Last Updated on April 7, 2019 by Jessica Adams
It’s important that you know how to balance your personal and professional life. This is especially relevant if you work from home, and further, if you do so because you run your own business.
That line between your home life and career can easily get blurred when you’re trying to make a name for yourself outside of your “she-shed”. But it’s so important as a first-time entrepreneur and woman, that you make an effort to solidify that blurry line.
Can Women Entrepreneurs Really Have It All?
One of the reasons for you to strike out on your own and start your own business is to get more time with your family.
Unfortunately, most first-time entrepreneurs end up spending less time with their personal people, choosing their professional passion instead.
It’s even harder to keep that line between business and family from blurring when you’re a mother because you want to be able to give yourself equally to your job and your family.
That’s the best thing about being a female entrepreneur, though, we can have it all! It takes discipline and careful thought to be able to have that flourishing personal life and the cushy dream job but it is definitely attainable.
It’s working around the clock and maintaining your passion for what you do that can be difficult to keep up. Instead, focus on what you must do to maintain your healthy family life.
Passions can fade over time but your family doesn’t. Striking a balance doesn’t always mean having an equal number of hours dedicated to each side of it.
It just means that you’ve finally found a rhythm that is fulfilling on either “side” of your balanced life. Continue below for seven tips on how to balance your personal and professional life.
7 Tips On
How to Balance
Your Personal and
Professional Life
Ask For Help
You may be an absolute force of nature in the business world. That doesn’t mean you don’t get overwhelmed by the constant chaos that is entrepreneurial life.
Whether that means learning about ATB Technologies and figuring out if they could help you with your IT efforts, or finding the best customer service outsourcing company to pick up the slack for your customer contact time.
It’s not always easy to ask for help, but being a business leader means knowing how to delegate, and you can do just that when you outsource or streamline your processes.
Stop Segmenting Life
If you spend time dividing life into two main categories, led by ‘Family vs Work’, you’re going to find it difficult to put them together again. It’s all about how you view your life as a whole. The reason behind this is that if your colleagues or your staff know how important your family life is to you, you can find the support when your two segments do collide.
Be Clear on Your ‘Why?’
You should also be very clear on your ‘why’ – the reason you work as hard as you do. For most entrepreneurs, their ‘why’ is their family or friends.
For others, it can be a personal quest to challenge one’s self or wanting to contribute something specific like a specialized talent that you have.
When you run your business in a way that prioritizes your values, you’ll find your work/life balance faster and easier than your peers and less likely to take on too much work.
Bounce Back From Setbacks
As an entrepreneur, you should hone your skills and learn how to bounce back from situations that don’t go in your favor at work.
Your business will have setbacks occasionally but it’s important to your work/life balance that you figure out a way to not take that stress and disappointment back into the main house with you.
And that works both ways; if a relationship at home is suffering, you have to be able to check those feelings at your office door, so that your business doesn’t suffer because of it. When you’ve mastered this, you will truly be an at home entrepreneur.
Know When To Say ‘No’
A common issue with all entrepreneurs is not knowing when to take a step back from work and allow yourself time off. You do have choices, even though it feels like you can’t say no to work – you can.
You can take a break, and you can say that you want to pass on work to be with family and friends. Stress is a leading cause in the breakdown of families.
If you learn your limitations now and are able to firmly say ‘no’ when you need to, you will minimize the stress that your professional life brings to your personal life and will aid in keeping your family’s happiness on track.
You Must Learn To Stand Alone
Sometimes, you can’t be dictated to by what society expects of you. As a professional, you’ll often be subjected to the pressures of what those in society say that you should be and do.
But you don’t have to live up to the expectations of anyone but yourself. Being a well-rounded professional means knowing what you want from your success and grabbing it – no matter what anyone else says.
It’s All About ‘Give & Take’
There are inevitably going to be situations where you have to work longer days and give way more of yourself to the job, than your average ‘Joe’.
It’s about keeping your expectations at a minimum and readjusting your goals to suit a new direction.
You’ll still have time to pursue your own passions but when you’re at work, you must literally adopt your team leader/business owners’ goals and passions, as if they were your own.
Balancing your personal and professional life is a skill that takes time to acquire. It won’t always be easy but if you’re committed to working toward that balance, you should find that maintaining this balance is definitely achievable.
Edited by Jessica Rose Adams
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