How To Get A Work/Life Balance Within Your Creative Business
I’ve been thinking how I want to make a bigger impact on the world and build community around me. So I am ready to bear my heart out and be vulnerable. I want to create a space where small business owners can be successful and still get 8 hours of sleep. Let’s dive into figuring out how to create a work/life balance within your creative business.
My Story
In the first 3 years of my business, I found myself feeling stressed out. There was a lot of anxiety, running myself into the ground and not actually being happy within my business. I let my health slide and it really affected me. Even though I had this dream come true of starting my own business, I still wasn’t completely happy. The highs were high and the lows were extremely low. After a couple of months, I finally realized that only I had the power to change. The power to rest, take care of myself and direct my life and business where I wanted it to go.
Implementing A Work/Life Balance
In order to rest and recharge, it’s a daily practice of balancing our personal and work lives. Yes, some seasons are busier than others which gives us an excuse to not take care of ourselves. However, the more we push it off, the more excuses we make, the more rundown and burnt out we become. We should build a business around our life and not the other way around.
We need to set office hours and take regular vacations or days off. Most importantly making time for friends, family and ourselves. I’ve learned the hard way over the past couple of years that self-care is incredibly important. I put it on the back burner and believed I would make time when I wasn’t too “busy” or “successful”. Truth is, it never came. There was always another big goal to reach or another “busy” season upon me.
Self-Care
Self-care comes with discipline and respect for yourself. When you can fully rest, recharge, and take care of yourself, you show up fully present. Not only for your clients, but also for your family and friends. Create a routine and balance life with work and play. We shouldn’t wait until we have everything figured out and our business is “successful” to live our lives. What does that even mean for each of us? Work hard but create a life you enjoy at the same time. Why should we wait years for a vacation or a day off of work? We deserve to rest, take care of ourselves and refresh our souls on a daily basis.
Re-Imagine Your Business
What if you worked 40 hours a week or less and still had a really successful business? Imagine what that would look like. You may be thinking that’s not possible, especially when starting a business. I mean it’s the status quo to be busy. We equate being busy with being successful but really those things don’t always correlate. You can be busy, running around saying “YES” to everything, but not successful. Real talk: whoever made the rule we had to work 40+ hours a week to be considered successful in our careers? (I mean, other countries like South America or Spain take an afternoon siesta! Now that deserves an Amen!) I suffered from feeling burned out in the beginning of my business and can still sometimes suffer from it.
In this time of social media, it’s easy to compare. We think everyone’s life is super busy, filled with fun events, cool travels, and their calendars are full of clients. But the truth is not every season is a busy season full of clients, events, and traveling. Sometimes, it’s slower and that’s ok. Why? Those seasons allow us to work on other projects, be creative and grow our businesses. Even spend time with those we love because that’s really the most important thing.
Making A Change
I always believed that I didn’t deserve a day off, I didn’t deserve to rest because I was the one responsible for my business and bringing in income to support myself. I believed that if I took a day off or even a week off, my business would crumble and clients would be let down. But the truth is, that was all a big fat lie! A lie that I believed for a long time which caused a really low season in my life thinking that I’d never make it and that I had made a mistake of even starting a business. I thought I’d be happy when I had x amount of clients or made x amount of money, but really I was missing balance in my business. Now, sure I could work my ass off for years and build this business up to something incredible and then finally take time off, but what’s the point? I will have missed years of enjoying my life, the people in it, and taking care of myself. That is, if I was still healthy enough to run a business.
I’ve decided that in order for my business to be healthy and growing, I need to be in a healthy state and growing myself. I’m constantly having conversations with other entrepreneurs about being tired, feeling burnt out, feeling not worthy enough to be running a business or successful enough and it made me feel for them because I knew exactly how they feel. So I’m deciding that I want to create more community around this and help incorporate an idea that a friend told me about called Slow Entrepreneurship (check out more about the movement here). This essentially is having work/life balance but one that we create and works specifically for us, not what everyone else is doing. It’s helped me immensely set boundaries and expectations for myself and my clients. This has been one of the biggest steps towards creating work/life balance.
If you want to hear more about Slow Entrepreneurship, listen to the founder, Sarah, and I chat about it on The Local Table!
