Overcoming 2024 Hurdles

Welcome to episode 159 of the Own Your Genius podcast, where we empower business owners to use their education and their experiences to create dope businesses. I’m your host, Attorney LaConya Murray. We are officially in the final quarter of 2024. This year has absolutely flown by. I spoke with a client the other day and I was like, hey, how’s everything going? And he’s like, yes, business is booming. We’ve had the most cases that we’ve ever had. And my heart was super happy for him, especially because I know for a lot of business owners, that has not been the case. For a lot of us, 2024 has been financially straining because of everything that’s going on with the economy. And I know that you might have been just trying to stay afloat financially, but today I want to talk about the mental aspect of what we’ve been going through in 2024. But before we get into all of that, make sure you are subscribed to the podcast so you don’t miss a single insight on how to own your genius.

Welcome back to the Own Your Genius podcast where we discuss building businesses, growing brands and what else? Only your genius. I’m your host, Attorney LaConya Murray, owner of Off The Mark IP Solutions. Off the Mark is a boutique intellectual property firm representing innovative entrepreneurs aka geniuses who are looking to protect their brand and grow their business with ongoing legal support and business mentorship. We have a good one for you today, so let’s get started.

I was journaling the other morning and I would reminisce on the good old days when we were in school and the only thing, we had to worry about was keeping our grades up and practicing during this nine-month period. And even in that nine-month period, you know, we had scheduled time off for a couple of days, sometimes a couple of weeks if it was fall break or Christmas break. And then we had three months off, but we didn’t have to worry about any of that. And at the end of the three months, we get to go back to school with clarity and sometimes a little excitement that, you know, we’re not going to play on that. We were a little excited to get back to school. Even if the excitement did not last long. But then after that thought, I was like, why aren’t adults, why aren’t we given that same luxury? It seems like a bit of a rip-off, right? That we don’t have this scheduled time off to just kind of decompress. You hit, I don’t want to say 18, because then you go to college and you kind of have the same break.

But when you get to a certain age, when you get to a certain level of adulthood, our bets are… all bets are off and yeah, you work jobs where you have vacation days, but up until recently, taking advantage of those vacation days were really frowned upon. What does this have to do with everything that we’re talking about? What I want to do is to remind you that even if you are going through this struggle financially in your business, do not forget to rest because the world will not give it to you. You will have to take it. You do have to be intentional about doing so. And for a lot of business owners, that idea of rest, it’s like, wait a minute, not working in my business. Like how do I do something besides think that all the time? You have to.

Rest is a necessary part of success. And I believe that business owners, some business owners don’t give themselves permission to rest because they tie their business success and failure directly to their value. If the business is doing well, if the business is succeeding, that means that I am a value. I am a success, I matter, but when the business isn’t doing so well, the flip side of that happens, right? I’m a failure, I’m wrapped up in shame and something’s wrong with me. And I need for you to understand that that is not the truth. Your business is its own entity, even if it’s not so legally, right? You and your business are not the same. Your business success does not directly affect the value that you provide personally. With that in mind, even in the season of being slow, you have permission to take a step back and rest. It’s kind of like when you go and you work out and you do all this working out day after day, but if you are skipping the stretching at the end of your workout, your muscles are getting all tight and then you’ll end up hurting yourself.

That’s the same thing with this rest as a business owner. I know 2024 has been a slow year for some of you and your businesses and you might find yourself not being able to sleep. You might have more headaches. You find yourself anxious, overwhelmed, and just really emotionally drained. First of all, I want you to know you are not alone. Second of all, I want you to consider seeking professional help from a medical doctor, from a therapist, and on that note, which by the way, I am not either one of those things. And today’s podcast is not about giving you medical advice. I just really want to bring our shine of light on this problem because a lot of times when we think about our business being slow, we really think about it from only a financial standpoint and we don’t think about what kind of toll that is having on our mind and on our body. So today I’m just going to try to give you a few things that I found to be helpful. All right, that good with you? All right, let’s keep it moving.

The first thing, looking at my list over here, the first thing that I find to be helpful, and you know this, you’ve been rocking me for a while, is I find mindfulness and meditation to be very helpful. Practicing mindfulness and meditation can help reduce the stress and improve your focus. You’ll be surprised that even just a few minutes, you know, I get up and I’ll do between five or 10 minutes of meditation a day. Sometimes I do guided meditation through my Peloton app with Chelsea or sometimes I just turn on my I have this nature playlist That I just turn on and I just call on that silence for myself but it Helps it helps and on the subject of you know meditation and mindfulness We need to be mindful that we are breathing you would be surprised how often I find myself holding my breath throughout the day and when you hold your breath then your shoulders, you know all stretched, you know, scrunched up and not relaxed. I have to make, be intentional about, hey, LaConya, are you breathing? Okay, breathe just like regular breathing. And then in addition to the regular breathing, if I find myself in a situation that might cause anxiety, what I do is I take a deep nose breath and then I let out a long sigh. And I don’t know why that’s helpful but it is. If you haven’t tried like breathing, try that. It’s helpful. The other thing that I’ve been incorporating lately is physical activity. And this is coming from someone who hates the gym. I hate the gym. Does not make my heart happy to get up and go to the gym. But regular exercise is a great way to relieve stress and it kind of boosts your mental health.

What I had to do, because I don’t like going to the gym, I’m not going to force myself to do something that’s out of alignment, right? But I did find something that I liked, but I do like walking, I do. I like walking and I don’t mind working out from my home. So again, the Peloton app, which I found the Peloton app in the pandemic when I got the Peloton bike, which I hated by the way. So glad I was able to sell that but I love the Peloton app because it has such a variety of exercises in there. I use it for meditation. I use it for yoga. I recently started using it for strength training and this body weight and some weight training. And I see a little difference. Look, I got a little muscle. But anyway, beside the point, find something that you like to do and do it, because I have never, even though sometimes it’s a little difficult for me to get up and get on the treadmill or turn on the app to actually get started. Once I do and once, I get to the other end of it, I’ve never like, oh my gosh, that was just a waste of my time. I’ve never liked that. I’ve always, at the end of my workout, I’m so glad that I completed the workout and I feel so much better. That’s really why I love getting on the treadmill and walking, especially when I am a little stressed because it just, you just put all that to the side and you just work it out.

And yeah, so finding something physical that you like doing. The third thing I would say that I find helpful is leaning on my tribe. When you’re going through something, your first response might be to keep it to yourself. And that might be because you don’t want to be a burden to anyone else, or maybe because you’re embarrassed to find yourself in that situation. Don’t run from people, you need to lean in. Join a community for business owners because that can help provide a sense of understanding when you have other people that are going through similar things, because a lot of times when you’re a business owner and you’re going through these challenges, we have a tendency to think that, oh, this is just happening to me. Like there’s, I guess, ego involved in it. Like no one else is going through this. But when you get with the community of business owners and you start sharing, you’re like, oh, first of all, it’s not just me.

And second of all, maybe I see something in a way that can be helpful to someone else and vice versa. Find your community and lean in. I think it’s super helpful to do that. And if you think that you can’t share with your tribe, I will encourage you to talk to a therapist. My mom used to always tell me when I was younger, don’t hold that stuff in, you’ll get ulcers. I was, I don’t know, what was my young self all worried and concerned and thinking about? I don’t know but I was, and my mom was like, cut it out. And I used to think she was just talking, but then I got older and I started reading things. I was like, oh, stress really can manifest itself physically. Like it can make you physically ill. If you don’t have a tribe you can talk to, go find a therapist, a medical professional that you can talk to. Because it is, just talking about it is health and make sure, and this is the other thing that I did, is start incorporating more work-life balance. I said office hours, I work from home and I would find myself just kind of just working and working and working, right? So now I have office hours and at the end of the day, you wind up, I make a list for the next day and then you can go home. But if you’re like me and you work from home, you just do something else, step out of your office, you go and you hang out with your family, you read a book, you find a hobby, you do something. When you’re reading a book, make sure the book is not as non-business related. You are trying to decompress. You are trying to let the business settle over here. I’m not saying you can’t read business books. You can, but when you are in that period of decompression, find something just relaxing to read. For me, I have all these books around me, but these behind me are business books. Yes, I haven’t started reading it though. I think it’s called The Business of Lovers by Eric Jerome Dickey. I bought it a few months ago and I haven’t read it and I just picked it up. I was like, hey, maybe this will be my weekend read. Find me something to do outside of work after office hours. You have to, again, rest looks different. Sometimes rest is sleep. Sometimes rest is just not thinking about the business, which can be very difficult when you’re like, oh my gosh, I haven’t had a client you know, all month, how am I going to pay things? But the worry and the stress of it is not going to help. And when you give your time and you give your brain permission to rest, guess what, you get to come back with more clarity. That has been true for me.

Giving yourself a mental break and stress relief. Stop trying to do all of the things. Delegation people, delegation. Being the IT person, the marketing director, the attorney, the bookkeeper, the technician in your business is causing you stress and is losing you money because how can you focus on the high-level things when you’re doing all of the things? And I had to, again, learn that out for myself and it has been so helpful in my business. There are resources out there where you can find help for $8 an hour, $10 an hour. And for the people who are getting paid that, that is a good hourly rate for them. That’s for their… where they are. You know, it might not be good here in the US, but if you hire, if you look outside of the US for help, you will, we can get the help that you need. And if you haven’t started documenting your processes, start there. You know, before you even hire, make that first hire, hire that first VA, start with documenting your processes because what we’re going to not do, you know, moving forward is hiring help and then firing them because they’re not doing the work the way we want them to do it, or need them to do it because you gave them no direction. Come on now, give people direction. Set your team up for success. You hired them for a reason, right? Set them up for success by giving them some type of documentation of how you want things done, whether it’s written or recorded through video. All right, that’s going to be a subject for a whole, another day, right? This whole how do you prepare yourself to work with a new team member.

The final thing that I will mention is to practice gratitude. Even in the slow times, especially in the slow times, it’s important to find opportunities to be grateful. And just because you are grateful for where you are does not mean that you can’t want better, but you need to be able to find the goodness and the blessing in the situation that you’re in. It might be something as simple as God, this is the business that I pray for. Thank you for allowing me to do it. I got a new client today. Or maybe you didn’t get a new client, but a client that you’ve been working with has told you, have you made a difference in their business? You know, that kind of keeps you motivated to keep going. And in these moments of rest that I’m talking about, I’m not saying that you’re completely abandoning your business. I’m just saying, give your mind a time to rest. Give it time to do something besides work and worry. Me personally, it used to be really bad, the worry and the anxiousness, just because that’s part of being a business owner. But last year, I decided that, it’s not even that I decided, I reflected. Because we worry and stuff, because we’re anxious about the future, we don’t know what the future’s going to hold. But a lot of times if we look back at the past, we’ll realize that, oh, it’s going to work out. I don’t know how it’s going to work out, that’s not any of my business all the time, but it’s going to work out because it has a history of working out. And knowing that, I can be less anxious. I can breathe. I can say, okay, what do I need to do in this situation? I can kind of take a step out and instead of making decisions out of desperation, I can be more strategic about what I’m doing. And that’s what you can do during this downtime. A lot of times, having that downtime is not necessarily a bad thing. You know, so don’t be discouraged. Take advantage of it. You can use it to reassess your marketing plan. You can use it to start documenting those processes that we talked about, right, to prepare for your first hire. But just don’t try to grind through it, you know, because that can end up just being draining.

When your clients do start coming in, when the business starts picking up, now you don’t have the energy or the mindset to be successful and to handle them like you would normally be able to handle them. Set your business boundaries, lean into your tribe and live to build another day. Geniuses, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. What are your takeaways from this week’s episode? If you found today’s episode insightful, make sure that you share it with a fellow entrepreneur and don’t forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review.

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