Podcast relaunch – it’s back and with a bang.
Listen to the podcast version of this blog below.
I’ve decided to relaunch my podcast (which I quietly launched last year as The Caregiving Business Owner podcast) but things got on top of me and something had to give. I’m now ready to launch the podcast again, but this time round, it’s got a new look and a new name as well.
The Caregiving Business Owner podcast was about how we’re all caregivers.
We care for ourselves, we care for our partners, we care for our children, we care for our family, we care for our friends, and we care for our businesses as well. So we are always caregiving. After a bit of soul searching for probably a year, I finally settled on something that feels more aligned with me, my new business mission, who I am, and my new perspective on life since becoming a young widow at the age of 34 at the end of 2021.
And that is FREEDOM.
I went into my business in 2015 because I wanted freedom.
Last year in 2022, I admittedly took on a part-time job at a local charity as their Business Enterprise Lead. There were a few reasons why I decided to get a job. One of those reasons was because of the state of the economy and the other because of what happened the year prior. I was full-time caring for my late husband (George) and running my business at the same time. Due to his terminal diagnosis, I wasn’t able to market my business the way that I normally would have done and that had an affect.
The style of marketing which I love and enjoy doing, is content marketing, which means playing the long game. I’ve had great success with it previously, but caring for George meant he came first. After George passed away at the end of 2021, I was struggling with grief and accepting he’d passed away. This also had quite an affect on how I was showing up in my business and a lot of the time I was frozen – there was only so much I could do.
I had to realistically look at what I could do, what I was able to do and what I had the energy for. Then I looked at how I could relieve some stress and where could I make my life easier. I thought the answer was getting a job. So that’s what I went off and did. It was great to begin with and I was excited to make a positive impact, especially for a well known charity. I was becoming accustomed to commuting into an office every single day versus walking into my home office each day… But I found as the days went on, the worse it felt for me.
And the more it felt like I was going into a prison. I wasn’t used to traveling and going into an office every single day. I wasn’t used to having to report to someone, like a manager and it started to have an effect. I was bringing the stress of the job home with me and it was starting to affect other areas of my life too, which I deem important. I didn’t want this to happen anymore, so at the end of 2022, I handed my notice in.
The biggest realisation I’d had was I’d lost my time freedom. Juggling a part-time job and running my business on the side meant I was even more stressed. I found I was eating, sleeping, working, and repeating, and not actually living my life, not going out and doing fun things, not seeing friends. I just felt so restricted and imprisoned by what I had effectively created.
So for me, the Freedom Seeking Entrepreneur is all about seeking that freedom and remembering WHY you went into your business in the first place.
Was it for time freedom? Was it for financial freedom? Was it to make an impact and to help more people? Was it for all of those or some of them for you? Whatever it is, don’t forget about it because that’s essentially what I did. I forgot what was important to me, which was time freedom, and now I’m back in my business full time and enjoying every minute of it.
I’m grateful for the time I now have available to me and I’ve been very productive since getting back into my business.
Something that I really want you to think about today is why did you start your business in the first place? Is it out of wanting to make an impact? Is it out of something you’re truly passionate about? Is it for the time freedom? Is it for the financial freedom that it would give you?
And where are you in that journey? Have you reached where you envisaged you would be? Or have you lost your way a little? Are you so caught up in a monster of a business that you’ve created that you’re not seeing the results, you’re not getting the success that you wanted? And what does that success look like to you?
I’ll be talking a lot more about this on future podcast episodes, which you can find on iTunes and Spotify.
Time freedom, financial freedom, and success are all different for every single entrepreneur.
I want you to think about what does time and financial freedom look like to you? What does success look like to you? And realistically, is your business at this moment in time giving you what you desire?
If you would like to chat more about how to take your business to where you want it to be, to allow you to live your dream lifestyle sooner rather than later, then feel free to send me a message on Instagram.
