Work-Life Balance: Tips For The Female Entrepreneur | Christine Rich | TEDxGoldeyBeacomCollegeSalon

The question that I'm asked the most is how do I take on so many tasks and just be able to make them work? Well, I learned a lot from my dad and growing up I grew up in a low-income house, two jobs while being in the military, taking care of my mom who was ill and then also raising me. He never complained and just somehow he made it happen. So growing up I was able to see the strategies that my dad used to overcome the obstacles that were thrown his way and I saw how they directly correlated with my other family members to becoming small business owners. Now my upbringing was busy to say the least and I had it ingrained in my mind that if I did not work as hard and as often as my dad did that somehow I would fall back because he worked so hard to get us out of. Well now that I'm older and wiser I know that that's not true but I also know and can tell you that being busy is not a badge of honor. So here are a few of the tips that I have used to help alleviate the busy in my personal life and also within my business. First and foremost, prioritize your business, your life, your family, your finances, everything. Find out who and what means the most to you and go from there. For me it's my family, they were here before the business and they'll be there if and when it ends. I know that if there's something going on with my son or I have a family crisis and I don't have adequate staffing at my storefront it's going to be shut down. Now for some of you your business is your number one priority, it's your baby and that's okay that's the beauty of it is you get to prioritize whatever you want in your life how you see fit but just keep in mind that what you prioritize now may not be a priority. Once you know who and what means the most in your life you need to figure out what tasks need to be done and in what order. So when you are looking at that there are a couple different methods to use but the most common one for entrepreneurs nowadays is this block method and that's when you have your entire day scheduled out in 30 minute increments. It allows you to place your event, your person, your task, whatever it is and dedicate your total time and attention to that specific task. Now for those of you who don't want to plan out your day every day in 30 minute increments a simple list with your tasks at hand, check them off, cross them off, highlight them, whatever you want is another way that will be adequate in going ahead and prioritizing your task. What these both do is they not only give you a visualization of the task that you need to accomplish but they also reinforce one large rule that we should not be multitasking even though us women we're pretty good at it. Another thing that we are really good at especially as parents is saying no. So did you ever have that guardian or parent or you know a friend that had that parent that always said no unless you had somebody with you and that was that friend that if you wanted to sleep over you know you had to bring that friend with you to even maybe get a maybe out of your parents. So we do the same thing especially when it comes to our customers. My son's raising his hand. We do that with our customers also we just we don't want to be the bad guy and we don't say no especially when it's a cornerstone of our business. We don't want to say no to an event or an opportunity and we want to just try and make it work but what we need to learn to do is to be able to say no to things that are not going to serve us and is not going to serve our business. So when you're thinking about taking on an additional task ask yourself a few things. Is this a priority? How is it going to affect my already prioritized schedule? And is this going to help me grow personally or professionally? Now if the answer is no to that you already know what to say but the really hard thing to do is to say no to our clients and our customers. How are we going to be able to do that when they're ready to give us money because we're in the business to make money right? So if they're willing to give it to us we should be able to you know accommodate that but being able to say no and do that effectively and professionally to our client is going to help us down the road because we know that it will affect our bottom line and we need to be able to do what is best for our business. My next tip is a huge one that has completely changed my life and it's automate, automate, automate and if you can delegate. Not only am I a wife, a mom and an entrepreneur I am also a professor at the same university where I'm obtaining my doctorate and I'm usually teaching about four courses a semester. I told you all I have to stay busy right? So when those four courses get loaded into my learning management system the very first thing I do is I go in and I find any way that I can possibly automate. So that's announcements, emails, reminders, open weeks when they need to be, closing weeks when they need to be, any type of automatic grading that I can utilize I am all for it and I am setting that up before the course even starts. What that allows me to do is to spend less time managing my course and managing the information and managing all of that grading and spend more time making sure that my students receive the best content and the best teaching that they can possibly have in that short period that I have with them. Now take an example and think about your business. What in your business can you automate? Usually it's marketing, email and social media are the two biggest ones. So if you have a company like mine and you're sending out usually our company tower promotions set out six months to a year in advance. Why not sit down take that 30 minutes to an hour, create those emails, schedule them out and have them always sent out to your client base. It doesn't take very long and it's one less task for our already busy first day of the month and the end week when we're crunching numbers trying to make all of our sales exceed last year's. Social media is another really great one to automate except for we're not going to do it six months out. I usually do it about a week. So I'll sit down on like a Sunday and kind of plan it all out but doing so for that week allows us to also incorporate little things that happen in our society. I mean Disney didn't even know that Baby Yoda was going to blow up the way it did and we just resurrected this burn town in 10. So sitting there during the week I was able to be on social media what needs to be on our social media and then also where it's going to be posted to which social media platform because we know they all need different things and then also what day and time because those funny little algorithms keep changing and people are on different platforms all the time so we need to make sure that we're because the whole point of delegating is allowing you on your business instead of in it. So my final tip going on is self-care and I didn't even realize that this was even a tip or something that I really need to focus on until about a year ago. So self-care really is essential care. You need to be able to invest in yourself socially, emotionally, mentally, all of those aspects of your life. You need to also be able to find a way to center yourself, restore yourself, and recharge yourself because you can't pour from an empty cup and we all know that running our own businesses can deplete that cup very quickly. You need to be able to practice mindfulness, letting go of things that you cannot control and people who do not bring out and incorporate the best in you because everyone is going to have an opinion about how you run your business but at the end of the day the only opinion that matters is your own. Small changes equal big results. Make them and watch yourself and your business flourish. You are doing things that people only dream about so keep hustling and inspiring because you never know who's watching. Thank you.