You Asked, They Answered: How Do You Manage Work-Life Balance?
Some days it feels like there aren't enough hours in the day. Let's admit it - we all take on too much. Time and again, we hear from readers who want to know how the women of Alexandria Stylebook do it all. So, we posed the question to them. How do our small business owners manage to run successful small businesses while maintaining personal time? Read on to see their answers.
Amy: The short answer is I don't. The truth is that as an entrepreneur, you are always thinking about your business. However, there is one day a week when I break free. Every Friday, Kelley and I work out with a trainer at 11am, then I go to a restaurant where there is very little chance of running into anyone I know and snuggle up in a booth to eat a tasty lunch and scroll my phone. I schedule around it and protect that time because it's so important to me. Friday is now my favorite day which is surprising because I never thought I would look forward to working out!
Rachel: Work-life balance - what's that? Ha! In all seriousness, our business is super seasonal, so I am really deliberate about scheduling every second of every day this time of year. Recently I started waking up a full hour before my kids and husband every morning, and it's restored my sanity. It's my "me time" to drink a quiet cup of coffee, catch up on a show, organize, order groceries, all the things.
Dr. Megan Brown: Honestly, I have not been motivated or driven in my work life for a few months. Fighting to save the studio over the past two years of this pandemic and now realizing we have made it (yay!) is allowing me time to breathe, and I am not feeling guilty about it in the least. So I have decided to give myself grace, focus on my teenager, and recharge after a constant two-year hustle. But my normal work-life balance involves looking forward to my two weeks in Bermuda every summer. This year I will be there twice! First this June with a Pilates crew and then second in August with just my family. It is truly my heaven.
Adrien: The term "work-life balance" is super stressful for most to even say aloud. After all, don't we all typically envision a scale with one side representing our personal lives and the other our work lives? This insinuates they SHOULD be equal. Let's admit as entrepreneurs, they simply cannot.
For me, my game changer was when, about five years ago, an executive coach convinced me to get up SUPER early in the morning to get my "big work" done before the sun comes up. I do, and I accomplish a ton of work and self-care before our daughter returns from swim practice at 6:15am, and I make her breakfast, a joy for me.
Since I teach work-life balance to our corporate clients, I'd say the biggest strategy I use myself, outside of my 4:45am wake-up, is my ability to schedule small personal life activities IN my workday. I schedule something for our teens or for me, walk outside during work phone calls, and I boundary my time to one task at a time.
Liz: To achieve a healthy work-life balance, I rely on an amazing team of individuals to assist with my business. We work collaboratively to curate and design gorgeous, unique jewelry for our discerning clients. At Mystique, I've created an atmosphere and culture that embraces our passion for our work as well as our love for family. Family is at the core of everything we do.
Dr. Lauren Fisher: Through all my years of balance and disruption, I found the thing that helps me most with staying near a healthy work-life balance is to make sure I go back to the basics of sleep, good food, and movement. Movement is really the thing I will make time for, even when I don't have time. I might even get up a half-hour earlier that day to work out or just go for a quick 20-minute run. That movement, the energy, exercise and cortisol release, and the way that I feel about myself after movement energizes me throughout the day and helps with clarity, focus, and grounding. So that is one thing I try to keep on my agenda to the best of my abilities.
Andi: I've been a mom for sixteen years next week. I first realized what it meant to be married to the Army when my husband deployed to Iraq when I was three months pregnant with our first child. He deployed when our daughter was born, and he returned home when she was eleven months of age. Sixteen years ago, technology wasn't what it is today, and he didn't know she had arrived for three days.
I've learned things from this life of ours that I never thought I'd need to know. Installing car seats is hard. Batteries in the smoke detectors inevitably die in the middle of the night, and it's always the device way up in the ceiling that's impossible to reach. Shoveling snow is not fun. If a bird gets stuck in your chimney, call a professional immediately. If your basement floods, take the kids and the dog to a hotel. Learn to snake a toilet because plumbers are expensive and never timely.
I'm the baseball mom trying to navigate competitive sports next to all the baseball dads. I'm the only parent at back-to-school night when two grades coincide. I'm the math tutor and the Uber driver. I'm the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. I'm the enforcer and the consoler. I'm the driver-ed teacher. I'm also the one explaining why Daddy is gone all the time, that he doesn't have a job like other dads, and that he's safe (even if I'm just guessing on that one).
But maybe the most important lesson I've learned is that I can't do it all, and that's okay. It's okay to give myself permission to acknowledge I'm not Wonder Woman. Things will fall through the cracks. It will happen, and life goes on.
