Finding self-worth outside of your work as a small business owner
“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
These words have been putting pressure on me since I was 18 when “what do you want to be when you’re older?” became a serious question. The pressure to give a solid answer, to have a plan for the next 5 years, having to explain to my friends’ parents how going to university would land me my ‘dream job’.
I was placing so much of my self-worth and confidence on whether or not I was getting social media engagement and making sales that I couldn’t appreciate all the good things in my life outside of my work. Something we must realise is that happiness comes from within. The number of sales you make or the amount of work you produce is something to be proud of – but not something which your happiness should ever be dictated by.
The surmounting pressure to have a plan only began to increase, I went to university to study Human Geography but in my third year I finally decided to think seriously about what kind of career I wanted. I knew I wanted to work in the creative industries, specifically fashion, although I’d taken humanities at a Russell Group University and I felt like it would be challenging but not impossible. Upon finishing university, with a lack of job prospects thanks to COVID-19, I began sewing handmade womenswear and selling it online. I decided to stop looking for full-time jobs and take a risk focusing on growing my own business.
I love what I have created. I love talking to each individual customer, I love designing the tops I sell and hand making each individual item, I love packaging them up and seeing all my work ready to go out across the country (and sometimes even across the world!). However, the need for constant growth is something I feel I struggle with massively.
For a lot of people their jobs are a means to an end, but for a workaholic like myself, I attach massive amounts of my self-worth to my work: how it is received, and the goals that I believe I should be achieving instead of just appreciating how much growth I have experienced in such a short amount of time. Feeling like my work is the be-all and end-all in my life has been affecting my mental health recently and I feel like it’s something I wasn’t prepared to deal with.
Even though I know I am my worst critic, since founding my small business I feel like I am never doing enough.
I feel as though I’m never creating enough designs, products or content, making enough sales, scaling up my business fast enough, reaching enough people through social media, learning enough about how to run a successful business… the list could go on, you get the point. For the last few months, I have allowed my business to become my life. I’m always thinking about my business, even when I’m sleeping (yes, I have dreams about it… frequently). I started to think that this was good – if I’m always thinking about it, I am always working, improving, growing and therefore succeeding, right?
In the last month, I’ve realised that this couldn’t be a more toxic mindset to have. August was my busiest month yet, I had tripled my average monthly income and I thought to myself, “this is it, I am really growing as a business, this is what brings me joy”. I thought this was what success looks like, and therefore happiness. Then September came, with rumours of a second lockdown coming, furlough schemes ending, and a massive dip in my sales. September was the slowest month I had experienced in terms of sales since I launched. Due to the amount of self-worth I place in my work, my mental health struggled and I noticed I was starting to think that because people didn’t want my work, they didn’t want me. In order to pick myself back up again, I realised I needed to change my attitude towards my work-life balance and come up with some ways to separate myself from my work.
Hobbies
This one is incredibly important for me: as a creator my hobby is my work, I turned what I loved to do in my free time into a product to sell. When changing your hobby to work, it’s easy to forget to make time for other things you like to do which are relaxing as opposed to working. Having active hobbies is completely the opposite to sitting at a desk sewing, doing admin or designing. Doing yoga has been a great way for me to destress and it gives me the mental space to think about something other than my business, to focus on me and how I’m really feeling.
Setting strict work/life boundaries.
This is one I still struggle with abiding by (I’m sitting here at 10:30pm writing this like I haven’t told myself to stop working by 4:30pm every day). I find that making plans with friends for the evenings and weekends really helps with this as I can’t then be tempted to overwork when I should be relaxing and having time off.
Accept rejection.
Not everyone will want your work, people will message you enquiring about buying your products and then never following through. I remind myself of how many times I have put items in my basket at online retailers and decided they weren’t for me before closing the tab and never looking back. It happens, and it is something I had to work really hard on not taking so personally. I remind myself that, for whatever reason, someone has decided not to go through with the purchase – it has nothing to do with me or my work, there will always be other customers!
Published to Glimmer Collective 12-10-20.