Building Healthier Boundaries Around My Business
In this post, I discuss how I tie my self-worth with how well my business is doing. I reflect further on how I am is trying to challenge this idea in real life.
2/27/20263 min read
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my self worth is often heavily influenced by how my business/work is going. I recently shared an Instagram video where I spoke about this topic and felt it was worth a blog post as well!
What Does This Mean?
Let’s break down what I mean by this - when my business is going poorly, I tend to subconsciously blame myself for it. My mood is largely connected to how my business is going. Running a private practice can bring a lot of ambiguity, since my schedule fluctuates on a daily basis. When a client terminates services, I tend to think to myself “I’m not working hard enough” and “I’m a failure”. Realistically, I’m well aware that I cannot control a lot of how my business goes. Especially considering most of the clients on my schedule came to me from word of mouth referrals, or happened to find my website to seek services, my business’ monetary success is largely from pure luck! Obviously, this is true just for the first point of contact, and how I navigate the relationship after that initial step dictates a lot of its success. But for some reason, my subconscious doesn’t necessarily understand that a lot of how things go is out of my control.
How I Am Trying To Challenge This
A couple things I’ve been doing to move away from this way of thinking has to do with perspective shifting and boundary setting. When that intrusive thought shows up, I’ve been trying to pause and observe it. The question I’m asking myself for this exercise is “am I assigning too much meaning to this?” and often, the answer is an emphatic yes. I don’t do this to invalidate my feelings, rather to challenge the thought before it defines my mood/the rest of my day.
For boundary setting, when I decide to take a mid-day break, you can often find me refreshing my inbox and checking my business Instagram to double check that I don’t have any pending tasks to do before tasks. For some folks, this might seem like a good practice to stay on top of tasks. In my case, I don’t believe this is a necessary step. If you know me personally, you know I’m a very type A person, with detailed to-do lists set up for each day, and thought out systems in place to make sure I complete all my business tasks with minimal error. Considering this, if I check my pending tasks before taking a brief break, the message I send to my brain is “I only allow myself to relax if there are no pending tasks”. If you’re a fellow business owner, you know this will never be the case. Most of our worst reality based nightmares have to do with forgetting a random but important task! I’ve been trying to pause before I reach for my mail app, and ask myself if I really need to do this or if it’s a habit I need to break.
A Message For My Fellow Overachievers
If you’re like me, and tie your self worth tightly to how well your work/business is going, I want you to know that I see you and we can untangle this together! I would love to hear from you, just know that you’re not alone in having to explore this.
