Your health is your businesses biggest long-term investment
By: Rachel MacPherson
Certified Personal Trainer (ACE),
Founder of Radical Strength
Your diet may have taken a back seat to your business if you find Yourself…
Constantly seeking out whatever is convenient after you've already gotten to the point of extreme hunger and lack the ability to make good choices. As a busy professional with a lot on your plate, you are required to make decisions all day long. Studies have shown that willpower is finite and when it comes to food when hunger is motivating you, you aren't thinking about properly balanced macronutrients, you are thinking about that street-side burrito or giant muffin.
Setting aside time for meal prep can be challenging when you don't have a lot of free time leftover during the day or week
Needing to be ever vigilant and responsible as an entrepreneur means you don't have typical work hours and off hours where you can consistently schedule in time to prep meals. This means that you need to write it into your planner as an important meeting with your own needs. Knowing that a healthy, well balanced and energizing diet will make you much more proficient and efficient at your job. Less brain fog, less fatigue, and improved concentration will result from a well-balanced diet and good sleep habits.
Set aside a certain amount of time to choose healthy, easy-to-prepare and quick to make meals that are also easy to store and reheat well if necessary. Write out a grocery list and purchase everything you need for all the meals. If you will have meals with clients or friends during the week, take that into consideration. Remember that perfect is the enemy of the good and aim to make meals that are acceptably healthy and easy without being overly complicated or time-consuming. As motivated as you might be in that moment, you want this to become a sustainable habit.
Foods that are ideal for sustaining energy are key
This means avoiding highly processed, sugary carbohydrates and making sure to get in all three macronutrients at each meal. Whole, complex carbs are best such as oats, rice, potatoes, quinoa, and high fiber fruits and vegetables.
Fiber is also a key component, helping to aid digestion and balance blood sugar to prevent energy spikes and crashes. Adding some healthy fat such as avocado, dairy, olive oil, and nuts will also slow down the release of glucose from carbohydrates into the bloodstream and increase meal satiety and satisfaction. Lastly, make sure to include nutritious sources of protein such as eggs, red meat, chicken, and fish, or tofu and beans if the meat isn't an option. Try not to eliminate or restrict macronutrients, especially carbohydrates if you are lacking energy and focus. Carbohydrates are the body's preferred fuel.
Making your health a priority as a business owner is imperative if you want to accomplish everything on your giant to-do list.
In order to perform optimally, continually crush decision making and goal setting, you will need the right fuel. If you are irritable with clients, you will hurt your business. If you are feeling hungry, sluggish or stressed, you will not be able to focus properly on climbing that mountain of competition. Most importantly, you will crash and have no energy to really enjoy your life, your family, and your downtime. Take care of yourself first.
Take the Mask Off
By: MiraZyra
Amethyst Design
I'm a millennial entrepreneur, and I've been running my own business for 3 years now. I run a small agency with my business partner. We have a few employees and are growing steadily.
I, like all other people who decide to start a business, have had to navigate the challenge of creating balance in my personal and professional life.
When you run a business, especially as a Millennial (because let's be honest student loans add a nice cherry on top of the rest of your worries) your personal and professional life blend together and there's so much grey area. It's foolhardy to think that you can cleanly compartmentalize the two, and both ultimately affect each other in ways you may never even realize.
If your personal life is turbulent, even if you keep your composure at work, it still undoubtedly affects the quality of your leadership.
The only real way to know how your personal baggage affects your business is to be truly in touch with yourself and your needs. You also have to be honest about what you may have to give up in terms of personal comfort while your company is going through growing pains. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices, and you need to really examine what you can do without (time with family, hobbies, privacy, social life, down time). You also have to make sure that when those sacrifices are in your personal life, you still maintain balance. It's hard and it takes a lot of trial and error to get it right.
This isn't easy and you've got to work at it every day. One thing that helps a lot is to have a business partner who will call you out when necessary. Giving your employees license to speak up in an honest and constructive way without fear of backlash is also key. Anybody who surrounds themselves with “Yes Men” is never going to gain the skill of constructive introspection.
A clear mental state will ultimately mean that you're not devaluing your own ideas. You're not nervous to voice your creative ideas. You've got the confidence to lead with them.
Imagine if you let anxiety get the better of you, how many missed opportunities that would mean. If you're not confident in yourself, how can you expect to be a leader to your employees and be respected by your peers?
You need to cultivate confidence in yourself.
It's a practice like any other. I think of this the same way I think of meditation, and in a way I think it is.
There are few tricks I use to keep myself on track. I keep a glass jar on my desk in my office so that I can see it every day. Whenever I notice something positive that happened in my life, I write it down on a slip of paper with the date, and put it in the jar. Whenever I'm having a bad day, I look through the jar and remember all the little things that made me feel that glow of positivity and gratitude for all the good in my life. It's important to me to write down as many of the small things as possible like my friends were emotionally supportive today and it helped a lot, or my cat fell asleep in the cutest way today or even the fact that I had a good day. The really helpful ones are the ones where I was in a bad situation and a small act of kindness made it better, like my neighbors unexpectedly cleaned my porch when I was laid up with a back injury.
Whenever I have a bad day, I go through the jar and feel grateful for everything good that I've taken note of.
When dealing with a Mental Health Diagnosis
I struggle with ADHD and Depression and I'm on medication for both. I know there's stigma surrounding mental health issues and I'm hesitant to talk about being on medications for my issues but I also know that the only way to de-stigmatize it is to talk openly about it. I've also had to manage employees who were going through mental health struggles and that's a uniquely challenging thing to navigate since it's not openly talked about by people in real leadership positions, and there's also the question of employee privacy. I make a point to have open discussions with my employees about mental health, how the workload I assign may affect it and how we can all work together to help each other out.
You've got to draw a clear line in the sand between recognizing when your mental health issues genuinely impede your ability to perform certain tasks, and when you're using it as a crutch or excuse. For me, that line is when communication breaks down, and/or you're not actively working to improve your mental health.
I believe that the mind is far more powerful and influential over our lives than most people are willing to acknowledge.
Your mental health is just as important as your physical health and you don’t need to be afraid in reaching out to others when you need help. It's tricky and there's no one blanket answer, but you need to build up your available resources. Go to therapy, journal, make time for fun things, list out your problems and tackle them systematically, try different things until something works. The only real advice I can give on this subject is to try in earnest and keep trying even if you're not making progress as quickly as you'd like. Sometimes, it's one step forward and several steps back but that's just part of the journey. It's messy and it takes grit but most people are a lot stronger than they give themselves credit for, and progress looks different for everyone.
Finding what works in terms of mental health is just a process of elimination. If you think of it that way, even failures are technically successes because you've discovered what doesn't work and that's a step in the right direction.
When your personal relationships are taking a toll… Balancing Love & Business
By: Melissa McKinney with The Hive Law
When I first started out on my own, I was forced to do a lot of hustling. I didn't have partners to feed me clients or a well-known firm's name attached to my business card. This meant I had to go on a lot of coffee dates, networking events, and call up other small firms to see if they needed help.
I was so focused on building this monster of a business that my home life took a toll.
At the time, my husband and I had only been married for a little over a year. So the honeymoon phase had passed and we could no longer excuse the fact that I was spending almost every waking second thinking, planning, or talking about “The Hive”.
Eventually, I had to face the facts: “I wasn't present in my marriage.” So
I had to make a change; it came in increments, though. It was difficult for me to just stomp on the breaks and automatically have a perfect balance. It took a lot of purposeful planning to help me really let go of the workday and transition into my non-working self.
Since most of my work was done from home, I made sure to keep the office door shut after office hours. So from 4 pm to 7 am the next day, I wasn't allowed to open that door. It helped for me to physically turn off my work mode. That was probably my biggest struggle. Work was so accessible; it was literally under the same roof.
Next step I took was to basically disconnect from my phone after 4 pm altogether. Since I have all my work emails, contacts, etc. at the press of a button on my phone, I decided to just be phone-free (as much as possible) once my husband got home from work. This forced me to be in the moment and not jolt at the sound of an incoming email. It also helped me to unwind before bed, so that was a huge plus.
Finally, I made a conscious effort not to talk about work in a negative way.
When “The Hive” was first starting, it was very easy to complain.
Complain about all the work that needed to get done, all the clients I wish
I had, and how law school doesn't prepare you for this. I was a real wet diaper when I think about it. I was bringing all of that negative energy into our house. Now, I make sure not to complain on and on about how hard work is. For starters, everyone's job is hard; it's not like my husband's work is a walk in the park. So now, I make sure to talk positively about my day, clients, and opposing counsel. I can definitely tell that it makes a difference in the mood of the house but also with how I see work.