Recently I wrote a guest blog post for the WP Elevation blog on “What To Do When You Hate Your Boss, And Your Boss is YOU!” The topic was a breeze to write as regulating workflow as your own boss is a common struggle for us self-employed folk.
I was pleased at the positive response it received. At one point it was the most visited and most shared of the posts on the entire blog! Here’s an excerpt from the post:
Taking care of yourself is the hardest thing you’ll ever do as a business owner. If you’re like me, you’ll understand. I can sometimes be the worst boss to work for.
We have to get out of the mindset that we work for our clients. Our clients merely partake in our services; we don’t work for them any more than a boutique or restaurant works for its patrons. We work for ourselves. We set our expectations, our pay, our hours, OUR limits!
I want to be a better boss to myself. But that involves me giving myself a break.
In order to find the best way to improve ourselves as our own bosses, let’s go through seven demands that we set on ourselves. If these requirements were imposed on us in a traditional workplace, we all would have quit a long time ago….
Read the whole post over at the WPE blog.
In full transparency, there have been plenty of times I have buried my head in my hands and said that I couldn’t do this anymore. It wasn’t because of lack of clients or because the pay was bad, it was because I wanted to “quit” myself. Thankfully in those times, I had the inner voice that challenged me “GET BETTER.”
After a good night sleep, I would just roll up my sleeves the next day and say to myself, “How can I improve my processes?” “Who can I hire to take off the load I can’t bear?” “Do I need to increase my fees to make productivity flow?”
Out of those times I did the following to pick myself back up:
Created recurring monthly services
Hired a virtual assistant
Hired a developer
Stopped offering unprofitable services
Hired a bookkeeper
Creating, hiring, removing; actionable steps you have to take to love your boss self again.
Don’t get me wrong, this will pop up again in three to six months time, but I’ll take a deep breath, and as the boss AND employee, I’ll just dig to create, hire or remove aspects of my business to secure a better workplace.
Do you have the same struggle? Comment below, and hey, if you can top running your own business from home with three small kids under the age of 5, I want to hear it!