Erin Thomas Wong (00:52)
Life Friendly Business podcast is back. It's been a little more of an extended break from recording this podcast than I had intended, but I am back and it's been so fantastic to have people reaching out to me who've been listening to this podcast and telling me what impact it's had on them and the things that they've taken action with since listening. And I love, love, love to hear these stories because
If you don't let me know you're listening, I don't know. So please do reach out to me. You can find me on social media at @lifefriendlybiz or come to my website, lifefriendlybusiness.com and get in touch. Let me know how you're finding this podcast and if there's any hot topics you would like me to talk about. you know, the idea of this podcast is to share with you my life friendly approach to business.
And I know what a difference this has made in my life and to my business, but also the difference it's making to the women that I work with as well. And I wanted to share that something that happened fairly recently for me, which has really highlighted the power of implementing these life-friendly strategies into my business. So a few months ago, I got the kind of phone call that we all dread. It was a stranger.
calling me to tell me that my son had come off his bike on the way home from school. Heart-stopping moment. Jumped in the car, went to find him lying half on the road, half on the pavement, in a terrible state. That night at hospital, they did CT scans. At one point, they said he'd broken both his legs and his arm. Luckily, it was just one break in his arm, but his knees were really inflamed and he couldn't walk for quite a while.
and he had concussion and they basically said that helmet saved his life. It was so traumatic and you know that weekend my world stopped, my world stopped and he was off school for three weeks and then I would say it took another three weeks for things to kind of settle down and to feel normal again so six weeks.
And that came out the blue. That was one of those unexpected curve balls that we just cannot predict. And it would have been really, really easy for my business to fall apart during that time, because to be honest, I was not okay. I was pretty traumatized by what happened. And not only did I have less time to work, but also less head space, less energy, less motivation. And so...
it would have been really easy for my business to just stop, for my marketing to stop, you know, for money to stop coming in. But it didn't. In fact, I did have one of the best cash months I've had in quite a while, that same month, because of the life-friendly business strategies that I've adopted and that I teach other people to do.
So this stuff really matters. This stuff isn't fluffy. This is about getting things in place in your business so that your business can support you when curve balls happen. Because I know I'm not alone in this. I know that probably most of you listening will have moments in your life where you just can't work out how you're going to be able to carry on working or you're distracted.
because you're caring for other people, maybe your own health is suffering and you're wondering how do I keep the wheels turning here?
And if we over schedule constantly, if we work in a way that's really rigid, it just takes a very small thing to go wrong for everything to be blown out of the water. So I want to help you adapt these strategies so that you can also have a life-friendly business, not be tied to your desk, but also when things happen, when the unexpected happens.
your business can still continue even without you at the helm.
Now the thing is, the first thing that you need to get when you're trying to plan for success whilst also preparing for setbacks is you need clarity. We all need clarity. And so many of us are walking around with a snow globe brain. I've talked about this before. It's one of my favourite analogies. You think about a snow globe all shaken up.
or the snow's going everywhere, you literally can't see clearly through that water. Now, if you're making decisions from that place, they're not necessarily gonna be the best decisions. That's where knee-jerk reactions come from and overlooking things and making mistakes as well. So we have to learn how to get that clarity in our businesses. And...
The way that I do that is by remembering the snow globe brain when I'm feeling overwhelmed especially and think, okay, what do I need to do right now to let my brain settle, to let my thoughts settle? And that's different for each of us. But for me, definitely recognising that I actually do need a transition period, especially after school holidays, but also just the weekend. You know, on a weekend, I'm being mum, I'm ferrying the kids around, we're doing different things. It's a different pace.
And then Monday morning comes and you have all the stress of school run if you've got kids, forgetting things, you know, making packed lunches. And then we expect ourselves to just instantly click into work mode and start doing. But what really helps with clarity is to be able to acknowledge the fact that we need a little bit of time to transition and, you know, let our brain settle. So...
Please don't schedule things for first thing on a Monday morning if you don't have to. Allow that time. And that's what I call CEO time. So every Monday morning without fail, this is one of my non-negotiables, I go to a coffee shop by 8 a.m. and I sit down with my notepad and I rewrite my to-do list. And so that gives me an opportunity to really think about is this still as urgent as it felt?
Do I actually need to be doing this? Has something changed? And is this aligned to the bigger picture of what I'm trying to achieve right now? And knowing that I have that time every Monday morning sets me off in the right way. It means that I'm starting the week being proactive rather than reactive. So having clarity, giving yourself regular CEO time, these two things alone will make a huge difference to the way you're feeling about your business and how you show up.
for your business. That's what it's all about. And if we want to be able to plan in a way that, you know, our business can support us when things go wrong, we need to be planning ahead. We need to have like maybe, you know, at least 90 days, 90 days. If you can work, I know it's really hard to like, you can't obviously plan a whole year. That can feel completely overwhelming. But like two or three months ahead.
And that way it gives you that overview of what are you trying to sell at this time? What do you need to be marketing? Is there anything seasonal that you're tying into? But also what's going on in your life in that time? Are there school holidays coming up? Do you need to do something for your parents? Are you caring for them? What are the different responsibilities that you've got? And this, life-friendly approach is all about taking that into account and recognising that we're not superhuman and we do have limited time and energy.
in order to do what we need to do on a daily basis. So that means making difficult decisions. It means saying no to some things because so many of us are people pleasers and we say yes to other people at the detriment of ourselves, at the detriment of our own wellbeing. Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. I spoke to one of my clients earlier this week.
and she's doing so many different things like so many of us do. We want to do all these different things because we can do all these different things and people keep asking us for all these different things and I said to her I know you I know you can do all those things but that doesn't mean that you should and what are you saying no to right now and she came back to me and said I'm saying no to time with my kids and to my own mental health and that was like whoa.
that's not sustainable and that does not feel good. It doesn't feel good. So we need to do something to change that. So when you listen to this podcast, my goal is hopefully that you're going to resonate with some of the things that I'm saying, but you're also going to take action because if you're resonating and you know that something doesn't feel good, we need to change it.
because it's way too easy to get caught up in the day to day of our lives. So many of us are living in survival mode right now and the days, the weeks, the months, the years are passing by when this stuff hasn't been dealt with and you've got that feeling in your stomach that this doesn't feel good and you start to resent stuff. You start to resent other people. Maybe you resent your business.
It's time to make a change. It's time to act on those feelings. So I would love you to start thinking about what you can get in place in your business so that when the expected unexpected, because it's always going to happen, something is always going to happen that's out of our control. When that happens, can your business still keep running?
Now, obviously I know that if you're a one man band and you're actually fulfilling a service, yeah, you might need to make some cancellations, but have you still got marketing going on out there so that you're still bringing in leads, so that you're still making sales? Have you got some way that you're still keeping in touch with your customers? Maybe you can be using automations so that you don't have to be tied to your desk. So if something terrible happens and you're ill or one of your loved ones is ill.
You know that you can take that time to step back and your business won't collapse. That's what the life-friendly approach is all about. And I've got lots of episodes in the bank that you can listen to if you haven't already, but I'm all about putting in systems and processes to help support you. And yes, that does include automations and software, but that does not take the human touch out of what you do.
We all know that people buy people and we are our own USP. So we need to look after ourselves. We need to look after our own health and our own mental health and acknowledge all the other stuff that we're carrying in our lives and how that's going to affect how we show up in our business. So to be the best boss to ourselves that we can be, we need to show ourselves grace.
I really hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please do share with any of your friends who you think need to hear this and I will see you next time.
