Heal Your Life to Heal Your Business
Your Life and Your Business - the two go hand in hand when you are a solopreneur or run a small business.
Who you are as a person directly affects your business whether you like it or not and it's up to you whether that influence leads to a positive or negative outcome.
Let's Explore the Importance of Self Care in Running a Successful Small Business Especially in the Wellness Space.
If you are someone who is in the service industry, a professional who offers any kind of service from a Nanny, to an Accountant to a Massage Therapist, there is a high chance that at some time in your career you will run into different types of 'burnout'.
It could be that a particular client is draining you from your emotional cup.
The emotional 'burnout'.
They might have a challenging situation occurring in their life and somehow you've become the person they are sharing all of their thoughts and feelings with. We all know that this doesn't happen when we have strong boundaries, and we also know that we are human and usually have high levels of compassion if we work in the service industry.
Or maybe you have overbooked yourself and finding that you are cutting into your sleep time more and more and soon find that the lack of sleep is becoming a problem.
This is a physical type of 'burnout'.
Sounds easy enough to stop booking appointments, but more than likely they all have background stories that pull on the heart strings and you want to help them, or maybe you've made unachievable financial goals for yourself and this is the only way to achieve them.
As time has gone on, we have become a society obsessed with regulations and the paperwork trail which in turn leads to the third type of exhaustion, the mental burnout.
When you spend so much of your working day not actually doing the work, rather doing the administration side of things that become all consuming. Sometimes this is able to be delegated and sometimes it is not.
The last type is a spiritual 'burnout'
. This can happen at any time in your life when you feel that you have lost your purpose, a crisis in faith some would say. This does not need to be a lack of faith in religion, rather it's a lack of faith in yourself. More people reach this point than we currently recognise. Around the age of 30-40, a lot of people will distance themselves from their nuclear family and in turn need to pave a pathway of their choosing. If you are lacking confidence or don't have a clear direction to follow this will cause issues.
However you land in these positions, know that there is a way out of all of them.
Things don't have to stay the same ongoing, there are always different ways of doing business, and sometimes you end up helping more people than you thought possible whilst have more time for yourself!
Looking inward, some of the ways out of burnout, or to prevent it in the first place are:
Prioritising Yourself
Interdependence is when you are fully whole as an individual and then able to help others from the overflowing cup.
If the cup becomes empty, no-one is being helped.
Body Health
The importance of good food, moderate exercise, regular sleep, listening to music, water therapy and meditation are imperative to you being in the best space possible to serve others. Never forget this must be done BEFORE you intend to serve and is not an afterthought.
Healing Trauma
If you have trauma that is beyond manageable (we all have stored traumas), then you need to seek outside help as it can influence your daily lifestyle which will in turn influence your business.
Listening to Your Intuition
There will be warning signs before you hit the point of 'overdone'.
If you listen daily to these messages and learn to decipher them, hopefully you will be able to make changes early.
Move to Group Sessions
Offering group programs or online components to reach more people, so that your 1:1 time is less whilst increasing your income and helping more people.
Organise Your Business
Calendars and Daily Operating Systems can make a huge difference in workload, Once you know all of the little things that need to be done each day you will have a better idea of exactly how much time you can use for 1:1, groups and online etc.
Hiring Staff
If you find that there are tasks that you don't need to do yourself, you may be better to hire someone else to help out whilst you earn the bigger money with clients. Win-win for all - you, staff and clients.
This is a very short list and there are certainly more ways to assist in the process.
If you would like to get an idea of where you are sitting on the 'Life Health' scale we have made a quiz to assess whether you are close to burnout on any of the levels above.
Hopefully you are looking for yourself, if you are not then we can help with guidance to help you so you can help your biz.
