.
Something is always better than nothing. If you start and run out of time, get the partial draft to your healthcare provider anyway. Imperfect and submitted beats perfect and pending every time. That is an execution principle you already understand. Apply it here.
The Real Reason to Do This
You are the person your family depends on to have things handled. They assume you have this covered because you have everything else covered. They would be wrong, and they will only find out they were wrong at the worst possible moment.
You pay for insurance every month because you already believe in pre-protection. You already operate on the logic that planning ahead is smarter than hoping for the best. This is the same logic, applied to the person the business runs through.
Get your state form. Open a chat. Spend the 30 minutes.
The people who love you will never know how to thank you for it. That is exactly the point.
Coach JoyGenea is an unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and champion for the high-performing leaders who have mastered the business side of life and are ready to stop running on empty everywhere else. Schedule a free session at joygenea.com/schedule-free
Video Transcription:
Really busy people quite often leave off some of the most important details in life, getting to them later. “I don’t have time right now. I’m gonna get to that later.” And so I wanna talk to you about healthcare directives. This is my PSA. This is my public service announcement for healthcare directives.
Um, a really great friend of mine just went through a scenario, and it, it brought to mind this, and I’ve actually been asking my clients this week, “Do you have a healthcare directive?” “Oh, I was gonna do that. I was meaning to do that. I was getting around to that.” I’m gonna actually call you all out right now and say, enough.
It is time. It is so easy to address your healthcare directive right now in a manner that was much easier than it has been in the past. So you wanna hear the story and the scenario. So the scenario was, um, my friend’s brother came down with kind of a rare debilitating autoimmune disease, struck out of nowhere, wouldn’t have had any idea.
He, um, on his healthcare directive had a do not resuscitate. But this is a curable, um, autoimmune type of thing, but it does take you down for a while, and you do possibly need a breathing tube and so forth to come back. And so there, th- there’s this medical team and his wife and family, and they’re like, “This says do not resuscitate.
We’re not gonna be able to actually give him the breathing tube. Like according to his, um, healthcare directive, we can’t do these things.” And so because it was pretty vague, what he’d written and so forth was pretty vague, and so they were having to follow that. Luckily, he’d actually wound up like half a day before they were gonna have to intubate him, meaning put that airway tube in there.
And so they did not have to do that, and they did not have to decide, but it was potentially even gonna maybe be a legal situation where his, um, wife was gonna actually have to like possibly get an injunction from the court to do these things, because when they’d written out that healthcare directive.
So it got… It reminded me. It was a very good reminder. I have one. It needs to be updated, and one of the easiest ways to do that, actually, each state is different, by the way. You wanna go online and get the healthcare directive for your state. Um, and then I highly recommend if you are using any particular AI consistently, that is a great conversation to be having with an AI, with a chat, with a…
You know, I use a Notion AI with a, um, Claude AI, with Gemini. I don’t care. Have that conversation, and you wanna be telling, asking it, “Ask me all the questions so I can be really clear.” When I fill this out with the latest medical data and information, I can help empower my medical team, my caregivers at that time with the best information to help me have a quality of life that I’m looking for, but also have the quality of passing if that is what’s necessary.
So I know you’re really busy business owners. I know this is… You’re like, “Why did I hit play on this video? Like, why is she talking about healthcare directives?” That is because it’s the gift you give the people that you love. It is the gift you give the people that are trying to keep you healthy and alive.
It is the gift you give yourself in advance. So if you’re paying for any kind of insurance, you’re already– Like, you believe in insurance, you believe in planning ahead, you believe in those types of things. So I’m telling you, taking… It’s 30 minutes, truly. The conversations I’ve had with my AI right now to just, to get it at the place where I’m now just copying and pasting into the healthcare directive, it was about 30 minutes that I just was like, “Here’s what it says.
You know me, but ask me some further health questions.” I’ll have a prompt in, um, in the article about this, but I’ll also have, um, a prompt online with the video. Like, there’s a prompt that I’m g- I’ll write for you to make it even easier. So as an unconventional thinker, these can be the types of things that we put off and go, “I’ll deal with that later.
It’s okay.” But the gift you can give the people more powerful than birthday presents and, and, um, Christmas gifts is, is actually handling your crap before, before anything falls apart and people are desperate and, and they don’t have access to you. You are unable to answer these questions at that point.
The greatest gift you can give your future self is to pause for 30 minutes and fill out a damn healthcare directive. It is not that hard, and like I said, with AI it can be even easier, and you can make sure you’ve covered medical issues that might be in your family that you wanna be aware of, and how those might be handled, and how best to, to cover if, if it’s a recoverable thing or if it’s, if it’s a non-recoverable thing, and how you’d like that to play out.
Something, and I’m always gonna encourage this, something is better than nothing. So if you dive into it and you’re like, “This is taking way too long,” ask it to summarize it quickly and say, “You know what? Let’s just take what I’ve got, and I will, I will turn that in to my healthcare providers.” So something is better than nothing, and this is a gift that your future self will thank you for, and this is a gift that the people that love you will thank you for so immensely.
So the excuse that, “I’m too busy and I don’t have time to slow down for that,” it’s not a qualified excuse, it’s just an excuse, and I am gonna call that out. You have time to make 30 minutes to update that healthcare directive and to make that happen. It… You’ll thank me later if it ever needs to get used.
And a lot of times, just like insurance, we fill this stuff out, it doesn’t even have to get used hopefully. That’s great. But like I said, if you’re paying for any kind of insurance, you already believe in pre-protection, you already believe in that process, so this is just a simple thing that needs to be addressed that’s about you.
So don’t be afraid of it. Go at it with confidence. You’ve heard me talk about it now, so now is the time to put it on your schedule for 30 minutes and just be like, “Whatever I can get done in 30 minutes is better than nothing.” Everybody else will thank you. I’m JoyGenea, unconventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and champion for pointing out the things that you may have pushed off to the side because they’re a little more complicated and they’re not as much fun, and those kind of things, making sure that you’re loving yourself in the future just as much as you’re loving this present moment.
You have an awesome week. Bye now.