Had Enough Hustle? Free Yourself From The “Busy” Trap and Reclaim Your Time
You’re a solo entrepreneur, kickin’ butt and doing all the things! So maybe you can relate when I ask you if you have had this experience before.
You want to take a day off and you think, “I’m too busy to do that.”
You want to turn off your phone for the night but you don't because you think, “I’m too busy, I have so much to do.”
A friend reaches out to have a mid-day coffee date, and you decline because, “I’m just too busy.”
For a lot of us being busy is a badge of honor. It shows how hard we are working and that we are determined to be successful. But is being busy really a measure of how hard working we are?
Are you actually busy or are you perhaps afraid that if you stop for a moment everything will crumble and you’ll feel the guilt that you didn’t do everything you could have?
Being unable to stop working has some surprising root causes, but we’ll get to that in a moment!
Have you ever heard of the term, “Work-a-holic” ?
Lord knows I have and I 100% was guilty of this. What is a workaholic anyways? It isn’t about how many hours you work. It’s more about what happens when you aren’t working! A workaholic tends to have a compulsion to work and has a lot of trouble switching out of “work mode.”
And it happens to a lot of solo entrepreneurs.
That could be because we choose to go solo so that we can do everything ourselves and not have to put trust in others or it could be because we fear that our presence is the only thing holding our business together. Both reasons are not good for your health—mental or physical!
Here are nine of the signs that you might be a workaholic:
You get stressed when you’re NOT working
You don’t have any real hobbies
You devalue personal priorities
You don’t take real vacations
Your mind is at work, even if you are not
You're too accessible
You hide that you're working from your loved ones
You overbook yourself
If you hire employees to help, you micromanage them.
While reading through these, you may feel like this is you. And that is okay, acknowledging is the first step!
The real key to shifting through this is knowing that being a workaholic is most often an avoidance coping mechanism.
We tend to keep ourselves so overbooked and busy simply because we are avoiding trauma or pain. And when we STOP working, we feel the anxiety or worry start to set in. Then we rush back to keeping ourselves busy, doing all the things in our business (even the things we don’t enjoy doing) because delegating means we would have more time to ourselves.
You may find yourself rationalizing that you have to all of these things you don’t enjoy because no one else will do it like you. Or that it’s only your responsibility to take care of the emails, customer service, accounting/book keeping, or marketing.
Successful companies are not functioning on one single person.
No matter how much someone may be the face of their company, they have help. They outsource some tasks or they have an assistant.
For your company to grow you have to learn to let go a little bit and put trust in other people.
What is really behind your fear that has you overworking yourself? And what can you do to be less busy but more productive?
Is your fear that no one else will do the job right? It’s time to recognize that there are people out there whose job it is to take the tasks that you don’t like off your hands and that those people can love and support your business. (pssst, I can help you with that!)
When you delegate to others then you have the time to do the parts of your business that you love and enjoy the reason why you started your biz in the first place!
If your fear is rooted deeper than that it might not be related to work at all. In that case it’s time to dig into your mindset and heal past trauma.
Your responsibly to is ensure your happiness, healing and joy.
When you work from that space, you feel peace with only doing the work that makes you feel fulfilled, and delegating the rest to people who shine in those areas.
That’s the mindset work that you need to do now to free yourself from the hustle and grind!
From someone who is a recovering workaholic, I’ve done the work to get to the other side and it feels like freedom, and my friend— you deserve the same.
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If you’re ready to take your biz to the next level, I have a new masterclass out that is totally free! It’s called Using Manifestation To Skyrocket Your Small Biz! Reserve your spot here
