Visioning Your Way To A Successful Business
(with work life harmony)
The temptation if you aren’t getting the success that you’d like, is to work harder or work more hours to get ahead. However, this just compounds the issue of being busy and feeling scattered in too many different directions. Worse case scenario chasing success can lead to health issues and burn out. Instead of pushing harder, it’s more valuable to take a step back, look at the big picture and simplify so that all the action you take aligns with your vision of how you would like your life and business to be.
Zoom Out!
If you can relate to this feeling of being overwhelmed by “all the things”, I’d encourage you to zoom out and take a really big picture view of your life as a whole, and where you would like your business to fit into it. I am sure you have interests in your life other than your business! Although it can be great to fully immerse yourself in the process of setting up and running a business, be mindful that it doesn’t overtake your life to the detriment of everything else – such as your health or your relationships with others.
Activity: Imagine Your Ideal Week
Take a moment now to imagine your ideal week.
How many days a week do you work?
Are you with clients most of the time or just some of the time?
Do you work from home, from a therapy room or online?
How much free time would you like, and how would you spend that, e.g to travel, spend time with your family or be creative?
How might you continue developing your skills personally and professionally?
How much money would you like to earn?
In your journal or on a piece of paper, write in detail about your perfect day. Be as descriptive as possible and run it through all of your senses. Create a really vivid picture or scene of what you can see, hear, taste, feel and smell all around you. Get a sense of how you look and feel in this image. Really tune in and evoke the energy of that perfect day.
You can do this in a meditation, draw a picture, or collect images and create a vision board.
How Your Vision Helps You To Make Decisions
By knowing how you would like things to be, this can inform the decisions and direction as you create your business. For example- if you know you would like to only work three days a week, when you get busy with clients you have the decision to either work a fourth day or create a waiting list.
Knowing your ideal vision helps you to set boundaries (and the key, of course, is to stick to them!). It’s not about being inflexible, but it’s about knowing what your needs are, knowing what’s important to you, and then your decisions become much easier to make. You are then free to do things because they are right for you, not to please others at the detriment to your own needs.
Creating Work Life Harmony
In the book Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers described the moment when she realised her life was out of balance. She and her partner separated and she realised that she had been so consumed by the relationship that when it fell apart, it left her with nothing. She vowed that she would not allow herself to become vulnerable in this way and wrote 9 quadrants, or categories, of her life. She made a commitment that she would create space for each element of her life, so if one did present challenges, it was not all encompassing.
Personally, when I set up my business I found that my health and my friendships took a back seat. As a busy working mum, there was only so much I could do and I felt like I had to work really hard to get my business off the ground. I ended up becoming ill and pretty lonely so know from first hand experience how it feels to have that imbalance. Through that experience I learned how to create more harmony and make more space for the things that will nurture my wellbeing, alongside setting up the business.
Next Steps To Visioning A Successful Business
Have a think about what three things you can do each week to ensure that your activity is aligned with your ideal life and business vision.
It could be the number of clients you work with each week and how much you pay yourself. It could be a self-care practice, time to play and be creative, or getting together with friends and family.
What do you need to stop doing, or let go of, to bring you into alignment with your ideal life and business vision?
It could be letting go of a service or dropping a marketing strategy that isn’t bringing leads or sales.
Make a commitment to ensure that all your needs are met as you embark on this journey to create a business doing what you love.
Remember to regularly check in with your vision board or ideal day so it becomes like a map and GPS to create the kind of life you’d love to live.
Leave a comment below and share your ideal day as a successful business owner.