How can YOU achieve work life balance as small business owner? Let’s get into the TRUTH about work life balance, plus top 3 tips to make it happen for you…
- 0:00 The truth about work life balance
- 1:04 Tip #1 for achieving work life balance — Work life balance is highly personal
- 3:00 Tip #2 for how to have work life balance as a solopreneur — Balance is about identity work
- 3:50 Tip #3 for solopreneur worklife balance — You need strategic action plans AND deep inner mindset work
- 5:40 My goal for you in achieving work life balance
Check out my full framework for achieving work life balance as a freelancer:
All videos in the Work Life Balance for Solopreneurs series:
- Top 3 Tips about Work Life Balance as a Small Business Owner (that's this one!)
- How to Find Time to Work Toward Your Goals as a Freelancer
- How to Have Work Life Balance — Without Self Sabotage
- Work Life Balance Mindset When You Are a Small Business Owner
The Truth about Work Life Balance as a Small Business Owner...
The truth about work life balance is that alignment is more important than having perfect balance. When you think about the work life balance that you want to achieve, does it connect back to your values? What does balance look like to you?
I want you to give yourself the grace to not be in perfect work/life balance 24/7. It's much more important that when you think about the work that you're doing, and the activities that you're enjoying in your personal life, that they actually align with your personal values. So even if you're spending more time or energy on one thing versus another, does it still feel good for you? Does it still resonate with you? Does it feel internally like an enthusiastic, “Yes, this is how I want to live my life. This is who I want to be.”
This leads us into tip number one for achieving work life balance…
Tip #1: Work life balance is highly personal.
It is dependent on who you are in this moment. You get to define what work life balance looks like for you.
You also can't compare your past self to where you are right now. So I know that a lot of the times when we're talking about comparing things, we look at it as “Oh, you can't compare yourself to anyone except for who you were yesterday.”
But I don't agree with that — because who you were yesterday was an entirely different person than who you are today. The person that you are today is experiencing completely different things. You might not have the same resources, the same mindset, or the same energy or the same amount of time or anything like that, that you did yesterday, comparing your present self to your past self.
Comparing who you are right now to who you used to be, is not actually helpful. And if it's not going to be helpful, then what's the point?
Maybe your past self had an amazing work life balance. But perhaps that was before you were diagnosed with ADHD or before you became a parent of small kids, or before you started your business… In that case, work life balance is going to look different today than it might have a few years ago, or a few months ago, a few weeks ago, even a few days ago.
What does work life balance look like today, in this moment? You get to define that. You do not need to compare it to what it looked like for you in the past. And again, that's not going to be helpful for you anyway.
Hit the like button on this video if this concept is resonating with you and if it is giving you the permission that you needed to truly embrace work life balance for what it means to you today… to let go of the past and live in the present moment!
This leads us to tip number two…
Tip #2: Balance is all about identity work.
Who are you when you are in balance? And who are you when you are out of balance? You need to know what these look like before you can even start striving for work life balance.
Often we talk about this whole concept of work life balance, but what do we even mean by it? Do you actually know what you mean by that? What is your definition of it? Who are you when you are in balance? And who are you when you are out of balance? What do these things look like?
When you know what these look like, then you can actually start working towards that. You'll know where your mindset needs to be, what actions you need to take, what thoughts you need to be thinking, what goals you want to be working toward, in order to make your work life balance work for you.
This brings us to tip number three…
Tip #3: Work life balance involves strategic action plans and the deep inner mindset work.
If you want to achieve real work life balance — which is work life balance that feels great for you, that supports you — then you need to improve your time management abilities. You need to streamline your business systems and processes. You need to upgrade your productivity skills. And there's a very good chance that you need to restructure your entire business so that it does accommodate for this.
You might have a whole bunch of different things built into your business that don't actually contribute to work life balance. What happens here is that you are trying so hard to achieve work life balance, but it's pretty much impossible for you because your business is not set up for it. Your business is holding you back from achieving work life balance: the entire structure of it, the way that you offer your services and products, your day to day operations, all of these things are not supporting your work life balance.
The good news here is that this does not need to be a huge, daunting, overwhelming, overcomplicated sort of thing. It can actually be very straightforward and freeing and liberating and even simple to restructure your business. This can happen pretty quickly and enjoyably — it doesn't need to feel scary. It doesn't need to feel heavy.
If you're wondering what this can look like, I encourage you to watch my free on-demand training all about solopreneur success and how to do all of this in your business to really achieve work life balance. You will get a complete framework on how to make this happen. It is my gift to you:
The goal with work/life balance
When we think about work life balance, my goal for you is that you enjoy your time off work and your time at work in equal measures. That to me is a huge part of work life balance, and I'm guessing that that's a really big thing about work/life balance for you as well. You want to enjoy your personal life and your professional life.
It's not necessarily about the amount of time that you are spending on your personal life or your professional life, or the amount of energy that you're spending on each of these things… Because what's the point of having balance in your time and your energy between your personal life and your professional life, if you aren't really enjoying it?
If you are constantly thinking about the next break that you get from work, then that doesn't indicate that you have a very good work life balance. You don't want to be at work and it's the same with your personal life. If you are spending all of your time away from work, just thinking about work, then you're not really being in that present moment and enjoying your personal life.
We want to have a balance of equal measures of enjoyment in your personal life and your professional life. And again, this comes back to presence, really thinking about what this means for your present self.
If you feel guilt or judgment or shame about either being at work, or away from work, then on both ends of the spectrum — the personal life and professional life — you will not have that true genuine sincere enjoyment. And that's where doing the internal mindset work is so it's so important in all of this alongside the strategic aspect and the implementation of action steps.
In our upcoming videos in this Work Life Balance for Solopreneurs series, we are going to explore how to find time to work toward your goals without sabotaging your work life balance, plus the best ways to get in the zone mentally to accomplish everything that you want to achieve throughout the day and some really powerful reframes on achieving work life balance. Stay tuned!