Put your head down
This is no news to you: I took a couple of months off from this newsletter. I needed the time to work through some major changes in my life, and it limited my ability to tap into my more creative side, the one that comes to you here.
But here I am, getting back on the horse/bike/bandwagon (pick your metaphor) at a time when I would expect myself to want to be quiet and mourn the future I was anticipating. While what I was hoping for didn’t happen, I found it a good time to put my head down and focus on the work at hand. That includes figuring out what I want to do with this space.
I don’t want to let it go, but I plan to be a less frequent visitor in your inbox. My hope is for monthly, but I don’t want to make promises to you, dear reader, and instead want to surprise you when I do pop in to share thoughts!
While this goes against advice I would give clients, it holds up my main tenet: Good work is better than lots of work.
I say this to people all of the time. Good marketing makes the difference. You may be posting six TikToks per day (which is what the platform recommends to creators as a best practice 🙄), but are they putting across exactly the point you want to make?
So here I am, bringing you good newsletters instead of bi-weekly newsletters from now on!
As entrepreneurs, we can be tough on ourselves. I have clients who have taken double or triple the time expected to get a task done, and often are very hard on themselves for doing so. It’s times like those that I remind them: You are running a whole business, so that one thing didn’t get done, but look at all of the others that did. You have to prioritize where you are going to spend your energy and brain power; it’s the only way to get through. Now put your head down, and try to spend a concentrated period working on it. If that’s only 25 minutes, make those count. If it’s more, that’s great, but the point is the quality and the focus, not the quantity.
So that’s what I’ve been doing while away, putting my head down and really focusing: How can I grow my business, what services matter most to my clients, how can I honor what I need to do to take care of myself through all of this? Remember, if we don’t take care of ourselves, the rest doesn’t matter.
Before I took my break here, I started writing this:
I’ve written previous newsletters about how grateful I am for my support system before, but here I am repeating it.
Why?
I’ll say out loud what many, including myself, have been saying behind closed doors: It’s been a tough year for service-based businesses. As the U.S. economy has contracted while suffering from major inflation, so has the job market, including people looking for contractors like myself. This isn’t confined just to my business; multiple small businesses that I have spoken with have been suffering from the same problem.
We are all struggling right now, which means it’s time for us to call on those around us and gather our resources. One of my clients, Maria Bryan, often shares information about storyteller self care, but today I’ve taken some time to think of it as business owner self care.
If we can't set boundaries and practices that help us regulate our nervous systems, in the short term, we will not be able to adequately attune ourselves to the brave story owners we hold spaces with. And that means we won't have the capacity to use all the tools in our trauma-informed toolbox.
Long-term, compassion fatigue will get the best of us, and we will burn out.
I'm not being crunchy when I walk you through caring for your nervous system. I want you to be here for the long haul to tell world-changing stories. Not everyone has that gift. Not everyone chooses to use that gift in the social good sector. That alone needs to be protected as we work towards building a more sensitive and thoughtful world.
When I reflect back on what I was writing about, I see that my self-care in that moment was doing less, and now I’m slowly working my way back towards doing more, thanks to self-care and support.
Lesson learned: Take a break when you need it, and the business will be there waiting better than ever. Only doing the essentials doesn’t mean you are weak—it’s the opposite, it shows how strong you are.
