This isn’t my first rodeo as a business owner. I’ve worked in various online businesses off and on in the last 12 years. From 2012-2015…it was blogging and writing occasionally for other websites. In 2016 I had an online jewelry business for a year. In 2018 I competed in the Mrs. Texas pageant…it was a whole thing…but it required a lot of online marketing & working with brands for sponsorships. I enjoyed some aspects of being online, but the burnout always came because working online has no limits. You can ALWAYS be selling and advertising and upscaling your business…there is no end. I hated it, and in 2018 I swore that I wouldn’t work online again.
In 2019, I started working with my own therapy clients, and in 2020, I worked as a marriage family therapy in private practice. Once again…in the business world. In a business that is extremely intense, emotional, and stressful. Fortunately, I had the most incredible boss, supervisor, and mentor…who was also a therapist and mother. I mean…can you imagine having a boss who had the skills of a highly-trained therapist? Who congratulated you when you set boundaries and told her no when you needed to? It was a dream, and I feel so grateful for these experiences. My boss started an incredibly successful family therapy practice and continuously sought out balance in her personal life and family life. I met with her weekly to discuss my client load and business, and her lessons are invaluable to me.
I’m no longer working as a therapist…at least for now. I miss the clients I had, but I feel very confident that switching careers to my online businesses was the right move for me and my family. That being said, I carry what I learned as a therapist into my current business…striving to follow my boss’s example of managing business with healthy boundaries. I’m just at the beginning stages of my businesses, but I hope this foundation I’m building will serve me for years to come. I could wait and write this article in a few years as the dust settles in my business, and I think I will, but here I am at the beginning writing about my goals for creating a healthy and sustainable business. Practices that helped me stay sane as a therapist. Healthy boundaries and extreme self-care are VITAL to being a therapist-business owner, but I think they are extremely important in any business and in our personal lives too.
I’ve created the following guidelines for myself to help me build a healthy foundation as a business owner, woman, mother, and wife…a whole person:
1). Set work hours each day. Working on social media has no end….so I set my own “end.” I schedule hours for pre-planned marketing, and I don’t work on marketing or connecting outside of those hours. 99% of the work I share online is pre-planned. I don’t share off the cuff photos of my day because it makes me feel like I constantly need to be assessing my life for ways to market my business. That is draining and makes me feel miserable. I’m not perfect at this, but my goal is that any of my posts or advertising or Instagram stories or writing are planned in advance…photos taken during my set work hours…texts written during work time. And when I “clock out” each day….I don’t look back. I’m done for the day.
2). Although I am an artist and creator, I reserve experiences and photos and art and writing for myself. What I share online will never be a full representation of my life. I don’t share my kids lives online (although they are a huge part of my life). I don’t share all my art. Or all my writing. Or all my thoughts. Or all the books I read. I want to have authentic experiences online, AND that will never fully happen. Because life online is 1-dimensional and it always will be. My life online is only a portion of my life. Work is only a portion of my life. I seek fulfillment outside of work, and I create meaning outside of my business and outside what I share online . I monetize my business, not my life. Sometimes that requires extra intention because I truly love my business and I love creating so much. I continually ask myself, “what can I do outside of work that brings me joy—-just for me?” In the social media world, we’re so used to sharing everything. But over my various years of being online and offline, I’ve learned that I don’t feel fulfilled when I share all of me online. I love having parts of myself that are just for me and my family.
3). I prioritize no-work time in the evenings, weekends, and on vacation. I plan ahead to take time off, and I commit to it. Even when my anxiety seeps in and tells me that I “need” to check in with something online. My anxiety tells me that I’ll feel better when I check in online or do “just one quick thing.” But that’s almost never the case. In my experience…those anxious feelings eventually go away as I intentionally re-focus on my present life. But committing to these boundaries is a muscle we have to build…it takes practice, but it really does get easier the more we uphold those boundaries.
4). Being a business owner is just ONE part of my life. I hope it can be the predominate way that I support myself and my family financially. AND yet, there is so much more to life than our jobs. We would do well to ask ourselves, “how do I find fulfillment outside of work, even if work is fulfilling?” Finding fulfillment both inside and outside of work are important for sustainability and overall health.
5). Sometimes, the ability to set boundaries with work is a privilege…it takes a lot of mental work and support and financial confidence among other things. I want to acknowledge that. AND…when we’re able to set boundaries around business (and in other areas of our lives)…we become more fulfilled overtime and likely, more successful.
I’d love to hear how you set boundaries for yourself, whether in your business, or in your personal life. Boundaries do not come naturally to me—I’m continually working on them, but I’ve learned a lot about how they benefit me when I was a therapist. I don’t want to forget those lessons.
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