One thing that I have really had to adjust to since taking the self-employment plunge is the long lone-working hours.
Of course, I get the opportunity to talk to lots of new people every day, for which I am extremely fortunate and grateful for, however, my entire professional career has been spent working as part of a team.
In fact, when I was teaching and working with vulnerable teenagers in a secondary school, I honestly considered my team as family. Not only did they know how to support me as an individual but they could just sense the days where something wasn’t quite right (and believe me, I had a LOT of those days!)
Harmony Holistic Therapy are a team who work together, talk every day and share everything, but WE are usually always separate. With this in mind, I sometimes have moments of total quiet, a rare and welcomed privilege when I was teaching but totally strange and alien for me now. When I have back-to-back treatments and I feel like my lower back is going to crumble into dust and I my wrists are going to fall off I literally gag for 5 minutes to sit on my ass and contemplate life. But then I have the other times where I am sat for 2 or 3 hours at a time waiting for clients to come in and contemplating life gradually turns into contemplating loneliness, boredom and misery!
If I was the person that I am working towards being, I would be super proactive, keeping busy, cleaning, training, doing literally anything useful. Buuuuuut sadly that would be way too easy, wouldn’t it? Instead, I often find myself doing what I fear more than anything. Nothing.
Total and complete apathy. Procrastination. Deflation.
I HATE IT
As someone who battles every day with their mental health and not knowing if it will be a bad bipolar day or a very bad bipolar day, the thought of long periods on my own really scares me. So, this is something that I am having to work on daily.
Currently, to try and overcome this, I have been trying to do simple, easy steps every day from the
below categories:
1. Do something that NEEDS doing
This for me, could literally be something as simple as iron a blouse or water my plants- it sounds so menial and ridiculous but every one of these menial tasks is a small mountain I have to climb each day and you know what? When I climb it I’m proud of myself
2. Embrace Positive affirmations
Every time I go to start my internal self-sabotaging bullshit, I make a conscious effort to shut myself up and use a louder, real voice to vocalise something positive. I usually my go-to phrase is ‘I CAN AND I WILL’ this usually helps balance me when I’m feeling wobbly.
3. Talk
I realise that I can’t always talk to the people that I want to about the things I need to, but what I have ascertained is that, if you talk, generally people will listen. I even have this bonkers neighbour who talks absolute rubbish, but at least I know that If I’m sat rocking in my living room like the anxious wreck I am, I can pop two doors down and talk to her about the bin collection or the Tuesday night bell- practice at the church. Little things count. Little things matter.
I am finding that, as time goes by, I am slowly getting a firmer grasp on managing my time and not letting time manage me. I have this really awful obsession with time. If I feel I haven’t spent it wisely I fixate on what I should have done and feel so guilt-stricken and disappointed in myself. So now I am using my diaries, I have my year planner with each day sectioned into hours and then I have another one which is a week by week calendar. Using both of these are really helping me get a better handle on how to deploy myself, my work, my family time, my me time etc.
I can’t recommend getting a diary enough, especially the week by week one. They don’t have much room to write in, but just enough so that you don’t get carried away (another one of my traits and another great way I waste my time!)
One other way, I’m keeping on top of things is writing lists. Now I have always been a serial list-maker. I would make lists for my lists if I could.
Since juggling the business, motherhood, friends, family and eveyting in between, I have become pretty forgetful, not to mention feeling tired ALL THE FRIGGING TIME. So lists are my absolute saving grace.
I get a great sense of relief when I go through each phase of a list and tick it off. It’s easy, effective and makes you feel a small sense of achievement, something I thrive off.
So anyway, writing this post was one of my items on my ‘things I need to do list’ so I’m going to go right ahead and tick that off!
I really hope that you heed the advice in my blog this evening, they are easy things that really do help, I can honestly swear by them.
Keep going, keep trying, keep believing you can and I promise you, YOU WILL!