How to make space for your humanness in your business
+ a workshop to help you build your business around your needs
Have you reached a new phase of business, are you wanting to change the way you work, or are you pivoting or building your business from scratch? I’m here to support you to create a slow, gentle and profitable business. I’ve currently got one spot for 1:1 mentoring starting in late April, and one starting in mid-May.
One of the most radical things I’ve learned and embraced over the past couple of years is to build my business around myself. Around my desires, my needs, my life. It’s something I come back to again and again with my mentoring clientsand in my programmes and courses like Grow.
In this post I will share more about making space for ourself in business, and help you to go deeper on this in a workshop.
What being human means
Whenever I help my clients make plans for their business, I always ask them how these plans feel for them. Are they sustainable? Are they doable alongside other needs, desires and responsibilities—next to their non-negotiables?
In other words, do these plans and the business as you’re running it, allow you to be human?
What being human means for you might be different from what it means to me. Allowing yourself to be human might look like making time for your weekly swimming class. It might be setting a timer so you get up more regularly from your desk. Or to take a nap before the kids come home. It might be satisfying your need for creativity, whether within or outside your business. For many of us, allowing space for our humanness has to do with taking space and time for ourselves—to rest, to move, to read, to be.
In general, our humanness is the thing that traditional business advice tends to ignore. Or even explicitly repress, when we’re advised to hustle, to push through, the keep going.
Our humanness is what traditional business advice asks us to repress and ignore.
For me, tending to my humanness means working at a pace that is sustainable and flexible. It means not working 8 hours a day. It means planning my days around time for reading in the mornings, a midday nap and movement in the afternoon. It means not having more than 2 to 3 calls a week. It means starting my days with creative work, such as writing or creating resources.
I am very much aware of my needs and my desires. They are what inspired me to start this business—and I am also forced to reckon with them regularly.
But a few weeks ago I realised I had let my boundaries slip. I was ever so slightly pushing my humanness into the corners. I saw the signs—the increased fatigue, afternoon headaches, feelings of overwhelm—and tried to push through them.
Making space for my humanness
Recentering my humanness starts by pushing back against myself. Deep down I am still a recovering productivity ninja, and sometimes I slip back into old thoughts.
Practical ways in which I made space for my humanness:
Recognise the voice that tells me I need to work more, and recognise it for a voice that doesn’t serve me;
Deliberately make time for my humanness: I collected a big stack of library books, and made a list of joyful things to do in the garden;
Shore up my boundaries around email and call availability—not even necessarily for my clients, but for me. Boundaries are as much, perhaps even more so, for me—reminding me when I do and do not want to work or be available.
Ask myself whether whatever’s on my to-do list is really, really, really necessary right now. Yes, it would be lovely to update my Substack for small business course sooner rather than later. But I don’t have the capacity to do this in one big swoop—it’ll have to go slowly and incrementally.
Be gentle with myself.
Most of all, centring and recentring the human in our business is about recognising that this is both necessary and hard—we live in capitalist societies that don’t want us to centre our own needs. But we can do it anyway: in big ways if we’re able (and privileged to), but in smaller ways too.
How can you make more space for your humanness in your business? Where do you see yourself slipping and what do you want to change? Leave a comment and join the conversation.
Workshop: Making space for your humanness in business
If you, too, find yourself slipping into overwork, or start to push your own needs away in your business, I’ve got a gentle and effective workshop for you. In this workshop, I’ll help you identify the signs that you’re not making space for your humanness, and make a plan for the smaller and bigger changes you can make to remedy that.
The 20-minute workshop includes worksheets with questions to help you go deeper, and to return to whenever you feel yourself losing sight of your needs.
» Paid subscribers: you have immediate access to this workshop right here «
At the end of this workshop, you will have recognised the parts of your business where you are not making space for yourself, and have made a plan to change that.
» You can access to the workshop by becoming a paid subscriber, and get access to all small business workshops, as well as behind-the-scenes posts and our community features (accountability club and mini-mastermind).
Take a look at the workshop 📽️
As always, thank you for being here, for reading and commenting. I hope that you are enjoying the first signs of spring wherever you are, and being gentle with yourself x
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