Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about why balance is a myth for founders running modern businesses and how to embrace holistic harmony in life and business™ instead of enjoying the pie of your life while running a powerful and profitable company. 

Prepare for a perspective shift to consider how to look at the pie of your life and harmonize when you’re in the midst of having to be in peak productivity while trying to skirt burnout by listening to the maintenance signals that your body is giving you. Our philosophy of holistic harmony has supported hundreds of female founders around the globe to do business differently without constant breakdowns and severe burnout.   

The Shame of Balance and Why It’s a Myth

Have you regularly just felt extremely behind no matter how far forward you get in your to-do list? When the holidays come around, do you feel like you’re perpetually trying to create the perfect holiday scenario while trying to audit your business and prepare it for the new year? 

Do you feel like you either give all of your energy to your business or all of your energy to your family, never quite finding space for yourself or for play, joy, and peace without shame or an overwhelming sense of needing to be productive at every moment?

I love that not everyone will relate to this. I hope you already have this figured out and that you can just shut off this podcast episode and send it gingerly to a few business girlfriends that don’t quite have it figured out yet. I hope that you feel so much peace in your body that you can move easily between doing and being – something we just talked about in episodes 8 and 9. 

That’s my hope, but out of the hundreds of clients that we’ve worked with around the globe… It’s rare that they walk in with peace, joy, and the ability to play as easily as they know how to hustle, grind, and get work done. 

The shame of balance is that it’s impossible. There isn’t a way for you to be the perfect person, the perfect wife, the perfect mom, the perfect business owner, the perfect friend, the list goes on and on. You’re consistently trying to win a game that’s set up against you. 

You’re consistently trying to work through the perception of you instead of how you feel in your own life. More often than not, perfectionism is hip-to-hip with people-pleasing and skewed boundaries.

More often than not, the clients we work with suggest that I should be a mindset coach because of how much we walk through the lifestyle of the founder before we even touch the work of evaluating and elevating the business from the inside out. 

Shame is a myth because no one in the world has ever achieved perfect balance in the pie of life which is the following: life’s purpose, home, personal development, health, hobbies, romance, community, philanthropy, work, and finances.

More often than not, we see and talk with founders that have their life’s purpose more or less sketched out, work rocking and rolling, finances coming in, personal development in relation to work on lock, and then home, health, hobbies, romance, community, and philanthropy are wonky, underscheduled, in a state of lack, and presence of the founder as a person outside of work is at a lack.

That’s an obvious problem and what it comes to is we start to feel like products ourselves instead of people. 

What Holistic Harmony in Life & Business™ Means 

Holistic harmony in life and business means to harmonize the pie of life by deciding month by month where your energy is going in that pie. 

If you’re constantly working and you know you want to re-harmonize yourself in other areas of your life… It’ll take intention, communication, commitment, self-responsibility, and some really sexy boundaries. 

And it’ll be absolutely worth it. 

How to Create Holistic Harmony in Life & Business™ 

Before we talk about how to create holistic harmony, I want to tell you a story.

In 2019, I didn’t have holistic harmony. I didn’t build holistic harmony until 2020 and though there was immense pain created in the year of 2020, there were also building blocks for me personally that happened in the quiet of that season. I was able to really look around and decide what I needed more of in my life and less of in my life. 

In 2019, my husband, Chris, and I decided that we were burnt out and needed a change. Chris was working in technology in the construction industry and I was working remotely with a startup as an employment engagement coordinator, coordinating marketing and promotional material to increase employee engagement as I worked my way up to being the company’s marketing strategist. 

At the same time, I was freelancing in marketing outside of my startup job, working as a brand partner under my personal brand to serve and sell holistic health products, and taking referral clients for my photography business. All while coming off of years of burnout after working in retail management and higher education. 

I was constantly going overboard for everyone and underwhelming myself in the area of love, self-care, peace, play, and joy. I was the ultimate people-pleaser, constantly saying yes to go to coffee dates that I didn’t want to be at, listening to problems and complaints from friends and collegues – drowning in the voices of negativity and feeling like my energy was taking a toll with every new text I responded to. 

We decided in early 2019 that we wanted to get away from Florida, have a fresh start by moving to our dream city of Asheville, North Carolina, and before settling down… we wanted to travel out west and just get lost for a while. And get lost we did. We were nomadic while Chris took a break from the technology industry and I became the breadwinner overnight – still working all of the previous positions, even booking photography shoots for when we’d return to Florida for the winter to see our family for the holidays.

I was stretched to my fullest capacity, my body was exhausted, I was running on fumes that tasted like Starbucks and lack of sleep, but I was happy.

Spending that much uninterrupted time with my husband, working on projects I really loved – albeit there were a lot of them – I felt involved and multifaceted. I was intricately connected to my creativity like I’d never been before and it was so healing, coming from a family that didn’t take trips often and didn’t have extra money to gallavant across America… I was healing so much inside of me that I didn’t even realize I was healing.

After hanging out with mountain goats in Montana, nearly driving off cliffs in Colorado to reach the highest mountain top, shivering in Utah amazed by the beauty and glory of the canyon rocks, laughing and having fun in Texas and Lousiana, drinking whiskey in Kentucky, I wanted to be rooted in Asheville.

And that’s when it hit me that I was doing way too much and I didn’t want to bring the clutter of my old life into my new one.

So, I looked at the pie of life, one category by one category and rated how I felt like it was a C-SAT survey and I was deciding if I was going to continue to subscribe to this life I had built. 

Here are the steps to look at your life:

• Do this however it feels right to you; if you’re an audio journaler, do it that way, a physical journaler, or a spreadsheet girlie, it really doesn’t matter, all I ask is that you keep a historical record that you can come back to – aka don’t keep it in your brain
• Speak or write out the categories in the pie of life: life’s purpose, home, personal development, health, hobbies, romance, community, work, and finances
• One category at a time, rate it from 1-5 with 5 being the best, and write out why it’s that number. Finish all of your categories in one sitting.
• If there’s another category you want to add, do it. This is your coloring page.
• Go back to each category and write out what you want to change in that category – 1-3 things per category is usually a good start. 
• Now move to a place where you can start fresh and pick 1-3 categories to work on for the next 90 days. You cannot overhaul your whole life all at once, but if you want to try, do it. I trust that you know yourself well enough to do what you need to do. 
• Those 1-3 categories can now be broken down into 1-3 actions to take weekly to change that category from a 2 to 3 or a 2 to a 4. 
• Add those weekly actions to your calendar and reward yourself in some special way for doing them until the action itself becomes the healing reward.  

How to Audit Your Holistic Harmony On a Regular Basis

To audit your holistic harmony on a regular basis, seek to review your actions weekly and see which actions you did or didn’t do and note that down in a place you can see it. Try not to use shaming devices to show that you did or didn’t do the action – don’t use happy faces for the days you did and sad faces for the days you didn’t. Find a way to make it fun, approachable, and full of patience. You’re gentle parenting yourself. You’re trusting yourself to create a sacred structure and a sacred promise of doing the thing you promised you would do. 

This will build your confidence, self-belief, and self-worth in ways that I can’t even explain. When you keep promises to yourself, you’re practicing responsible self-care. 

Each week, as you review what you did or didn’t do, all I ask is that you do not shame yourself but instead say the one thing that I love to say when I’ve misstepped: “oopsie, let me try again.”

Like a child.

Just oopsie, let me try again. 

And when you try again and succeed, all I ask is that you say “wow, I’m SO proud of myself, wow.” Shower yourself with self-affirmation and validation and reward yourself for the work you did. 

If you desire a bit more support to help you as you’re taking these actions, check in with a close friend that won’t shame you for not doing the work but encourage you to get back in the saddle. Let them know the categories you’re working on, the actions you’re taking, and the rewards you’re going to give yourself as you do the actions. Remember, the goal is not just to reward yourself at the 90 day mark – we’re talking about weekly rewards for doing the actions you said you were going to do. 

If you want to send this episode to your friend to give them a bit more context to the work you’re doing – and influence them to do the same thing – full send it! 

And finally, after you’ve checked in week to week on your progress, give yourself a bigger reward at the 30, 60, and 90 day mark and celebrate the hell out of it. Tag us online when you do it. We’d really love to celebrate you loudly and proudly. 

Proud of you already. So proud of you it hurts, just for making it to the end of this episode. I have a conversation topic ready for you that will expand you and your community even more.

Resources:

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon.

Bio:

Ashleigh Henry has been in marketing, sales, and leadership positions for the last decade and it was exhilarating for Ashleigh to climb the retail, corporate, higher education, and start-up ladder holding positions such as Marketing Strategist, Copywriter, Social Media Strategist, Manager, Editor, Co-Editor…until it wasn’t. Alongside her degree, Ashleigh decided to bring all of her experience into the freelancing world until it became clear that she didn’t just want to pay the bills – she wanted to create a company that was foundationally built on cheetah print, legacy-minded marketing, and sexy sales structures that could stand the test of trend and time. The Cheetah Company, founded by Ashleigh, does this for female entrepreneurs through their education, coaching, and consulting services. Learn more about Ashleigh here.