A behind-the-scenes tour of my business
“What’s it really like to run a business as a life coach?” you ask.
Well, then. Let me share.
Life: I wake up around 6:30-7:00. I used to not get up until I heard my daughter’s feet running down the hall, and my husband handled the earlier wake-up times. These days, I feel aligned around the idea that I want to get up earlier and get time (and coffee) for myself before the day gets revved up with various and sundry to-dos.
I used to check a voice messaging app first thing in the morning to see if there was anything mission critical that someone had left me a VM about, but these days I’m unhooking from immediately doing something business-related in the morning.
We have breakfast together as a family. I stay in my pajamas as long as possible. My daughter colors, reads books, sometimes we dance in the kitchen to the Dixie Chicks. Either my husband or myself drop her off at school, and some mornings I have one of two chiropractic appointments that I pop in for, each week. I’m usually home and ready to rock the day by 9am.
Creative Focus: With a few exceptions—launches or times when I’m on a deadline for a project—I adhere to a “Pleasure, First” work policy. Nope, nothing saucy in that statement (though hey, now that I think of it, that could also be an interesting way to start the workday), but rather I start my workday with creative work that brings me pleasure. I’ve learned the hard way that to do it differently will inevitably mean feeling burned out, or trying to write/create and hitting nothing but blocks. I think that creativity generates from down time, so that’s also how I use this time. Time just to read, to relax, to let ideas germinate, sketch a few things down. “Creativity over productivity.” — Lianne Raymond
Work: I use the Daily Greatness business planner, and once a year I define annual business goals. Each quarter, I define quarterly goals that feed those annual goals. And, each week, I look at what I’ve got going on and prioritize. I use the Productive App to remind myself to do a weekly check in and carve out that time and space. In Basecamp, I break things into to-do lists and delegate to my team. Work tasks range from changing something on the backend of my website to writing to creating graphics to setting up newsletters to being interviewed for podcasts. The longer I’ve been in business, the more I’ve been able to hire people for different roles, which has allowed me to focus more on just facilitation and creation. I’m usually working between 11am and 2:45pm, with a break for lunch.
Money: I’m a fan of the idea that we are all in our relationship with our money. If I’m in relationship with something, I need to give it respect, time, attention, validation, and listen closely to what it needs. My worst money habit? Getting the bills paid, and not reserving for pleasure. My best money habit? I’m not big on emotional spending; I feel very clear that if I’m feeling crappy, spending money on stuff that I don’t really need is not likely to make me feel better.
Connection: I feel really fortunate that my life has expanded greatly and I get to be in contact with so many people during the day. I’m highly introverted, but enjoy a little texting and Voxer time with kindreds. Most things are impromptu, though. Scheduling calls with friends (really, scheduling calls in general) brings up this feeling of constraint—I don’t like the feeling of something I “have to do” at a set time—so I rarely have them.
What’s Most Time Consuming: Anything that has to do with something being broken (ugh). So, a link not working, something not going live when we scheduled it to go live, stuff like that. Everything else mostly feels fun, so I don’t think of it as “time consuming,” but for sure, when tech issues come up and it’s on me to either figure it out or find the person who can, I feel like my time is quite literally “being consumed.”
CrossFit, baby! I’m bananas about CrossFit. Afternoons are when I grab my kiddo from school and we go to CrossFit, where she hangs out with the kids and I go act like a kid–jumping off of stuff, slamming stuff, running, lifting, hanging, (kipping) swinging (or aspiring to kipping swinging, since I can’t yet do a precise kipping swing…). CrossFit has been my jam. It’s stereotyped as being a bro environment where you only go if you’re already fit and athletic, but that’s not at all the case. I’m blown away by the results I get, both with how I look and feel. I used to be a triathlete. I’d do my long run on Mondays, Master’s swim followed by spin class on Tuesday evenings, a shorter run on Wednesdays, a distance swim on Thursdays, a distance bike ride followed by a short run on Fridays, and vinyasa flow yoga on either Friday or Sunday. It was like having a part-time job, and I basically always felt sore and tired. With CrossFit, I feel energized.
The kiddo: Evenings are all of us together and are full of more book reading, drawing, dinner, baths, meltdowns, and all kinds of wonder. Weekends are when we get a lot of our quality time as a family. We’ve been hiking since she was four years old, going on average 2-3 miles but sometimes we’ve gone as long as 4 miles. My husband finds the trails, I pack the snacks, we roll out for a new adventure.
The hubs: We get one date day on the calendar each month, and we always eat dinner or have a glass of wine together after our daughter has gone to bed. He leaves me post-it notes on my office door, and I send him Bitmojis of myself in compromising positions. It works. We are in regular communication in pockets of the day, and we always know that we need more time when we start picking at one another. One of my favorite things about our relationship is how often the “little things” are present that add up to something bigger. The “little things” like silly jokes, pinching each other on the butt, hugs, sharing funny memes that we find, and offering one another gratitude for the everyday tasks like making dinner or cleaning up the kitchen.
Household: How the hell do I run the household, with all of that going on? Simplifying meal planning was the big first step. I created two weeks worth of menus. Week 1 has its shopping list; week 2 has its shopping list. We just flip back and forth. The meal plan is posted on a cork board in the kitchen, so that my husband also knows what’s for dinner and can get started on something if needed. We each dump the same amount of money into an account for bill paying. The rest—laundry, housecleaning—gets shoved into nooks and crannies here and there. Our house is often messy. Everyone’s fine.
What makes it easier: that I’m not in my first few years of business; that I know what I want my business to be about; that I’ve diversified my offerings between digital programs, life coaching, our life coach training program, speaking. Having created all of those things, now my attention turns to the sharing about and running of those things, and it’s always less time-consuming to manage what you’ve created than to be starting from scratch in business, figuring out what you want your brand and message to be about, getting a website up.