Finding Work-Life Balance As A Small Business Owner And Avoiding Burnout

Hello entrepreneurs, I’m going to be vulnerable today. Work-life balance is one of the biggest struggles that I have had personally in business.

As I talk to other owners work-life balance is one of their major struggles too!

In this post, I will outline some tips and tricks to help you figure out how to re-establish balance.

Work

The first struggle in entrepreneurship is the work part and you have to figure that out before worrying about balance later.

Before starting my business in 2006, I was working 80 – 90 hours a week at a regular job. The job was hard, but it made sense because I just went in. There were some rails I stayed between when I did the work.

When I started my own business, it was much more confusing because there were an infinite number of tasks.

I could go anywhere!

It was easy to work 90 hours a week and not have much to show for it!

That’s why “how to work hard” was one of the first important lessons to learn and until I had that mastered, focusing on balance didn’t make sense.

I had to work extra hard because of a lack of efficiency and effectiveness and until I had found my foothold here there wasn’t any space to try to slow down.

But once I had figured out the hard work part, now I needed to get more balance back for my life.

Work-Life Balance

Now I was ready to look at a new problem. How would I be able to scale back this intense work and have more balance in my life?

The Work-Life Balance Myth

Work-life balance is falsely talked about as if it’s a static thing.

• Here’s my work. I’m gonna be working at 72%
• Here’s my life is going to be at 28%

Perfect.

It has clicked together. It’s exactly balanced how I wanted it,

The Reality of Work-Life Balance

In reality, balance actually implies this active verb of things moving. It is a dynamic balancing of the two sides on the scale.

Maybe you’re a seasonal business – the holiday season is busier, the Work is gonna be heavier, and the Life side goes a little bit slower.

Sometimes Life is gonna be a bit heavier… It’s vacation season. You’re out of town, you’re kind of letting the business coast a little bit.

It’s going to move back and forth. I used some exaggerated examples to show the point but it also fluctuates on a much more nuanced level day by day and hour by hour!

Feeling Out Of Balance

I talked previously about being aware of the Riptide. I’m feeling a lot of entrepreneurs right now (November 2022) are getting extra stressed in their businesses.

That means that environmentally, across a wide range of businesses, many people are feeling that the Work side of the business is taking a higher and higher priority over Life. And it’s not because of incidental things like they had someone quit, or they have a new product coming out. It’s just a byproduct of the way the economy, culture, and other variables are moving right now. They’re really feeling that extra chaos messing up their balance.

Re-establishing Work-Life Balance

In today’s post, I wanted to talk about what I do to try to focus on helping myself when I’m feeling out of whack and how I try to help my clients also think about work-life balance and getting it readjusted.

It’s not as easy as “just work less.”

Because if your work is over-indexed on the scale and you need to be focusing on that because you have problems, and just “stopping” doesn’t fix those problems.

You might for a day, get some more Life time back but then all the problems you didn’t deal with probably just jump right to the forefront and be even worse.

7 Proven Real-World Tips To Get Work-Life Balance Back

I have accumulated some proven tips and tricks that I have found work for me and have worked for my clients.

1.) Pause

The number one first thing is to pause!

I find oftentimes, things start going crazy and I don’t really notice that they’re going crazy until they’ve been going crazy for a while.

So once I notice the craziness, I can recognize that stress, anxiety, and pain are actually important indicators! Those SHOULD flag my attention, when they say, “Hey, pay attention!! There’s something going on wrong over here.!!” They are like a check engine light for my emotional state.

But unfortunately, I don’t always listen as well as I should to these warning signs. Instead, I usually keep my head down and keep working and say “oh yeah, there’s stress and pain. Let me get this stuff done so the stress and pain go away.” I keep working and working and improvement of my state is just not happening.

In the real world for me, the warning bells usually have to be screaming pretty loudly before I notice that’s what they are and realize it is time to pause.

This first step of pausing is when I really look at “what is going on?”

What am I feeling right now?

How is everything going?

For me?

In my business?

In my personal life?

Within this, I also try to evaluate “Am I being efficient or effective?”

So “efficient” means I’m checking out lots of boxes on my to-do list.

“Effective” means I’m working on the things that matter the most from my to-do list.

Typically I find when I get really really stressed my to-do list keeps getting longer and longer. I have these big giant projects that I am avoiding tackling. Instead, I go after smaller tasks to try to feel like I am shortening my list.

Since I know I have a lot to do, I’m working on these itty bitty things only because they’re bite-size NOT because they’re important or urgent.

By stepping back from it, I can reevaluate my working “efficiently” getting a lot done or “effectively” getting important things done.

Usually, I find that when I’m getting overstressed it’s because I’m working really efficiently doing a lot of things. Whenever I have weeks like those, I look back and I like to joke I got abducted by aliens. I couldn’t account for what happened minutes a minute. I just think “I was busy and it was pretty crazy”.

Pausing first of all and just checking in with “am I being efficient or effective?” is an important tool.

2.) Get Everything Out Of My Head And Onto Paper

The second thing is to get stuff out of my head and onto paper.

I put together a to-do list of all of the items I need to be working on.

Because when they’re floating in my head, it takes up this itty bitty amount of bandwidth over and over again. I’m struggling. I’m forgetting things.

When I put it on paper, it makes it tangible and real. It feels like not this cloudy, murky problem to find a specific problem addressing

Once I put it on paper I have one of two outcomes.

• One outcome is the to-do list isn’t very long, and I find I’m just emotionally charged about one or two items on this list. I’ve had clients in the past that have felt this way. Maybe they had only three or four things on their list, but one of them was having a confrontation with a customer that was a longtime customer. That type of task even though it was a 30-minute conversation felt to them like a 10-month project. It weighed heavy emotionally.
• But oftentimes, when I am putting it all on paper, there are indeed soooo many items on the list. I look it over and I say “well, no wonder I’m stressed out. I do have 10,000 things to do.”

4.) Prioritize And Schedule My To-Do List

Once I have my list together the next step is I start to prioritize it. I can say “okay, I’m being effective. What am I working on?”

I can look at the dates things are due and determine what is urgent to get ahead of it before it’s an emergency by planning things out.

Doing this. I oftentimes find out. ” Well, no wonder I’m stressed I have six months’ worth of work ahead of me. There’s no way I’m gonna get it done this week! Maybe I should let my foot off the gas a little bit, give myself some more life back, and not just be doubling down on work. I’m not going to just power through this week and it’s all going to be fine next week. This is a long-term commitment to lots of projects.”

So I pause, I put together my list of the items that I need to do. I help prioritize and schedule those items.

I have talked about the best practices for doing this area like picking your 3 – 5 most important items to work on daily in previous content.

5.) Protect The Asset (Yourself!)

Once I am confident about the menu of tasks to be completed and I have them prioritized and scheduled I know I am on autopilot for success and that it is just a matter of time.

In the meantime, I move on to the next step which is starting to focus more on myself.

I like the term “protecting the asset.” In action movies, the bodyguard is protecting the asset – stopping the assassins from getting to the asset (the most important person) and the bodyguard should throw their life in front of that person to save them and take a bullet.

In your business, YOU are the asset! (Yes, it has a double meaning. An asset also has a dollar value in a business!).

If YOU get hurt, if YOU get injured, if YOU get exhausted, the business does crumble!

In my business. I’m the asset. And I would say early on I’ve done a pretty poor job of taking care of the asset. Lately, I have done a better and better job,

Protecting the asset starts with the basics. So many times I feel I’m really stressed out, I’m really overwhelmed, I just can’t feel much motivation going on right now, and I look at the most basic healthy habits and recognize that I am failing myself in those areas.

Am I getting enough sleep every night? No, I haven’t slept enough in about two weeks. So of course I’m extra stressed a little bit foggy and less motivated.

Have I had enough water?

Am I doing the basic things needed?

Am I eating fairly healthy?

Am I getting some physical activity?

If you’re not doing those things and you’re not feeling very good? That is easy low-hanging fruit just to double down and focus on those healthy areas to start with. Without these basic healthy habits in place, it is going to be hard to feel in balance at all.

These are all skills. These are not things that you just hear the knowledge you do right away. These are practices you have to establish and get better and better at.

I would say earlier on in my journey, to establish the skills I actually did them very rigorously every single day, every single week, and every single month.

Now, to be honest, I focus on these skills more prescriptively. I have the skills in my back pocket and usually do a pretty good job of taking care of myself, but if I notice some feelings of stress, that is when I’ll pull one of these skills out and ask myself, “how are my healthy habits?” If I find I have been negligent it is easy to restart these healthy habits.

But early on if you’re figuring out how to add this now, I would say being rigorous and disciplined in one of these areas at a time is a good way to start that process. To give an idea of how long it can take to optimize in these areas, focusing on sleep was a whole probably five months to figure out!

5.) Focus On Relationships

Once the asset is protected, the next part is socialization.

Being an entrepreneur can be really lonely! Sometimes people who are very comfortable on their regular job track are kind of alien to entrepreneurs who are building a thing from scratch and all the pressure of the world lies on their shoulders.

So it can be hard to have a connection sometimes. But that’s why it means you have to focus EXTRA hard on having and keeping those connections.

Also with other entrepreneurs, I find it is very easy when having friend interactions to start talking about business instead just because that’s comfortable day to day. It takes discipline to expand my horizons and have a broader way to connect.

Having a life outside of business with friends and family is really important.

Go out to a local retro arcade and play some Galaga forget about business for a while so you’re not so just myopically focused on this narrow one part of life.

Whenever I do that, I am reminded that this type of interaction is what I’m doing all this work for anyways. So I can have a high quality of life laughing with friends, family, and loved ones.

And it makes it all worthwhile!

6.) Be Authentic

One of the last items on my list is to be real.

I think this is one of the hardest items on this list because this is a balancing act all by itself.

We tend to have a protective mask on and that can be nice to keep things deflected. It’s this PR shield that things are going okay. And then people believe us and the business does better and better and our mask becomes truth in classic “fake it until you make it fashion.”

But that mask can also be exhausting! Holding this mask out in front of us and saying “hey, everything is fine. I’m good. It’s the best year ever.”

That can become really exhausting holding it up over and over and over again when it isn’t the truth.

And it can become a habit. For me, I have to worry about taking home with me. I don’t want to act like it’s all okay out in public and then come home and default into not being authentic with my friends and family and loved ones.

Finding that balance between self-preservation and authenticity is a big part of finding work-life balance.

I find the more real I can be, the more vulnerable, the less extra baggage I’m carrying around.

Being authentic doesn’t resonate with everybody. Some groups of people sort of want to have their “mask club” more or less. Those people can be exhausting if they are your only circle and it becomes a game of “keeping up with the Jones’s” and tearing each other down.

For myself, I’m always looking for other people who are looking to be real and talk about a real experience. (Note this is different than someone being just a downer and always complaining about how bad everything is! Those people are just as toxic to feelings of work-life balance!)

It’s being actually yourself in the space you inhabit.

Being real can be a really helpful tool to take some of the burdens off of feeling like you have to act like everything is perfect when it definitely is not.

7.) Get Help From Professionals

And this carries on to the last point which is finding professional help.

For me, the problems psychologically in my past were the kind of traumas and things that actually motivated me to be a really amazing entrepreneur. They inspired me to work really, really hard to build extremely special things.

But at a certain level, those SAME things also got in my way. They were a double-edged sword.

Therapy

Seeking out therapy at a certain level makes sense for most entrepreneurs to help deal with past traumas, regrets of things that they wish that they had done or hadn’t done, and ways they were treated and never dealt with.

It can be helpful to get that out and unload that weight from the backpack to move forward.

I used to think that therapy was only if you have had a specific and clearly traumatic event, then you seek therapy, kind of like if your car breaks down then you go to the mechanic.

But now I think it’s actually much more helpful to every human alive. I think of it as keeping the oil changed in an ongoing regular maintenance type schedule.

Not every therapist or counselor is the same so if you do happen to go see one that doesn’t seem like a fit, keep shopping. When you find one that to works, you’ll know!

Professional help like therapy or counseling is helpful.

Health And Wellness

A health and wellness coach can be helpful.

Oftentimes we’re great at taking care of everyone around us, our family, our organization, our business, but not ourselves. We don’t have the tools.

Someone like a nationally board-certified health and wellness coach can help provide some extra tools and guidance along the way.

Business Expertise

And finally, some business expertise can help you solve problems to lighten the toll being an entrepreneur takes on your life.

Sometimes, fixing business problems in a smarter way can reduce the load it takes on that two-sided work-life balance scale I talked about earlier.

Sure you can use books and podcasts and Google searches to try to learn about business.

But having a face-to-face experience with an expert can make things a lot easier because typically if you read a book or a podcast, it’s not clear how it might work exactly for your specific business.

Also if you’re actually doing all of the prescribed information and it’s not working. It’s hard to ask the question “hey, I did all the things why am I not getting the result that was promised?” (Sometimes it’s because it was a marketing ploy and not a real solution. Sometimes you’re missing a small nuance.)

So having someone you can talk to can alleviate some of the business stress. They can also give you an outlet and help you figure out where to focus and what to let go.

If you’d like to have a conversation with ME about your business needs feel free to reach out and start a conversation.

Conclusion

I hope some of this helps.

I think we’re in for a rocky road continue to go on.

So I really want the community of entrepreneurs to focus on this self-care piece. This is what lets you stay in the game.

If you can stay in the game you can keep finding ways to make things better and better.

You can make it so your business is not your prison keeping you captive. It’s not the worst job with the lowest paying and the longest hours you’ve ever had.

Instead, it is the type of organization you actually want to work for!

So keep taking care of yourselves.

Have a great day.