In today's episode, we will be talking about how self-care is a business strategy. If you are an entrepreneur, there is no way around it. You need to take care of yourself. So you don't burn out because if you burn out your business burns out.
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I'm Jen with the Business Breakthrough Mastermind Show. And I am so glad you are joining us today. I am talking about one of my favorite topics and that is self-care. There are a lot of ways to describe self-care. It could just be self-care. It could be self compassion. It could be soul care. And there's just so many ways to look at it.
But what we are talking about today generally is the care of your mind, body and soul. As you are pursuing your business dreams. I have seen way too often. People who are in the entrepreneurial world work 24/7. And I will say the ones who are the most successful that I have seen are the ones who view, work as play.
And typically, they're type A's. So if you tell a type A to rest that actually will produce more stress into their lives and into their minds, and that will destroy them even more. And so it's really important to talk to an entrepreneur in a way that they understand the importance of taking care of yourself and that it is just as important to take care of yourself.
As it is to build your marketing funnels or to work on your content creation or to work on however, you are delivering your product to your customer. Because like I said, in the intro. If you burn out, your business burns out and I'm primarily talking about smaller businesses, businesses where you're a solopreneur or you're a team of probably less than five or ten, that a lot depends on you still.
And, and we've seen it happen, with owners of large corporations, Kate Spade, for example, were her brand can still live on without her, but for us, the smaller businesses, the brand probably will not survive without you, unless you have purposefully designed it to sell. And you've been having the business run without you.
So for the most part of the early entrepreneur, your brand depends on you. Your business depends on you. And so that's where it's so important to see self-care as a business strategy. When we start to burn out, things happen. We start to deteriorate in the way that we see things. Our business starts to become heavy to us.
Uh, we start to feel depressed and I see a lot of people who just want to take their business and chuck it out the window because they're so over it, right. The burnout is so big and they start to have these thoughts of... you know, maybe I should just go back into corporate or maybe I should just go back into some type of J.O.B. Where I can punch a clock and at least have my nights and my weekends to myself again, and actually earn a consistent paycheck.
And now some people will argue with that, there are philosophical things that people say that even if you are in a J.O.B. That still doesn't guarantee any type of security. But for many, it does and they feel like, you know, I tried the entrepreneurial thing I realized I can just make more money for less work, doing something that's not as fulfilling and get that regular paycheck.
So when that happens, I always get the thought of... wow. This person had this dream. They had this idea of how they were going to bring change into the world and how they were going to make an impact with the skills and the talents that they have. And now that dream is gone and it's not there anymore. And it isn't available.
And in the way that that one person could deliver it. And so what happened, what happened to get there? Sure there were probably different elements of, you know, how was the messaging? How was the person's delivery? Uh, what type of marketing strategies did they try that didn't work out? Or was it the product, maybe more market research, uh, around designing a better product to serve the market's needs could have been done.
But a lot of times entrepreneurs are really smart and they do have those things dialed in, but the one thing that's missing is the energy. So often it's the energy that we bring into our business and into our marketing and into our delivery, that makes the biggest impact. It can surpass the impact that the technical stuff can provide.
And so having all this strategy and having the technical things in place is so important and these things go together, but you also have to have the energy dialed in. You just do you have to be able to know ahead of time, what is going to keep you from burn out or not even from burn out, but from feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm.
And so much of exhaustion and overwhelm comes from either one, not having a team, not getting people to help you with low level tasks or tasks that are out of your zone of competence or genius and handing those things off. Or it's just not being clear on what the next step is because I see so often once you know what that next step is, once you know what to put all of your big energy towards, then you get this resurge of hope and renewal and possibility that things are possible now that I know where to put my energy.
So I often see that, like once I have a session with somebody and we get super clear on what those next steps are, then I see all the excitement and energy come back as they regained their focus. But something that's also important is knowing what fills your soul.
What really fills your cup in a way that you will have something to pour out and when you can identify this and here's the key before you need it. That is going to help you be more resourceful in all the other areas. So for example, when I start working with somebody, I always want to go over their values.
We do personality assessments, so I know their strengths. So I know they're building a business that is based off of something they're going to love. And part of that process is really identifying what gives them joy in life. What is pleasurable to them in the sense that they can have other parts of their life and their being that fills them up and helps them to stay more well-rounded because when we're building our business... we're not just doing it to be these living, breathing souls who only focus on business, right?
We go into it because we want to make an impact in the world and in our bank accounts so that we can have the resources to do other things. Maybe it's travel, maybe it's move up in house size, get a better car, do fun things with your family, whatever it might be, just purely running a business isn't what we are made for or what we're 100% about.
We are also about other things in life. And so we're not going to wait until we have that income to do all those other things in life. We're going to do that now so that we can start to enjoy the things. Now you're saying I can't just go out and buy a big house right now, or go on that luxury vacation or any vacation.
But what you can do is you can think about what gives you joy, what gives you joy? Getting that bigger house or that new car we'll give you joy, but there are other things in your life that give you joy too. And so experiencing those joys right now in a way that you're able to control it. Is what is key to knowing how to take care of yourself in a way that will help you get through those hard times.
When we enter those hard times, we want to enter them with our full set of resources, to be able to ride the dips, to be able to get through those hardships. When we're able to regularly take care of ourselves. And this is what I encourage all of my clients. And I do this myself is we practice a regular self-care, self-care before you need it.
If you're practicing it before you need it, you will probably not need it as much. Like get those desperate feelings of, oh my gosh, I have to get out of here. I need a vacation, or I have to schedule that massage today, but there is no time today, you know, and get in those types of crises type moments where you're crashing and burning and all of a sudden you need to self-care really hard and it takes ten times as much self-care to get to the point of rebalancing and restoring yourself, then it would have, if you were taking care of yourself regularly, already.
When I was a therapist, I used to always give people that visual of when we are stressed or anxious, we're going, we're like shooting up our anxiety or stress level is shooting up and. If we never truly take the time to come all the way down again, we're just going up and up and up. We might do a little self-care when we're like super stressed out, but not enough to come all the way down. So there are all these different ways of taking care of yourself. One other way that I think is so important to mention is our self talk.
This is our thoughts and our beliefs. Do you truly believe that you are deserving of self-care? I remember back when my kids were little. And I had a lot of my friends who were parents at this same time. And I remember some of my friends who were moms would say, oh yeah, I went out to get a massage and I felt guilty about it the whole time I was there.
I came back home, not even feeling rested. And that just blew my mind. And I was like, what, how did you not feel like you deserved a massage? And that was a big aha moment for me, that our mindset really determines if the actions that we're taking even matter, we can sign up for the massage, we can sign up for the babysitters.
We can go on vacation. We can do all types of self-care activities, but none of them really matter if you don't truly believe that this is important to you or that you're deserving of it. And one of the ways that sometimes I try to help people lean into that belief if they're not in that belief already.
Um, because making that big jump to I am deserving of this might be too big of a jump for some people. And so we take little baby steps towards that. And one baby step that I often encourage people to do is to tell themselves that self-care is a business strategy. Now, remember what I said in the beginning is that entrepreneurs find work as play.
And if you ask them to take a step back and take care of themselves or to rest, that will probably trigger more anxiety for them. So instead if you frame it as a business strategy, Because everybody understands that if you burnout your business burns out, but if you frame it as a business strategy, then they're going to start to value it more.
And when they start to value it more and they actually see like, okay, I need to take a break. I need to take the weekend off every weekend off. Um, I need to go... take a walk around the block. I need to go golfing. I need to play a pickle ball. I need to, you know, go on vacation or go out with friends tonight.
Remember friends? [laugh] That is so important to keeping your mind in a really healthy place to perform at your peak in your business. And sometimes we forget that sometimes we think push, push, push, and that's performing at our peak, but instead it's when we take breaks, when we refresh our brains and we get that level back down to base level, that we can actually start to perform better in our business.
We get we're creative. We get excited about things because we have energy. And so all of those elements are really, really important and yes, there are other elements of it too, stamina health with nutrition and exercise and that's for another day. But today I wanted to encourage you that self-care is a business strategy.
And I want to encourage you to start building in off time to do other things notice, I didn't say rest, but to do other things. And then that's important for your business to have your brain take a break from the problem solving and just engage with something new, something different and something that gives you joy.
So share with me wherever you're listening to this, share with me what you plan to do to take care of yourself, how you plan to build that into your business strategy and what kind of results you've gotten from doing that in the past. So I can't wait to hear your answers, what you have to say.
And I want to also, I think it's important to give a little plug if you are an entrepreneurial woman and you have a developed business, you've been in business for three to five years and you are ready for a break and maybe for a community to come around you. I have a mastermind that is designed to support other women in business who are business owners.
This is for women entrepreneurs who want a committed community in their corner to give them incredible strength to meet their goals. And one of the things that our mastermind is doing is going on a retreat to Tulum, Mexico, this April to enjoy and to... get some relaxation and some together time. One of the things I realized, this is going to sound so funny [laugh] that I'm using this as an example, but you might understand if you've planned a wedding.
One of the things that I noticed on my honeymoon [laugh] was that it took three days to come off of such a big event. And I've always felt like since that point on that, whenever I go on vacation, it really takes three days to fully unwind. Would you agree, have you ever experienced that yourself, but this masterminder tree is a five day retreat at an all-inclusive hotel in Mexico.
Um, adults only for that purpose of having those three days to unwind, to relax, to connect with each other, and then to mastermind in person as well. And I would love to have you join us. So all you need to do is apply to the mastermind on my website @jenargue.com. So I hope you got a lot out of today, and I hope that you really do incorporate self-care as a business strategy.
Take care!
