When life is more important than work but work is your life…….

The last 3 months have been a series of challenges for me and my business.  I lost my darling pussy cat Mr M just before Christmas:

A big project I was working on failed and I lost a lot of money (and my confidence to boot).  My partner’s uncle passed away and this was closely following by a family friend.  Although both funerals were a celebration of those who knew and loved them, both had died way too young.  Then on Monday my grandma passed away as well.  She had been ill for a long time, she died peacefully in her sleep and I have no doubt she is now causing chaos up there with her husband Charles – bottle of lambrini and box of broken biscuits in hand.

Here they are…….

I gave up on doing any work mid way through Monday; spent some time with my family, sharing stories and helping with errands.  I am not going to lie, my task list for that day had been quite long.  I had a lot of work to do but found myself making another pot of coffee and handing out the sausage rolls – I decided that pastry should be the grieving food of choice, other foods are available……..

I felt guilty about not working!

 Does that sound ridiculous to anyone??  On the day that my Grandma died I was feeling guilty about work.   Not only that but I am the bloody boss and no one was going to tell me that I should have been doing something else!  When I first started my business I met with a business coach Chris Grady  http://www.chrisgrady.org/

One of the things he told me that was once in a while I should have a day to myself.  A day away from work, where I am not worrying about client deadlines.  A day for me, doing something nice, relaxing and spending time with the people I loved.  Monday was the epitome of what that day should look like and lets face it, I was probably not going to get anything useful done anyway!

As a small business owner, I sometimes forget that that clients are people too.  They probably have families, they might have had days when working is the last thing on their mind and they definitely wouldn’t mind if you said to them

“I am not going to work today, I am having a difficult time at the moment and I want to spend time with the people I love”.

If there are people out there reading this, thinking ‘I couldn’t do that, my clients/work colleague would be cross and feel that I had let them down’   THEY WOULD BE FINE WITH IT!  If they genuinely won’t be ok with you taking a personal day then my suggestion would be GET A NEW CLIENT!  You don’t need them in your life.

Running your own small business can sometimes mean living in your own bubble – learn more about potentially breaking out of that bubble in my latest blog http://lccreativeadmin.co.uk/to-network-or-not-to-network

Please remember that once in a while its fine to break out of that bubble, and take some time once to do what we want and be with who we want.

Returning to the title briefly; Life and work don’t have to be separate entities.  If you love doing something that earns you money, then you are definitely winning at life.  However, don’t become a slave to your work.  Take back control and sometimes just STOP……

I have broken every rule in the book with this blog.  There have been no themes, a natual flow of writing or calls to action.  I have written things unnecessarily in CAPITALS – apologies if it feels like I am shouting at you.  You know what?  Sometime you have to just follow your instincts, not have plan (phew that was hard to say!) and just write.

Happy Easter and happy creating!