Has running an online business and balancing it with your personal life turned out a lot more challenging than you ever imagined?
As a Life Balance Coach & Strategist working with female freelancers, online service providers, and small business owners, I regularly hear stories of women who set up their businesses to create a better lifestyle for themselves while doing fulfilling work they’re passionate about.
They…
- Craved more time for themselves, their hobbies and fun adventures
- Dreamt of enjoying more special moments with loved ones
- Imagined making more money than in their corporate jobs
In reality, female entrepreneurs often find themselves working longer and harder than when they were employees. Far from leading the lives they dream of. Some start questioning if it’s even possible to achieve the freedom and success they desire.
Do you relate to this, too?
If so, you’re probably wondering if working with a life balance coach can help you create the life you imagined you’d lead by running a service-based business online.
Maybe you’ve been thinking for quite some time that it’d be great to get some personalised help, but haven’t felt ready to take the leap. And perhaps, you’re questioning if now is the right time for you to make that investment in yourself.
So if you’re considering working with a life balance coach (or booking a complimentary consultation with me), here are 8 key signs that indeed it’s time and worthwhile to get outside help to create the lifestyle and success you desire.
- You’re an ambitious business owner & want to enjoy life without burning out
- You’re fed up feeling you’ve not achieved enough despite working long hours
- The traditional productivity methods don’t work for you consistently
- You’re tired of holding yourself back & want to progress faster in your business
- You crave to have time for yourself
- You’ve had enough of cookie-cutter approaches that don’t fit you
- You want to follow the right path for you but struggle to stay on course
- You’re done with figuring everything out by yourself & see value in support
Let’s dive deeper into the 8 most common signs and find out if it’s time you got help from a professional life balance coach.
1. You’re an ambitious business owner & want to enjoy life without burning out
You’re passionate about your work and have ambitions for how you want your business to evolve. Yet, you know that running a business, whether solo or with a team, can be all-consuming and there is always loads to do.
Working from home and for yourself means that work is always just there. At the reach of your fingertips.
Maybe you’re getting frustrated that you aren’t spending as much time as you’d like with your partner and your family. And you haven’t caught up with your friends for a long time. Or whatever it is that you dreamt of when you left your last job.
Or do you put everyone else first and you rarely find time for yourself? Perhaps, you’re getting annoyed with yourself because you’ve been meaning to exercise for months but you hardly have any energy to go for a run or even do a workout at home.
Hands down. It can be tough a balancing act.
You may already have worked with a Business Coach or Mentor to help you grow your business. However, typically they tend to focus solely on your business.
How can coaching help you create a more balanced life?
If you’re anything like my favourite clients, your business and doing meaningful work you love is an expression of who you are and an integral part of your life. This is exactly why I use the term ‘life balance’ and not ‘work-life balance’.
And let’s be honest as much as you love your clients and what you do, you want more out of your life, right?
This is precisely why as a life balance coach, I help you look at your life holistically.
In our first session, we’ll review how you feel about all the different areas of your life i.e. your health & wellbeing, personal development, leisure time, business, finances, home environment and relationships.
We dig deep to understand your values, individuality and priorities. Once you have this deeper level of awareness of what’s truly important to you, I will support you in setting aligned, inspiring goals and outcomes for your business and personal life.
2. You’re fed up feeling you’ve not achieved enough despite working long hours
You love the core of what you do. You’ve been pouring your heart and soul into your business to make it a success for quite some time now.
Does your head keep spinning thinking about your overwhelming and never-ending to-do list even when you hit the pillow late at night?
Maybe you’re wearing a number of different hats in your business on top of serving your clients. Trying to keep up your presence on social media. Doing the admin. The bookkeeping. The marketing activities. Sorting out the tech. I get it even just typing this out sent my head spinning.
Naturally, you take a pride in your work, always striving for perfection and to deliver excellent service to your clients.
Despite working so hard, you often feel like you’ve not achieved enough.
How will coaching help you perform better?
Overwhelm can happen easily particularly when you’re a one-woman show. So focusing and consistently prioritising taking action towards what will make the biggest difference to help you achieve your business and personal goals is key.
Working with a coach will help you to:
- Gain clarity and create a strategy with inspiring goals and outcomes based on the sage of your business
- Walk away with a manageable plan of action between sessions
- Manage your time and energy more effectively
- Improve your focus and get what’s important done
- Keep you on track through accountability
- Reduce stress, overwhelm and feel more in control of your day
3. The traditional productivity methods don’t work for you consistently
As a smart businesswoman, you’ve probably tried various ways to manage your time more effectively and be more productive.
If you’re anything like me and all my female clients, you may have found that traditional productivity and time management methods sometimes work. Sometimes not at all. You may have even felt frustrated that you can’t stick to them day in and day out.
You’re not alone.
At the start of my coaching career, I was a Productivity Coach and even though I knew a ton of techniques and methods, there were days when I felt like an Impostor.
After much frustration and questioning how good I was, I discovered that traditional business productivity teachings while having a lot of awesome insights, have a lot of shortfalls, especially for women.
They are typically created by men and for men.
In particular, popular business productivity methods don’t take into account:
- The different stages that you go through as a woman each month
- Your personal responsibilities or circumstances
- Your personality, tendencies and strengths
- What is holding you back from taking action
During my Personal Performance Coaching training and Continuing Professional Development, I learned a lot about the last three aspects.
The female cycle was never even considered. This is what lead me to create my unique female-centric coaching approach.
How is a female-centric coaching approach more effective?
Did you know that women who are in their fertile years can optimise their productivity by synchronising their business activities with their menstrual cycle?
WAIT! WHAT?
This was a huge eye-opener for me, too!
As a woman, who is in her reproductive years, you can optimise your productivity by synchronising your business activities with your menstrual cycle so you can achieve more with less stress. And finally, drop feeling guilty about not achieving enough!
Wow! Now take a moment to let that sink in.
This is why I’m so passionate about teaching women this life-changing female-centric approach.
When we work together, I help you to create a structure and flow to how you lead your life and run your business that taps into the wisdom of your feminine energy and natural cycle so that you can achieve more of what matters to you with ease.
4. You’re tired of holding yourself back and want to progress faster in your business
Deep down, you know you’re really good. Scratch that. A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. at what you do.
But that annoying critical voice keeps on popping up and telling you that you’re not enough. You need to learn more. You need to be even more experienced. You have to have more qualifications. Blah… Blah… Blah…
Does your inner critic ever get so loud that you forget to appreciate how amazing you already are? How much you already know! What invaluable experience you already have!
Perhaps you tend to discount your wins and your achievements. Or do you continuously sabotage your own success?
If you feel like you should have been further ahead in your business then you already are, it’s probably because you’re holding yourself back. You’re keeping yourself small. You’re not having the impact that you want. It’s unnecessarily slowing you down and maybe even prevent you from creating a business you’re really proud of and the lifestyle you desire.
How can coaching help you develop an empowering mindset?
This is where having an unbiased, skilful coach can help you draw out all of the awesomeness that is already within you.
One of my favourite aspects of coaching is helping you focus on what is within your control right now, on your capabilities, knowledge, experience, creativity and transferable skills.
This heightened level of self-awareness will enable you to stop, or at least mitigate, your tendency to discount your contribution. You embrace who you already are, what you bring to the table just as you are. You get to truly see your strengths and value your existing knowledge and experience.
Yes, you get to kick that Impostor Syndrome to the curb!
It’s possible by shining the light on how you may be holding yourself back from achieving what you want and challenging you in a gentle, patient, caring and supportive way. (No bullies needed)
Plus, I will be your cheerleader along the way. We’ll regularly review and celebrate your journey of how far you have come and learn to integrate more celebration into your life.
5. You crave to have time for yourself
From dedicating yourself so much to making your business work and taking care of your family, if you have one, you may be feeling like you’re losing yourself in the process.
All your time and energy goes into keeping things afloat that you either rarely find the time to do fun things and have forgotten all about your hobbies or when you get the time, you’re so tired you don’t have an ounce of energy left.
How can coaching help you be at your best?
An integral role as your life balance coach is to help you review your life as a whole and what truly matters to you.
As part of that, we’ll analyse how you actually spend your time and where your energy goes.
Firstly, you will get to understand how you truly spend your time and learn how to manage conflicting priorities. Then you’ll learn how to manage the day-to-day energy sappers and how to raise your energy levels.
Managing your energy as a woman and not only your time is essential when it comes to creating a life you love.
So I will help you develop and instil healthy habits, behaviours and rituals that support you to be at your best.
6. You’ve had enough of cookie-cutter approaches that don’t fit you
As an avid learner, you’ve probably signed up for classes, courses, memberships, masterminds or maybe even worked with a mentor. The promise of ‘Follow my footsteps to the holy grail’.
But you’ve been there and done that. After trial and error, you’ve figured out that cookie-cutter approaches and rigid blueprints just aren’t right for you anymore.
Maybe your voice gets lost as you scramble for attention in large group programs and memberships.
Or the advice you received wasn’t tailored to your personality, your personal circumstances and your business. And if it was lit was made of lots of bitty pieces that you still need to figure out how to fit together.
What is different about one-to-one coaching?
By working one-on-one, with each session, I get to know you, your life and your business holistically and on a deeper level.
Instead of dishing out quick advice, I bring to the forefront your personality tendencies, strengths, skills and experience. For example, one of the things that my clients have found incredibly useful is learning how they respond to external and internal expectations using Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework.
HINT: It sheds light on why just-do-it or the do-as-you’re-told-approaches don’t work for most people.
Taking into account such personal insights when deciding the steps you are going to take and using a coaching approach is incredibly powerful for carving out the right path for you.
Ultimately, it helps you achieve the aspirations you have for your business and personal life with less resistance and more ease and joy.
7. You want to follow the right path for you but struggle to stay on course
Working with a coach naturally creates a sense of accountability as you report back on your progress at the start of each coaching session.
At the start of each session, you will share what went well or as planned. What didn’t. What got in the way. What you’ve learnt. What you will do differently next time/going forward to help you stay on track.
There are many different reasons why we get off track or struggle to do the things we say want to do.
In an increasingly noisier online world, it’s more difficult than ever to stay in your own lane and not get sidetracked by what other people are doing.
My VIP Alignment Method was designed to stay in your own lane and focus on what’s most important to you.
How does The VIP Alignment Method help you stay on course?
The VIP Alignment Method is my signature five-pillar female-centric coaching approach.
The first step is to get crystal clear on Your VIP i.e. Your Values, Individuality and Priorities. These set the foundations of everything else in your life and how you run your business.
When you’re tempted to get side-tracked by what others are doing, I will check in with you how that aligns with your overall goals and ambitions and if it’s really the path you want to follow. Naturally, there is a lot more to that but the VIP is your guiding North Star.
This is why it’s so much easier to say “Bye-bye comparisonitis and shiny-object syndrome!” and stay on track.
8. You’re done with figuring everything out by yourself and see value in support
Running a business, juggling various responsibilities in your personal life is a tall order. When you’re spinning so many plates, it can be it’s hard to see the wood for the trees.
If you appreciate being challenged in a stimulating way and you’re always looking to improve how you do things, then working with a coach can be an invaluable experience for you.
In summary, a professional coach:
- Helps you raise your awareness with powerful questioning techniques so you can get clear on what you truly desire and who you are at your core
- Assists you to create practical, step-by-step action plans to reach your goals and aspirations
- Keeps you connected to what motivates you and drives you
- Provides ongoing support through any changes or obstacles you may encounter
- Shines a light on your blind spots and help you see new perspectives and opportunities
- Helps you develop an empowering mindset and overcome unhelpful beliefs and thought patterns
- Provides you with tools, techniques and strategies to create lasting change and success beyond your work together
OVER TO YOU:
Now you’ve read the eight key indicators of why working with a life balance coach could be a worthwhile investment, you can make an informed decision about what is right for you.
If you would like to learn more about the VIP Alignment Method and explore what it’s like to work with me as your coach, get in touch.
Ready to hire a coach?
To find out if we’d be an amazing fit to work together, book a complimentary, no-obligation consultation call.
