As full-time business owners, entrepreneurs, and self-employed creatives, we often forget how important it is to take care of ourselves while building our respective empires. It is easy to get lost in business management, creating content, balancing books, and maintaining a work/life balance. So here are three boundaries to set in business in order to protect our peace while we get our paper.
- Reclaim Your Time
As entrepreneurs, we often get caught up in being there for customers any time they want us. We pride ourselves on exceptional customer service and work diligently to make sure we have time to cater to clients/customers. We give our time to build our businesses, to maintain our businesses, and to grow our businesses. We spend time advertising, marketing, and promoting day in and day out. We use time to accomplish daily goals and assist clients/customers. With all the time we give, spend, and use for business and clients, we must carve out some time to reclaim for ourselves. Taking time for ourselves reduces the likelihood of burning ourselves out. It also keeps us grounded and closer to our place of peace.
2. Limit Your Accessibility
When building our businesses, we often create a professional email, establish a dedicated phone line, secure a mailing address, and create affiliated social media links to give our clients and customers full access to us. We want to look like a legitimate business owner with a solid presence online and offline. When doing this, we must remember to create a schedule to limit the access we give to others. It can be very disheartening to receive a distress call from a client or customer in the middle of family dinner or a relaxing evening. There is absolutely nothing wrong with providing clients and customers with multiple methods to communicate; however, there is something wrong with not turning off communication at some point. Limiting accessibility allows us to maintain a healthy work/life balance.
3. Know Your Worth
During the beginning of the business-building process, many of us struggled the most with setting our pricing for our goods and services. The struggle was so real because many of us were trying to create a price tag solely for our talents without considering all of the factors. There is a great deal of research that goes into building the business and creating a budget to ensure the success of the business. Once the pricing is established, it is imperative to stand behind it. Constantly changing prices and adjusting fees increases stress and reduces financial growth. Knowing what our talents, skills, and services are worth and pricing them accordingly prepares us for peaceful expansion through consistency and reliability.
Once we sit back and look at how much we have done, how far we have come, and how much we have accomplished, we work hard to protect what we’ve built. Once you’ve found your place of comfort and peace, you are not willing to let that go. Protecting our peace should be a part of our lifestyles instead of a response to less-than-favorable situations. It is ok to set healthy boundaries in business and to enforce them. Now that we’ve reclaimed our time, limited our access, and gotten to know our worth, let’s keep these boundaries in place and create the business we want and the peace we deserve.
Article Written by: Shay Cole| Shay is a writer, author, coach, poet, and publisher. She owns and operates Creative Chameleon LLC, a professional writing and publishing company, specializing in creating custom content for books, blogs, and websites. Shay has self-published a number of books and seeks to help others accomplish the same goal. She also performs her poetry on stages across the country. To learn more about Shay and what she does, please visit the website www.acreativechameleon.com
