Living the life we crave, with the business we desire, starts with vision and our values.
But the real test happens in the everyday—in what our weeks actually look like.You can have all the plans for a spacious, gentle and profitable business on paper, yet still feel stressed and stretched thin most days.
Bridging the gap between the ideal and the reality is one of the biggest challenges of redesigning a business—something I hear in almost every conversation with small business owners, freelancers and creatives (and have experienced myself).
In this post, I’ll tackle two common hurdles to creating that ideal work, and share a free mini-workshop with you to make your own roadmap.
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#1: Being too ambitious about your time
As humans we are irrepressibly positive about what we can do in the time available. We expect things to take less time than they really do, imagine that we’re always at the top of our game, and generally seem to secretly believe that our days have 36 hours rather than 24.
If you constantly find yourself running out of time, you’ll probably need to take a good look at the plans you’ve made. You might need to acknowledge that your plans are simply too ambitious — or that your energy and capacity look different from others’. And you might feel really frustrated.
If that’s you, here are some gentle suggestions to try out:
- Prioritise: shorten your to-do list by prioritising as radically as you can. What really needs to be done, what can be delegated, what can be moved?
- Try unplanning, the deliberate and intentional making of loose plans to create room in your days, weeks and months;
- Build in a buffer—a big one if you know you’re prone to being too ambitious about your capacity and available time. Think that a task might take 1 hour? Add another 30 minutes, or even a full hour. If you’re done early, that’s a win.
Don’t beat yourself up. Be gentle with yourself. You are dealt the cards you’ve been given, and that can be incredibly unfair, painful and frustrating. But your limits are valid, and here and true (and most probably, non-negotiable).
Most of all: give yourself permission to shape your business the way it serves you. Because you really can.
#2: Forgetting your humanness
So often I’ve had small business owners come to me with a story that is all too familiar: they’re finally running their own business, but are not feeling the spaciousness or autonomy they wanted.
Running a successful, profitable business is not the opposite of running a business that is spacious and gentle—even though it might sometimes feel this way.
Some suggestions to try out:
- Return to your vision and your values for your business, to remind yourself of your foundations;
- Make your life more important than your business: start planning your week by adding the non-negotiables first, the things that serve your humanness like more time for rest, movement, reading, crafting—whatever nourishes you;
Only then plan your business activities. If you’re used to overworking, you might feel like you now actually have less time. You might have to get more intentional with your marketing, to make it lighter, more effective, and less time-consuming. You might need to make decisions about the products and services you offer so they’re better aligned with your capacity. You might need to raise your prices.
Free mini-workshop: designing your workweek
If you’d like to go deeper, I created a free mini-workshop to help you design your ideal workweek. You’ll create a gentle roadmap and next steps, centred on your life, energy and needs.
Like all of my workshops, this one’s gentle, supportive and flexible. Your roadmap isn’t set in stone—it’s something that grows with you. Because your business isn’t static either: it’s living, moving, breathing, changing. And you get to move with it.
📽️ Watch the free mini-workshop below
Grab a cup of your favourite tea, settle in and follow along as you design what your ideal week can look like.
I hope this inspires you to pause and gently reimagine what your week could look like.
Discover more Female Owned workshops from me:
Crafting an intentional year in business
Making space for yourself in your business
Letting go of traditional ideas about work
I’d love to know what resonates with you from this post.
Please feel free to share this post it with business friends, in your newsletter or elsewhere. 💛
I’d love to support you in all phases of your business. Providing clarity, focus and next steps is something that my clients tell me I’m really good at. If you’re curious about how we can work together through 1:1 mentoring, check out what I offer or send me an email–no strings attached. I have payment plans available, and flexible options for mentoring calls.
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