Before I decided to be a mother, my favorite pastime was work.
I am a Capricorn, after all. 🐐
I definitely worked 60 to 70 hours per week and didn’t even blink an eye because I loved every minute of it.
I loved strategizing, engaging my clients, kicking around new ideas for launches… the whole thing was fun and deeply fulfilling for me.
During that period of my life, I felt very ambitious about generating income. In fact, I measured success (and if we’re being honest, my worth) on how much money I made. Year after year, my revenue increased by a minimum of 50% annually – I was really going for it.
The year my daughter was born, my business just kissed the 7-figure mark. What an accomplishment, right?
Maybe…
But during that first year of my daughter’s life, a lot changed.
Money wasn’t my most valuable resource any more… it was time.
And, my business was running my life instead of supporting my life; and more than that, with the birth of my daughter, my values changed and I needed a business structure that supported my new lifestyle.
Purposeful Downsizing
Luckily for me, I anticipated that a baby would shake things up (world’s biggest understatement!). So, I prepared for it. During my pregnancy, I strategically planned to downsize my business.
In fact, my goal was to cut our revenue in half so I could take a lot of time off, stop working more than 20 hours per week, and just BE…
I should mention that even though the gross income for the business decreased, my personal income actually increased because I was very purposeful about cutting down overhead, automating systems and making my business as profitable as possible, rather than simply aiming for high revenue.
For the first year or so of my daughter’s life, I worked about 18 hours a week, which gave me this precious year to be the kind of mom and spouse that I wanted to be. It was wonderful.
When my daughter turned one, I had to ask myself, “Okay, what do I want my life to look like now that she’s a little older?”
I had to clarify my vision again – because it had changed once more – and redefine what success meant to me in business and in life. One thing I knew for sure was that it wasn’t earning seven figures (if earning seven figures meant working non-stop).
Success now meant spending more time with my family, having more freedom to live wherever I wanted to live, and having greater bandwidth to be personally fulfilled and feel creative.
Clarify Your Vision
Now my daughter is about to turn five and my business is humming along at about $500,000 annually.
The old me would have looked at those numbers and worried that I was a failure, but what I now see so clearly as a coach is that living with integrity is more important to me than bringing in oodles of money. To me, that means aligning my business with my values.
A lot of coaches lose sight of their personal definition of success when they start to see results and focus solely on revenue. The pitfall of that is – and I’ve lived it myself – that right before your eyes, your business can suddenly run your life instead of the other way around.
No matter where you’re at with your business goals, take this opportunity to define what a wildly successful year in your coaching practice might look like in the next 12 months.
Take this time to get honest about how you want to feel in your business, what the holistic picture of success looks like, and what matters to you most.
Let me know your thoughts over in the Coaches on a Mission Facebook group.
