This year, I'm levelling up my business game and if there's one thing I know about running my own business, it's that: running a business is easy. Being your own boss is hard.
Good morning friends, or good afternoon, evening or whenever post this finds you. For me, it's almost 5:30am on the Tuesday after the last Bank Holiday in May and I would very much rather still be sleeping in my bed. But alas, this month has not gone exactly as planned and so I find myself scrambling to get everything done that I want to get done in May and that means early mornings.
I was really looking forward to May. Watson and I had a week off together and we were planning on doing lots of really fun things. We weren't going away anywhere, instead we were looking forward to a week at home with lots of days out. We were going to go to all the places we keep saying we want to go and do all the things we keep saying we want to do but always put off because we don't want to go on a weekend when it will be really busy. As hard and fast introverts, the thought of sharing an activity with other people kind of spoils it for us and so this week off inadvertently had a lot of pressure piled on top of it to deliver a fun-packed week full of activities without other people.
Infuriatingly, I got sick at the end of April with a really nasty viral infection that took three weeks to get over. I felt rubbish the week before our week off, but well enough to go to work, spent all of our week off in bed, mostly asleep and in a great deal of pain, and then required another week off work to finish healing and get my strength back. May went from being a fun month full of the things we love, to one I'll be glad to see the back of. And to top it all of, having two weeks off work means that I only earned 50% of my usual income this month so, all in all, May can do one.
I'm about to say something really ironic.
I've worked really hard to work less hard, by which I mean, I've worked hard to create a work-life balance that actually prioritises my free time and gives me time to indulge in my hobbies. I've worked hard on enforcing boundaries with my clients (mostly with myself) so that I no longer feel obliged to check my work phone out of hours and on my days off just in case someone has messaged me. I've also worked hard to create a schedule that suits where I am in my personal life, since moving in with Watson has given me a commute. Three walks a day no longer fits into my daily routine and I've had to do a lot of inner work on accepting that it is OK to only be doing two walks a day now that I'm spending almost two hours a day travelling to and from "work" (I must be the only dog walker in the UK with a commute 🤦🏻♀️). I'm also in the middle of an online business growth course that I've been excited about for over a year. In the long run, it will mean working smarter not harder, but at the moment just means a lot of extra work, so maybe you can see what I mean when I say, I'm working hard to work less hard?
I've been figuring out all the best ways to create a business that works for me and gives me the life I want so that my work-life balance is tipped in favour of life but in doing so, have run myself ragged without even realising.
I don't identify as one of those busy people who always gets sick on their weeks off because it's the first time they've slowed down in months, especially not this year! Watson and I have had plenty of time off together thanks to our extra holiday in February, Fridays off for our birthdays in March and April, and long weekends from Easter and the Bank Holidays. If anything, I feel like I've had too much time off this year (eh, not really). So getting so sick and effectively losing our fun week off together really annoyed me. It just seemed so unfair. I haven't been working too hard (not by my standards) and I haven't been feeling stressed, so what caused it?
Well, if I'm being entirely honest, I think I might have been getting a little bit stressed. There were warning signs.
The viral infection I had, is one that I've had multiple times before and is usually triggered by obvious bouts of stress (graduating uni, finishing my Masters). I haven't had an episode in five years and thought that I'd grown out of it since my life is unrecognisable from what it was back when I was getting one episode a year, five years in a row. But occasionally, during times that I'm stressed, I have a dream where I'm going through it again. The dreams are always real enough that I wake up remembering exactly how those infections have felt and they've always been a reminder to SLOW DOWN.
I had one of those dreams in April, while I was housesitting. While I was housesitting and while I wasn't sleeping. I don't know what it was about this job but I could not sleep during that week and it took a while for my sleep to return to normal when I got home as well. I didn't think much about the dream as, like I said, it had been five years since my last infection and I thought I had grown out of it, but a couple of weeks later, I found myself thinking "I'm always doing something. I'm always on the go. Usually it's doing nice stuff that I really enjoy, but I'm always planning something." I felt tired and like I was too busy and a within a week, the first symptom appeared.
I was annoyed because I thought I had been working less hard. I was angry at myself because I felt like I must have been doing something wrong to let this happen again. I was scared because I knew what the next three weeks were going to look like. And I was confused, because I genuinely didn't know what had caused it when previously there had always been an obvious cause.
I think that's what was bothering me most; was I so caught up in my work that I couldn't even admit to myself that it was stressing me out? The simple answer to that is yes. There's no point in beating around the bush.
Obviously I can't speak for other business owners, but for me, because I run my own business and have the luxury (and burden) of being my own boss, I feel like I should enjoy it every minute it. I don't feel like I'm allowed to have days where I don't want to go to work, or have parts of the job that I don't enjoy. And right now, having invested a lot of money on the course that I've been wanting to do for over a year, I hate to admit to myself that there's even a tiny part of me that isn't enjoying it, is finding it hard work or wishes I'd never started it in the first place. But it's a privilege to be able to work for yourself, so you'd better be grateful for it, or so my inner critic tells me.
But it's also bloody hard work. I've said it before and I'll say it again; running a business is easy. Being your own boss is hard.
Maybe not if you've got excellent boundaries and a healthy money mindset, if you're not prone to overthinking and don't worry about what other people think of you, but if you have even a shred of anxiety, childhood trauma or perfectionism, then being your own boss is really, really, really hard.
What's been coming up for me since starting this course is something that I'm calling The Effort Contingency, because everything takes more effort than you think it will.
Have you ever watched Grand Designs, or similar shows, where we meet these aspirational people with visions for their ideal home that they are building from scratch? They draw up their plans and wait ages for planning permission, painstakingly managing their finances and adjusting for unexpected life events that crop up along the way, all the while factoring in every little detail except the Great British Weather only to always miss their deadline of being in before Christmas anyway.
They always talk about having a contingency because these things always go over budget. It's expected in a big project like that. But what about our day to day life projects? Can we have a contingency for those too? I'm not talking about a financial contingency (although that would be lovely - "oh, lunch has gone overbudget has it darling? No matter I set aside a contingency for it, just in case...") I'm talking about an energy contingency. An effort contingency.
Last month, I got myself in quite the tail-spin, and if I'm being totally honest, I think this is what triggered the viral infection, all because what I thought would be a relatively simple task turned out to be a muuuuuuch bigger job. I was adamant that I wanted to complete this course I'm working on in real time, despite the fact that everyone, including the course leader, said that you can do this on your own time. But no, me being me, I wanted to tick all the boxes and complete it to the gold standard so that, in the end, if it all comes to nothing, I won't have myself to blame.
I had mentally allotted myself a certain amount of time and mental energy to this course and naively assumed that I could get everything done in that time, so when I found myself having to go back to the drawing board and re-do a load of work that I had already done, thus putting me behind my self-imposed schedule, I panicked.
Writing this now, I can see clearly how foolish I was being, but at the time, I was blinded by perfectionism. I had been working to the mantra of fail at full speed, which I love, but which to me meant: give this 110%, give it your all, show up to the trainings live, do the homework before the next session, do all the recommended reading. I tricked myself into thinking that if I met this gold standard, then my chances of finishing the course and doing well were maximised. And maybe they would be - there is a statistic that says those people who turn up to the live trainings are more likely to succeed but that doesn't mean that the people who are catching up in their own time aren't also putting the work in. You could make the argument that they're working even harder because they're not there live but let's not pull at that thread - it's not a competition.
So, there I was, already failing by my own impossible-to-meet standards. I wonder now if I set the bar so high so that I would "fail" and then I wouldn't have to blame myself if I have nothing to show for it in a years time, because, "it wasn't my fault - I wasn't able to give it all the time and attention it needed. If only I had, then it would have worked out but oh well, I guess we'll never know." Maybe I'm being harsh on myself and giving my inner critic more credit than it deserves.
The needless stress I put myself (and Watson) through made one thing abundantly clear. I cannot keep up with this course in real time. I'm already five weeks behind but in a way, that feels better than just being one or two weeks behind. I can't make up five weeks of work before the next session, but maybe I could have made up one or two weeks. I've been forced to accept that I'm now running this marathon at my own pace and that's OK. In fact, it's better than OK, it's what I should've been doing in the first place!
It took some work (again) to come to terms with not completing the course in real time. It felt like I was giving myself a handicap, because now I wasn't asking the same sorts of questions as other people at the same time and it's so easy to get lost in a Facebook group with over a thousand members. But in reality, I've never been good at group work and I work better on my own. The whole point of this course was to work smarter and not harder and to keep my business working for me so that I can focus on the fun things in life. Letting it weigh so heavily on my mind and become a chore is the exact opposite of what this course was supposed to be about. I've been looking forward to it for over a year while I saved up for it, now that I'm finally doing it I don't want to feel under pressure, I want to enjoy this time and relish what I'm learning along the way.
All this overthinking could have been avoided if I had just given myself an Effort Contingency. If I had stopped for just one minute to think "hey Aislinn, what if this takes longer than you think it will? It could be even harder than you think it's going to be. It might require more effort than simply answering some homework each week. Are you prepared to really dig deep to see it through?" then I could have prepared for myself for the inevitable mental anguish that always comes when I think I'm not doing something well enough. The whole point of this course was to enjoy it and giving myself such tight deadlines is one sure fire way to take all the fun out of it.
What if, instead of putting the outcome first and focusing so hard on achieving it, I tried putting the journey first instead?
What if, the important part of this course wasn't completing it, but what I actually learned along the way?
What if, instead of finishing it, I enjoy it?
Seems so simple, doesn't it? So here I am, trying to embrace working at my own slow pace and actually enjoy this experience that I paid almost two thousand pounds to be part of, so that I can squeeze every last morsel of knowledge from it and learn not only about my business along the way, but about myself too.
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