A lot of people, after consulting with their vision and doing the schedule exercise, conclude that they just can’t work a normal 40-plus-hour workweek and still live the ideal life they desire.
(The schedule exercise is where you fill in a blank schedule hour-by-hour first with all the things you want to do (the fun stuff you enjoy) THEN you fill in the left over available hours with work).
This often means that people decide to embark on a journey of self-employment so that they can ‘control their schedule’ and have more free time. Well…if you haven’t done this yet, let me save you the surprise and tell you from experience this isn’t how it normally goes in real life and people often end up working twice as much.
And you just end up replacing one jerk boss with a bigger one 😉
When you’re an entrepreneur or self-employed is very easy to let yourself slip into the habit of always working. Not only do most of us work out of our homes (which makes it difficult to separate work time and non-work time), but we rationalize that it we don’t do it, it won’t get done, so we create a dramatic scenario in our head that if we don’t do it all today we’ll end up starving, living in a cardboard box somewhere on the wrong side of town by next week.
This in turn leads to a lot of people becoming completely obsessed with their business and not being able to relax…EVER.
And the very thing they created to give them a life ends up taking it away.
I know I’ve painted a gloomy picture for you, but it’s pretty accurate for most people.
Notice I said most though…it doesn’t have to be this way IF you set things up correctly from the start. How you ask? Simple…set boundaries!
We had a couple in my coaching group that worked literally 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. When confronted (it was actually more of an intervention – lol), they swore up and down that they had to work that much or the business would crumble.
Pressured by the group, they were forced to set some boundaries and limits on the amount of time they could work and slowly adjusted them downward over time and guess what? They made more money and worked less! The business flourished!
They became recharged and refocused…more effective and efficient…happier and more fulfilled.
It opened up a whole new life for them and now they look back and can’t even imagine working a fraction of what they used to.
The same can happen for you but you NEED to set boundaries or your business will consume you, your life, and the lives of those around you.
When you struggle with this, you need to remember the purpose and reason why you started your business in the first place…to use it as a tool to help you live an abundant, joyful, passionate life on your terms!
