Anyone who has worked with me knows the importance I place on self-care.The reason for the emphasis is that I know first-hand what stress can do – I’ve got the malfunctioning adrenal glands to prove it. Although stress happens to just about everyone, the way we nurture ourselves on multiple levels – physically, mentally, emotionally, [...]

Last week I decided to revisit my values. The last time I did a values exercise, I was at a very different place in my life. I’ve grown a lot since then and was curious to see what has changed. Here are the steps I took:

1. I really like the comprehensive list of almost 400 adjectives that Steve Pavlina put together for such a task, so I copied and pasted the words into an excel spreadsheet and printed the list out.

Just as you and your family explored your collective vision for the summer, it would be equally valuable to create your vision for how your business will support you during the summer months. By focusing on your family’s vision first, you’ll be giving your personal values priority. This will help you put your business goals in perspective and integrate your business into your life rather than allowing your business to take over your life. You’ll be able to more easily allow your values to guide your business building and management decisions so you can honor yourself and your family during the summertime.

Each year, my biggest challenge has to do with setting boundaries for my work so I can make my family and my self-care a priority. In the crazy moments, what helps me is to return back to remembering the overall vision for how I want to be and feel when it comes to my family and business.

Every May, I spend time with the kids creating some intentions on how we want to spend our time, and this helps us develop a good rhythm over the course of the summer months. A vision for home and business life helps everyone set expectations, develop a few systems, and a big plus – we get along without much cabin fever or many squabbles. Over the next few days I’ll be sharing five steps that could help you create a great summer rhythm.

I’ve been listening to audio recordings of brilliant coaches I’ve discovered over the past month. As I listen to these recordings, I jot down Powerful Questions that I hear. These shift-creating, perspective-changing questions not only help me serve my coaching clients more effectively. They have also had a profound impact on my business and personal life.

One Powerful Question I’d like to share with you is this:

Money has an energy all its own, fluid and expansive. Take care of it and it will take care of you. Neglect it, abuse it, or hold onto it too tightly, and it hits the road.

I’ve seen how some practitioners in the healing and helping fields have difficulty with money… how they make it, keep it, and grow it. One’s relationship with money affects how much (or whether) that practitioner will charge for services and the opinions and judgments one practitioner has about one another around this topic.

When I began paying attention to my self care and search for “life balance” about seven years ago, I was encouraged by my coaches at the time to consider my life balance wheel. By filling in how satisfied or dissatisfied I was with different areas of my life, I could see how skewed and “off balance” I was and what areas I could focus on to, well, get in balance. If you could imagine rolling that wheel, it would be a really rocky ride.

Today while my son was hanging out with me as I worked, he picked up a check that I received from a student of mine and we had this little exchange:

Son: “Mom, is this check really for $xxx.00?”

Me, glancing up from my laptop: “Yes it is. I get paid to teach childbirth classes.”

Son: “But do you like doing it?”

So what’s the number one rule? Your potential customers are really not that interested in what you do and how you do it. What they really want to know is, what’s in it for them?

For the home business owner, time management is critical for maintaining peace of mind and peace within your family. It’s important that you be as productive as possible in the time you set aside for work so you can enjoy life more when you’re away from it.