Building a business around your family is GREAT… you get the freedom to be the mother you want to be and do the work you love, however, whenever and wherever you choose. That said, it’s also really hard at times.  

There are always certain times when the life / work juggle gets more intense – whether that’s holidays, when kids are sick or when your personal life suddenly needs more of your attention than usual. Life happens and our resilience is tested. 

In this episode I’m going to be pulling out bits of easy Positive Psychology that we can turn to when we need a bit of extra support to help us through a challenging patch.  

Here are the highlights from this episode: 

{2:00} Optimism is a core strength of entrepreneurs 

{7:12} Nurture your resilience 

{8:19} Your wellbeing is like rowing a boat 

{11:40} Saying no in the short and long term 

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Update: AMotherBrand closed its doors in March 2023.

I now help purpose-driven female entrepreneurs to create maximum impact alongside maximum wellbeing, through 1:1 coaching.

I combine my experience as a Founder, with my background in Social Entrepreneurship, Positive Psychology and ICF-Certified Coaching to help ambitious women create the flourishing life and meaningful work that they desire.

Head to https://noniewhite.com to find out more.

Social links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nonie-m-c-white/

Insta / facebook: @noniewhite_

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And the, and thrive is a really important element because it's not about just sharing tools and the community. You need to build a business. It is that, but it's that plus how do you do that with Goodwill? Big. How do you do that? So you're not just working yourself into the ground and not seeing your family, not taking care of yourself and getting ever closer to exhaustion and burnout.

Work gets even more precious and there's more stress in your life. Life just happens and we need to find a way to get through that without burning out without getting too exhausted. And we're looking after our wellbeing. So that's what we're looking at today. In this episode, I'm going to be putting out bits of easy, positive psychology that we can turn to when we need a little extra bit of support to get us through challenging patches.

The first thing I want to look at today is a graph called the coping under pressure. I find this a really useful concept and analogy to think about it. If I want to check in with my workload and my levels of stress, because as entrepreneurs we are driven and with passionate and sometimes we're over optimistic too.

So we're driven, we're passionate, sometimes were over optimistic. We love our businesses and we want them to succeed. And what that means is it's pretty easy to sometimes get a little bit out of alignment with our work-life balance. You know, the reason that we set up a business in the first. And when this sorts of thing goes on for too long, that's when things can go.

But what happens is over time and mindset suffers and as an exhaustion moves towards burnout, they feel completely out of love with their business and they can't remember why they started doing it in the first. It's a false economy. It's this kind of stress epidemic that we live in. It's caused by this conditioning that we have to keep working harder, sleep less work harder, and that'll be the answer.

But actually the truth is that if we work less, that we sleep more and we have better wellbeing. When we do get to work, we're going to do better work and we're going to achieve more and have greater success. But it's tough because that's kind of how we will be conditioned to believe that we should work.

There's not much work going on. It's called an underload phase in this phase. You're going to get a little bit bored and you're going to underperform. You're just kicking around. It's boring. So imagine you're spinning plates. We're going to look at this curve through the analogy of spinning plates. So when you have too few plates to spin, you literally can't do it.

It doesn't really work. So you're underperforming. And then when you have a few more plates, it starts to work a bit better. And then you add a few more plates and the curve starts to rise towards its peak to the top of the hill. And in this phase, you've got optimum stress. It's when you've added just the right number of plates, you start to develop momentum, motivation, and just the right level of challenge and stress.

So ideally we'd spend all of our time at the top of that curve at the top of the hill in peak performance. But what happens is, if you start to just add a couple more plates, you start to tip into too much stress and suddenly the load is too much and go into overload and suddenly. It becomes less efficiency, less lower performance.

It's harder to double the plates and your performance suffers. You've got greater stress and your capacity to cope the client. So this is when your health starts to go down. As you can imagine. And if you keep on adding even more plates, eventually you're going to drop all the plates and you're heading towards burnout.

I miss this guy. Not, I'm not going to want to go do all of this stuff for work by this time. And the children were for short period of time, we can cope with that. So you could cope with the functional. If it's for a short period of time, but then next phase is dysfunctional overload and that's when the level of stress becomes chronic and there's no end in sight.

And the third stage is breakdown and that's in the level of chronic stress becomes too much and you have a mental or a physical break. So that's not very curious at what can we do about it. So what we can do is be aware of where we are on the curve and then reflect on how we can build our resilience or how best to cope with periods of overload.

What does that actually mean? So resilience has been defined as the ability to deal with find strengthen and to recover from difficult times. So it's about getting through and bouncing back. And the key thing to remember about resilience is it's just like happiness. Really? It's not something you just have.

You're not just born resilient or born and happy. It's something you do. So you have to do things to build and nurture and maintain your resilience. And it's that same way. You have to do things to actively build and maintain. So there's not just one thing that makes us resilient. It's caused by a kind of constellation of factors that work together to generate your resilience and they're different for each of us.

So being well and healthy is a bit like rowing on a boat and. But if an illness or another kind of problem were to occur and you life it's a bit like crashing into a rock. So you've got the problem or the rock that's half the story, but you're not likely to crash into that rock. If the water levels are very high.

So the water level represents our. Uh, resilience. So when we're feeling good in ourselves and our emotional reserves are at a high, we may flute over the rocks, but when we're having a bad day and we're feeling depleted, our water levels are low and we watch more likely to crash into them. So the question I'd like you to ask yourself is what can you do?

They're going to raise you as Indians and a downward ones with the kind of risk factors that are going to lower it. But let's look at what you can do. The four areas, the voluntary influence that are gonna raise your water levels. Yeah. Sometimes called your energy bank and the four areas are the choice to nourish yourself.

So are you eating a balanced diet and are you drinking lots of water because what you eat and drink can have a huge impact on your mood and your energy levels. It's common sense, but it doesn't mean that it's common practice, even mild dehydration can massively impact your ability to think clearly. The second thing is exercise.

So exercise and maybe another powerful, awkward. The third one is, are you getting enough sleep? There are things that you can do the awkward hours that you can actively do that are going to increase your likelihood of getting good sleep. So you can make sure that you relax at the end of the day, that you have a windup period that you keep a regular body clock and that you exercise in the day.

So your body's tired when you go to. I'm a full thing that you can do is have a good support network support from other people. There's a key upward arrow, high levels of social support, reduced stress, and they can increase positivity, happiness, creativity, and they can even predict longevity as reliably as regular exercise does.

Can you make a list of new realistic steps that you're going to put into place in your life that are going to help increase the upward arrows view? And therefore we're going to raise your resilience. So now we have a better understanding of how we can become aware of where we are in the coping under pressure curve and what we can do that will help us to build our resilience.

So things that you could count as maneuver pauses are exercise. Just 15 minutes of movement will have a massive difference on your mood or getting yourself into nature for a wellbeing boost. It's going to be calming. It's going to ground you. It's going to be good for your body and your mind. You get extra wellbeing points for exercising in nature research shows that it takes to five minutes of physical activity in a green space.

This is sometimes called green exercise to start generating positive emotions. So just five minutes, you're going to feel better. And if you can blue things into the mix. So a blue environment such as sea or lake or river, you've got green exercise by water. You're going to have an even greater improvement in mood.

And the final one is probably my favorite micro maps. Do you take little disco naps and do a power nap? I've always taken them and I swear by them so they can be anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes. If you go over 30 minutes. Speeding a bit groggy for an hour or so afterwards. So really good to have tight little nuts, tend to 20 minutes.

Um, I have historically always set my alarm for about 23 to 26 minutes, depending on how quick you, I reckon I can get to the soup. So now we get to longer term notes. So how do we make sure that we don't end up in a position of over those. Well, we can't control everything in our life, but we can try to remember to only do what's most important to us.

The gravel represents lower value calls on your time. And the big rocks represent the most important things in your life for which they're the things that we often struggled to find room in truth. So if we try to put the big rocks into the glass jar on top of the gravel, they're going to be really hard to fit.

You just can't squish them. So we're going to have to say no to the usual way that we tend to plan our lives and we're going to have to empty that job. So tip everything out of the jar and start again. And here's what we got. We're going to get an empty glass jar, and we're going to put the big rocks in first and then with whatever room is left over, we're going to fill it with the gravel.

What are the big rocks that you want to put in facts? And what are you going to have to say no to, in order to make that happen? When this episode we've looked at how you can tune into where you are on the coping under pressure curve, how many plates you're spinning and how the stress of spinning plates actually impacts on performance.

We've also looked at the energy bank and the key things that we can do to increase our resilience and our capacity to cope with tough times. And finally we've looked at how we can say no to things, to small things and to longer term things in order to help us cope and plan better in the future. So I hope that you found today's episode interesting and useful.

I have a membership that can help you with that. Go to www dot mother brand forward slash membership for more information and as a heads up the doors to the membership, only open a few times a year and that opening soon. So do jump on the wait list to make sure you don't miss that. If you've enjoyed the episode, please do hit follow, leave a rating, leave a nice comment and share with anyone else who you think might enjoy us.

See you next time.