Loving your way all the way to a successful business
So in our monthly investigation of themes we are in February, and love. For today’s blog post, it is time to talk about loving ourselves. As an entrepreneur it is often hard to find the time to do the things I should to love myself and from talking to others, I know that I am not the only one that feels that way. Somehow caring about me doesn’t feel as productive the many other things I do on a daily basis.
As a reader of this blog, you likely know me just as an little icon picture so you might not know that I have struggled with my weight for my whole adult life. Some years I do better and some I do worse. 2011, as I launched Spring Insight, I did worse. It wasn’t that I didn’t try. Indeed near the end of the year I created a support group of friends and even set up a somewhat brilliant but complex commitment device to stick to my plan. That attempt failed. I started again at the beginning of this year (part of my three words to describe Spring Insight). This time around, I gave a lot of thought to what didn’t work last time around. I came to an interesting conclusion… I was being to gentle on myself. My prior planning had been built around the idea that if I was too strict I would fail. I needed to build in “days off”. What I found was that I would inevitably fail as I tried to “reenter” plan after a planned day off.
The thing is… success begets success.
Every time I gave myself a free day, I was undermining my resolve and retraining my brain that I wasn’t serious getting back on track meant retraining my brain AGAIN. This year, I am serious and let me tell you what serious looks like. Serious looks like being engaged and intentional every single day, consistently making decisions that advance my goal and not letting up. Every day I succeed, I want it just a bit more. Funny how similar that is to the fundamentals of running a business right? And there my friends is the point of this post. When we entrepreneurs think of loving ourselves and taking care of ourselves as something unrelated to our business, we aren’t looking at the whole picture. If you don’t take care of your biggest asset, you aren’t taking care of your business.
~e