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I don’t think enough people, enough women in business talk about the different seasons of their life and how it affects the way we show up in our business.
If you are committed to personal growth, or you have an interest in self development, or you are a big believer in your business being one of the biggest personal development journeys that you’ll ever go on, it’s easy to follow the instruction manual, pick up the step-by-step guide and buy into the next webinar of who’s done X, Y or Z and try and apply particular strategies that aren’t necessarily going to apply to you in the phase of your life that you’re in.
Because let’s be truthful when we are footloose and fancy free in our early twenty’s and we’re not only using our business as a vehicle for freedom, but we’re also using it as a place to share our identity with the world, understand our place in the world, attract attention, be able to set ourselves up for whatever we dream of in the next area of our life…it’s going to be very different to the moments when:
- We’re up at 2:00am holding a baby to our boob
- Trying to care for an elderly parent
- Worrying about our own health condition or something of a loved one in our family
- Having a hot flash in the middle of the night
- Worrying about what our legacy might be
They’re all going to require of us very different strategies. And so applying knowledge has to be viewed with the lens of what time of your life you are in and what that little next phase is just around the corner for you.
Beginning my business journey, I was super excited to get my qualification and I was going into a ready made family. I became a step-mum in a blended family as soon as I entered my final year, and didn’t have a baby of my own until twelve months later. And so, when I was making my multi-page business plan, of all the things that I would do, I didn’t consider what it might be like to have to do everything with one hand. Not just my business with one hand on my laptop or my phone, but also feeding myself and moving things around the house as I held my baby to my boob.
For the vast majority of the time, there’s some data around breastfeeding being 1900 hours in the first year – if you last the first year, that is. If not, you’re still feeding with a bottle, you’re still feeding with your hands and your focus and your love and your oxytocin is preoccupied, as is your dopamine, which is our achievement hormone. So in doing so, a 30 hours a week job is actually 1900 hours in a year. So, you’re actually having a full time job in just feeding a new human.
It gives a bit of perspective in the notion that everybody tells you that we all have 24 hours in one day. Yeah, sure we do. But our priorities in different seasons of our lives are going to require of us to do something different with those hours.
Some of my biggest tips in this zone is that you will be one handed. If you’re looking down the barrel of having a baby and you have a new burgeoning business, it’s a toddler in and of itself, you will be doing it one handed. And one of my favourite things to help in the mentoring side of things, when people tell me that they’re about to fall pregnant, they’re about to expand their family, they’re about to go on their IVF journey or they’re coming out of loss and are still looking forward to bringing a new life into their family? My suggestion is how could you create a business that can be done on your phone?
There’s other options of shutting it down, there’s other options of care and all sorts of other things. But if you’re someone like me, who likes to have some sense of control or some sense of dopamine hit that you’ve achieved something, you need to find a way to make it happen.
I’ve seen many a mentee move and use platforms and processes that enables them to check their client details, to do bookings, to update their website, to speak into their phone and get their blogs transcribed or their ideas transcribed and then put them up on the back end of their website through their phone. So, having a mobile device is a much easier way to ensure that you can get the dopamine hit that you’re looking for at the same time as having that full time commitment that is having a bubba in your life.
The next phase is freaking out that you don’t have enough time. I see it all the time. But wanting the dopamine hit, knowing that inside you, you have so much to offer, you have a bit of a mission to be able to help people in the way that your gifts and talents are there. And there is a time before kids get to school that there is much more demands on your hours in your day. My advice? Surrender to those moments.
Some days are just purely being with the moment, being with the small frame of time you have, being with the mess around the house, being with milk vomit on you, being with the toys absolutely everywhere in the house and knowing that this too shall pass. Each and every one of these stages shall pass. To be honest, the good stuff and the bad stuff. Being in the moment and surrendering to it is one of the best things that I found to do. And it’s one of the hardest too…
I can easily say it, now that I have adult kids, but I remember some breakdown days before the breakthrough that I had in finding a day a week to go and work on my business, finding two half days a week extra after that to go and work on my business and then having it grow as my kids went to school.
Kate Toon has written a great book recently, and it’s one that has been well needed for a long time. It’s called Six Figures in School Hours. And the thing is, with the beautiful addition of technology, we get to do whatever we want when it comes to running our business in school hours. Yes, there are limitations, but gosh, there is so much more freedom to be able to do things on the fly.
Digital nomads have also given us really great evidence and examples of being able to run your business from your laptop and do it in small buckets of time. As long as you have the platforms, processes and some version of passive income streams that allows you to create a lot more freedom in your business in the time frame that you do have – if you choose to be there within school hours and still do pickup like I did, like Kate Toon did, like many people do. That is only one option, though. You’ve got so many other options in being able to be the person you want to be in that season of your life.
Kids grow up and parents grow older, and people that we care about continue to change. Their needs change, and ours do too. One of my most recent lessons is that we’re not all superhuman, invincible humans and that our own health conditions do come up from time to time. We’ve just lived through a pandemic and of course, 80% of the population has had COVID, and the figures on long COVID are only just starting to come out and having long term health conditions that resurface. We see it as practitioners with Ross River virus and Barmah Forest virus conditions.
We see it with mold, illness and other things. These conditions have flare ups, they have times when they are going to need more energy, more focus, more convalescence from us. They’re going to create a season in our life that is going to require us to have a different perspective and a different way of dealing with our business.
Having, again platforms, processes, automations, delegations, having somebody on your team that can look after things if you are having a down day, a down week, a down month, if you’re taken out for the count for a little while. These are the types of things that when you are in a season where you are productive and you are in growth phase, that you start to set the foundations up for these types of things, so that the quiet seasons, the convalescent seasons are looked after either by automations delegations, things that you don’t need or picking a date for in the future for when you can come back to it again. There’s a level of surrender that happens with a lot of these things.
More recently, I had a hysterectomy because I had two very large tumours – 18cms and 12cms and they just kept growing. They had been growing for about ten years but hadn’t been identified. Often when I talk about this, people go, “Oh, she must have been burnt out or she was taking on too much!”. No, they’d been growing for a decade. It just so happened I had slowed down enough after the pandemic to pay attention to my health.
At this time I got a scan, and that scan showed that I needed to do something about that and I had to have surgery. That surgery took me out for the count for a little while, but I was able to do things like have a fire sale on my courses, which continues to be helpful to small business owners, creatives clinicians and coaches, and I was able to get my team members to run that in the background.
Having a proper convalescence and time off to heal, some new ideas naturally came through. For me, I really enjoy travel, so having an opportunity to have that on the horizon also helped for a creative time. I then found out that my other ovary that got left alone went rogue and started growing a couple of tumours itself. And so I also recently got that one taken out as well. It’s crazy, because something that a lot of women don’t talk about is menopause and how it changes the way that we feel about ourselves.
There’s a reason it’s called second puberty. I was already feeling all sorts of weird and wonderful perimenopausal symptoms as I was going in to get that surgery. But having had it now and experiencing what a hot flush feels like, holy moly! No one has ever talked about having these…and to keep running a business, keep having a conversation with a client in front of you, keep being able to be on in the middle of a training is beyond me.
It was amazing to witness Drew Barrymore having a hot flush on TV in one of her more recent episodes of her show. If you Google it, it’s quite fascinating because it’s absolutely real. It happens every day. And for 52% of the population that is female, and the majority of them being of the age that have had, will have or come currently in menopause, these types of things are a real thing.
They are something that is going to change the way that we show up. So again, making sure that I am following podcasts that I’m interested in, people who are two steps ahead in this zone, making sure I’ve got the right information for my health and my well-being helps me support myself in creating a business and a lifestyle that adapts to the changes and the season that I’m in.
When I went away recently to the UK and I was looking down the barrel of this whole notion of going into menopause, my wise woman years, my crone years, as I would like to embrace them, rather than hot flushes and crazy experiences, I started to think about what it would like to have a legacy. What does it look like to genuinely use the skills and talents I have for the last half of my life? That’s a very different question to the one at the beginning of the seasons of having babies or starting my business foot loose and fancy free.
We’re talking about legacy, we’re talking about having the foundations that allow investment and continued generation of wealth, beyond me doing what I need to do and beyond passive income.
- What do you invest in so that your money, makes money?
- How do you pay attention to the way women in their 40s, 50s and 60s show up?
- What is the next phase asking of us and how can we create that using this wonderful vehicle and tool that we’ve created that is our business?
- How do we manage how many people we can help, to make the money we need to generate, to invest in what we need to invest, so that that money makes money?
Whatever season you are in as a woman, in small business, there are always options – especially now with technology, with AI, with transcription, with access to women who have done it before. Hearing their stories on podcasts, hearing their stories on YouTube, hearing their stories in blogs, in books that are coming out in compilations, we have the opportunity to access woman-to-woman (if you want to choose to look at it that way and if you want to reach out) to find out what that next phase is asking of you. There is evidence that it has been done before and it’s essentially proven that you can do it, too.
When I was wanting to have my baby as a water birth, I read Ina May Gascon’s book, Guide to Childbirth. It was a compilation of her stories of home births from the 70s, 80s and 90s – it was amazing. All of these stories of different births, how they went well, how they were challenging, and the breakdown and the breakthrough of it all. But what it gave me was permission and the confidence and confirmation that, in actual fact, if I was choosing that path for that season of my life, it had been done before. It wasn’t the first time.
Reading this book gave me such confidence that no matter where I was in my labour experience, I thought thousands of women, hundreds of women, every other human that had been on the planet was birthed by a woman. This has been done before. My body can do this. And similarly, hundreds of thousands, millions of women have made money, have helped people, have continued to grow their own health and their own wealth through small business means before. And however you were doing it, I promise you, somebody has done something very similar. And so you’ve got evidence and proof that you can do it, too.
Whatever the challenge is for you right now, the season of your life that you are in, know that you’re not alone. Try and find some evidence for yourself in all of these places and spaces and stories. Wven if it’s just one little gold nugget of advice that you could apply to your world right now to get you through that moment, that challenging breakdown of a day, to get to the next day and create the life that you want to live, I hope that you can find it.
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