My Next Experiment

Have you ever felt backed into a corner by your work set up?

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For months, my husband and I have been trying to solve a sticky problem:

He’s a nurse. He’s been a nurse for a decade. He’s really, really good at his job. But like many other healthcare workers, he’s also burned out after years of working long hours during a global pandemic.

After we had our second child, his work hours started to feel unsustainable. First, he didn’t have any energy reserves left when he came back to the house in the evenings. (Caring for dying people all day will do that to you.) Second, his schedule meant that I was managing most of the childcare — morning drop offs, evening bedtimes, and two days of caring for our infant daughter — alone, along with running two businesses.

Third, our expenses began to go up. Paying for childcare for two kids — even though one is in a very part time situation — ain’t cheap. Add in inflated food costs, pricey house projects (we bought an older house in the woods last year), and my husband’s remaining student loans, and each month’s financial meeting started to feel like running through a gauntlet.

How can our money still be so tight? I wondered. I combed over our budget, but all of the things we were paying for were necessary. I switched out my low-paying clients and left The Writers’ Co-op to try to reduce my load. But I couldn’t take on more work because of my husband’s hours, and his salary was set. We both started to feel more and more burned out.

Have you ever felt backed into a corner by your work set up?

My guess is that almost every one of us has been in this place. And I’m telling you this story because I want you to know that feeling backed into a corner is often a sign that you need to bring another perspective into the mix. 

I love this quote from Alok that one of my clients shared a few months ago:

"Whenever we're coming across the brittleness of impossibility -- 'it's impossible for me to both pay the rent and live the life that I want' -- that is an invitation for a good conversation with a friend. The purpose of conversation is to expand our horizon and suggest that the impossible is not actually a fact, it's a point of view, so you just need a different point of view."

When you come up against the brittleness of impossibility, as Alok aptly summarizes these frustrating moments, you often need to talk to a professional — a therapist, a coach, or anyone who can help widen the viewfinder. It makes sense: You’re not seeing all the options because you are only you! You’re a product of your conditioning, your context, your desires and your fears. Sometimes, you need another person’s perspective to reveal what’s possible.

In this case, we took the situation to our marriage therapist. We explained all the ins and outs: the fact that my husband’s job provides us with health insurance, the presumable necessity of at least one of us having a full time job, and our feeling that we just couldn’t get out of this mess. Our only perceived solution was for my husband to apply to new jobs — remote nursing jobs, perhaps. But because of his schedule, he couldn’t even find the time or bandwidth to do that.

She looked at both of us with a small smile.

“Jenni, could you make enough to cover the household’s financial needs?”

I cough-laughed. Months before, I’d turned down yet another assignment and shouted in frustration, “Dude, you should just quit your job and help me run my business!”

It was an actual joke. I didn’t think it was possible. His stability supported my flexibility — right?

If you looked back at my journals, you’d find that this is actually a solution I proposed months ago: I want to scale, I wrote. I want to build something that provides the money we need, but I can’t do that without support. I whispered this desire to myself in the evenings, when I felt frustrated and weighed down by our situation. I’d been working 15 hours per week for three years. I could barely imagine what I might do with 30!

My husband and I stared at each other in the therapist’s office.

Could I make enough? Could I actually make $15-20k each month without burning out? Could I make that money without sacrificing my mental health, and my time with the kids? Could I make that money in 30 hours per week?

“Yes?” I said. “I think I could?”

She wasn’t asking if I wanted to. She wasn’t asking if I would. She was asking if I could. That framing helped me focus on the possibility. I could do that, if I had support. I could scale up, if I did it in a way that still allowed me to meet my life’s priorities and needs. I could.

• What could you do if you had all the support you needed?

• What support do you actually need?

• What would be possible if you gave yourself permission to remove things from the “impossible” list and applied some outside-the-box thinking to make them happen?

• What do you truly, deeply desire in your career?

It was a lightbulb moment. We went home and considered the solution as a thought experiment. We asked: What would Jenni need to actually make this amount of money? 

The answers: An editorial assistant, having my husband take over testing for product reviews, being relieved from the responsibilities related to dropping off the kids and picking them up, the ability to keep my Fridays with my daughter as non-work days, and a tolerance for draining our emergency savings if needed.

Two weeks later, my husband put in a request for a 3-month leave of absence from work. As of three weeks ago, he’s not working as a nurse — at least for right now. It’s an experiment, from now through June.

What will it mean for us to finally open up my capacity? How will we manage health insurance long-term? Will he go back to work after the three-month leave? Will this schedule change relieve us both of resentment, or will it add new challenges?

I don’t know. Genuinely, I don’t know. I have no answers. It’s a wild experiment.

Here’s what I do know: We can always go back to our previous paradigm; it’s a misery we know. But the possibility lies in what it looks like for us to build something together that hinges on freedom, ownership and values alignment. We need to try it out.

During the past few weeks, we’ve seen dozens of options that didn’t seem possible before: Him taking over my product writing business. Opening a brick and mortar business together. Him going back to work per diem.

He’s also really present for the first time in a long time. He feels rested. He’s exercising, cooking dinner and providing a stable base for me to scale. We needed to open up this space to see that the things that looked impossible were just symptoms of the situation we were in; they were not impossible full-stop.

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If you’ve worked with me in a coaching relationship, you know that I’m big on experiments. The best way to grow in your business is to design experiments that are well-educated guesses about what might work, with time frames and a fall-back plan. Experimental design involves:

• Coming up with a hypothesis (“Opening up Jenni’s capacity might allow our family to meet our financial needs in a creative, flexible way that keeps us all healthier.”)

• Shifting one variable at a time (“We’ll adjust my husband’s job situation, but keep the rest of our lives running in the same way, to see how all of that feels.”)

• Recording observations (“We’ll meet every Sunday evening to talk about what’s working, what’s not, and how it’s impacting every member of the family.”)

• Setting timelines (“We’ll try this for 3 months. By month 2, we’ll start to talk about what comes next. By June, my husband will go back to his old job if we don’t have a clear game plan for the future.”)

This is a calculated risk. I’ve been saying no to a lot of work over the past few months, so I know there’s more work out there. The barrier isn’t the amount of work available; for so long, the barrier has been about my time and capacity. I already had a $15,000/ month of work planned for March. We have an emergency savings account that we can draw from, although we’d rather not. We get insurance through my husband’s job for a few more months, while he’s on leave.

How does this impact my ability to spend time with my children, stay present, and get outside? All of those things are non-negotiable, but scaling means I must hold those priorities much more firmly. What matters most to me right now is scaling slowly and gently, with lots of intuitive check-ins, to manage my nervous system and keep my health in tact. My main goal isn’t to blow the roof off my financial goals. Instead, I’m building systems and foundations that will allow me to work at a higher level come June, even when (if) my husband returns to some kind of “traditional” work situation. My goal is space and support. Every morning, I’m keeping my eyes on that prize.

In future newsletter editions, I’ll share about how this change shifts my business model. But right now, I’m still feeling out how it changes my mindset; that bit always comes first.

When you feel backed against a wall, there’s always another way. Sometimes the option that seems the most “impossible” is actually the one that gets you the space you need.

I have a quote written on my mirror this week: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”

What kinds of risks are you considering for your business and life? Tell me about your next experiment in the comments.

Hugs,

Jenni

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Curious about my background? I’m a writer and business coach based in Central Oregon. I have two small children and I work part-time so I can spend a lot of time with them. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with non-linear business building and teaching people how to build successful businesses that support their human needs first. Check out my coaching offerings here and follow me on Twitter & Instagram!