Spring Cleaning Season

I’m where I need to be, even if being here feels vastly uncomfortable.

Mindset Mastery is a weekly newsletter about the psychology of small business ownership for creative entrepreneurs from Jenni Gritters. If you’d like to support my work, I invite you to become a paid subscriber for $5/ month! Paid subscribers receive monthly journaling prompts, along with other perks.

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If you’ve been following along, you know that I’m in the midst of a big life and career change. I wrote about the experiment in this newsletter a few months ago, and shared a March update here. In my March update, I explained that while the numbers looked great, my experience felt more complex than just “it’s working!” This month, I want to share a behind-the-scenes look at the emotional experience I’m having as I add multiple people into my workflow and begin to run my business more like an agency versus a solo-preneurial venture. In short, it’s a lot.

We decided to run this experiment — which entailed my husband leaving his job as a critical care nurse so I could scale up my business in intentional ways, and feel more supported — for three months. Technically, that means the experiment ends mid-May, which is in just a few weeks. So, this will be my last “official” experimental update. But, spoiler alert, you’ll still be hearing about all of this in the future because it won’t be an experiment anymore! We’ve decided to keep this situation permanent.

As part of this experiment, I committed to sitting down at the end of each month and asking myself some big questions:

• Is this working?

• Am I happy?

• Do I feel good in my body?

• What do I need to change?

Below, you’ll find my honest answers to these questions for the month of April 2023. Let’s get to it.

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Is this working? Am I happy?

Yes and yes.

But as I noted above, “it’s working” and “I’m happy” are not quite complex enough to sum up the situation. I’m going to share my insights based on the holographic thinking model I wrote about a few months ago, which involves considering my head, heart and gut to make a decision.

Head:

From a financial perspective, this experiment is 100% working. In April, I continued to beat my original monthly revenue goal of $15,000. (I surpassed it by a few thousand dollars this month, which felt better than majorly overdoing it, like I did in March.) We paid our bills and we were able to add some money to our emergency savings account, which is a big deal. May looks similarly steady.

As a nurse, my husband was locked into a really rigid schedule, and his added flexibility made a huge difference this month as well. We had several days of lost childcare, and we were able to deal with it without taking a huge financial hit.

We also took a week of vacation this month, just the two of us, and spent it hiking in Joshua Tree National Park. I felt good about making enough money to support us in just three weeks, and I wasn’t worried about finances while we were on our trip.

My assistants have also added a ton of value to my business in the past two months. They’ve freed up my time by handling scheduling, social media, research, ordering products, and so much more. (I’ll write more about hiring help in an upcoming newsletter later this month, because I know y’all have a ton of questions about this process!)

There are hard things, too. The rational stressors related to this switch are mainly tactical: When my husband leaves his job, we’ll need to get our own health insurance on the open market. If we’re both working on my business, we need to store away more savings, just in case crap hits the fan. And we have a lot of work to do related to building a new budget and financial framework for our family.

Heart:

Rationally, this decision is a total yes. But from a feelings and emotions perspective, this experience is so much more complex than that. As I add more people into my business, I’ve had to contend with some tricky, trauma-based thought patterns. Here are a few of the (many) issues I’m working on uncovering:

• My business has been my safe place. As I add other people into my business, I must contend with changing my systems and leaning on others for decision-making. This is really, really hard on my nervous system. In short, I feel safer alone. But I also don’t want to be alone anymore; the pressure that I carry on my shoulders often feels like too much to bare, and I’m craving support. There’s an internal battle happening related to the safety of asking for support; it’s taking a toll on me.

• I have a lot of scarcity around money, which I didn’t realize until I started upping my prices and bringing in more revenue. My scarcity doesn’t come up around work opportunities or business possibilities; I believe there’s more than enough out there for all of us. Rather, my scarcity has more to do with trusting myself. How much can I handle? Am I equipped for this?

• I’m also realizing that I associate money with control. When I don’t feel in control of my finances (which is happening now, because things are changing), I get scared. When I’m scared, I accept things that pay too little, just because they feel safe. Then I get all wrapped up in pricing dilemmas. I try to muscle through my work instead of operating ease-fully. Again, I’m working on this in therapy. But god, it’s huge — and deeply tied to the way money was discussed in my family as a kid.

• Turns out, I also associate higher earnings with suffering. I desperately need to break this association in my brain if I want to work sustainably in the years to come. My knee-jerk reaction is this: Making more money will cost me (my sanity, peace, happiness, etc). There is so much evidence to the contrary, but my little kid brain is completely freaked out by all the decisions I’m making because she worries that I will suffer. Again, this one comes from my family of origin.

• Here’s another fun one: I try to avoid mistakes at all costs. As a child, criticism felt like it risked my access to love. And I will need to accept that adding people into my business means adding mistakes into my business, too. Honestly, I hate the whole idea of this! I’ve been raging about it with my therapist. I know that perfection is a defense mechanism for me but my nervous system is going to have to learn that mistakes are tolerable and safe if I also want support. Oof.

All of this gets at that third question: Do I feel good in my body? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. When the answer is no, I handle the emotional complexity by doing a lot of nervous system regulation (via hiking, gardening, playing with my kids, massage therapy, talk therapy, and beyond).

It’s worth noting that my heart has also been so, so happy seeing my husband relax after years of burnout. Often, when I go to label my emotions, I find a mix of terror and cascading joy sitting side by side. When my husband and I sit down to talk about our lives now, we see possibilities everywhere. We’re making plans for the future (which we struggled to do while in survival mode) and having adventures together. It’s incredible.

Messy emotional cocktails are so human, aren’t they?

Gut:

I sat with my wise, older self earlier this week (which I do through an amazing visualization meditation that I learned from Nisha Moodley; my ADAPT group got a taste of this last week). This is what she said to me:

Stay the course. This is one of the biggest break-throughs you’ll have in your life. You’re at a threshold of being able to handle more. You’ll finally be able feel safe in your own body and let your emotions out. Work be damned, this is everything.

I trust her. She almost always appears to me as a 70-year-old woman dressed in gardening clothes, energetic and grounded. And I believe that she’s right: I’m where I need to be, even if being here feels vastly uncomfortable.

The TL;DR is that my hypothesis was right! My husband won’t be going back to his full-time job. He’s joining my business instead. This is better for our family, our finances, and our emotional health. We’ll be building some really cool things in the coming years. And you’ll find me spending a lot of time in therapy as I navigate through all of these tricky transitions.

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I’ll leave you with this metaphor: I live on an acre of land in the woods, and the yard hasn’t been maintained for at least a decade. Because of that, there’s a deep layer of pine needles and pine cones built up on nearly every surface. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’ve been in a season of wintering, focused on introspection, healing, resting, and tending to myself. But as I move into a spring season, it’s not like the flowers will just pop up suddenly. That’s not how it works! Instead, I need to remove the debris that built up over the winter. Only once I remove all the debris will I start to see new growth. Emotionally, spiritually and intellectually, this is where I’m at: Clearing, grieving, and seeing new possibilities for how I’ll operate in the world moving forward.

• What kind of season are you in right now?

• What debris do you need to clear from your life and business, so the flowers can bloom?

• What do your head, heart and gut tell you about what’s next?

• What conflicting, human emotions are you experiencing related to your life and business?

Every time I rake my yard, I think about how proud I am that I continue to do this work, even when it makes me feel like I want to run and hide. There’s nothing like owning a small business to make you face all of your patterns and coping mechanisms, over and over again. It’s self-growth, on hyper speed. And despite the challenge, it’s also a little bit magical.

Sending love to you in this season, wherever you’re at. We’re doing a good job.

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!