Does your mental health affect your business?

Hey friend!

Happy New Year! I hope you had a fantastic start to the year and spent time with your friends and family. If life happened and you didn’t get the chance to (like me) remember, that’s okay too.

I’m so grateful to share the first-ever edition of Your Business Your Way with you. It’s the beginning of a new year, and I cannot wait to traverse this beautiful journey with you through all the ups and downs, failures, and successes.

Thank you again for giving space in your inbox.

I know it’s the first edition, and initially, I wanted to take the comfortable route with topics like “Lessons learned in 2022” or “Blunders I hope I don’t repeat in 2023”. But then, something suddenly happened that forced me to write this email.

Yes, I’m talking about mental health issues.

Honestly, whenever I bring this topic up, I get petrified of judgment. But I realize it’s not spoken enough, at least between coaches. We feel we help others with their lives when our own lives are going in a spiral.

“Why can I not implement the advice I give to my clients?”

I heard this question 5 times in the past month.

So here I am, writing this email, asking you not to compare your coach self to the human self. They’re 2 different people. Plus, what works for others will not work for you, right? You have to figure out your own root causes and work on them.

Now that we’ve got this out of the way, I hope today’s letter helps you find a balance and gives you enough time to work on yourself.

A few weeks back, I had a horrible couple of days. Okay, weeks.

Life as we know it started throwing crap, and I was struggling to keep my head out of the water to stay afloat. It was shit.

After months, I was terrified of returning to the Shruthi I once was, giving me a rude wake-up call. But that’s a story for another time.

Why am I telling you this? Because I’d be lying to you if I said the phase did not affect my coaching business.

Coaching/consulting is a career path that needs you to stay 100% mentally, physically, and emotionally with your client all the time (during the call). And, of course, other stuff comes with it, like sending notes, following up, and ensuring that they achieve their full potential.

But as time passed, I slowly noticed cracks forming.

I did not have the energy to send notes or follow up. And there were moments during the call when my brain shifted the gear to my life.

Being the perfectionist I am, I hated it. Constantly feeling like I wasn’t doing enough. I was beating myself up because I had no right to affect someone else’s life or waste their money. After all, I was the one who could not handle my shit, right?

If you’ve ever felt like this, trust me, I know what you’re going through (though your reasons might be different).

On one particular moment with a client, I lost track for a full 2 to 3 minutes.

That was when I knew I had to look for ways to balance my personal and business. I could not lead my life this way anymore.

I mention balance here because we all need time to heal. We cannot force the process to happen faster and give it enough time. We cannot box things up and throw them in the back of our minds only for them to burst later and affect us even more.

But what we can do is find ways to design our business and handle it the way it works for us while managing to stay present with our business and clients, right?

So here are 4 tips that worked for me and a couple of my friends (no, they don’t include standard stuff like having an active lifestyle or meditating).

1. Seek help

Until I was in the deep end, I never knew how much I needed external help. Have you heard the phrase, “Every coach needs a coach or therapist.”? Probably it was inspired by this.

Entrepreneurship and life put together are hard.

You need someone not a part of your family to listen, ask the right questions and help you sort things out in your head.

The best route here would be to take on paid coaching because you get more serious about the transformation. But if you cannot afford it right now, look for barter systems. I once took help from a life coach in exchange for doing content strategy for her. Or even ask for help from a friend (if they’re looking for beta clients or want to help you)

Do anything to get external help.

2. Inform your clients

Some coaches might look down on this, but it worked wonders for me because I was honest with them.

I informed 3 of my clients that I was going through some personal stuff, so I could not do the admin tasks for now. This did not mean I was giving excuses, but it meant I was setting the expectations and apologized.

I even offered them extra sessions because I felt I wasn’t good enough in 1 or 2 sessions. And wanted to make up for it.

I had never seen more empathy in my life before. Because they were going through similar stuff, they completely understood where I came from and were gracious. I’ll always be grateful to them.

3. Spend time with yourself

Do you know what company budget gets hit every time a recession occurs? It’s always the marketing team.

Similarly, when life throws shit at us, our alone time is the first thing that goes down the drain. But we don’t realize that it’s the most important one.

It needn’t be fancy or some long-drawn process at all. It can be as short as 5 minutes or as long as hours.

You can do anything you wish to. Sit on your patio and stare at the sky. Make a hot cup of tea and drink it. Water your plants. Journal or meditate. Listen to soothing music. Clean your home. Play instruments. Go for a walk.

Do anything (Reels/shorts/Twitter/Netflix is out of the list).

But you need to be alone with your thoughts and your physical self. Trust me. It’ll do wonders for your mental health.

4. Talk about it to your friends or, if possible, in public

I know some of you will be uncomfortable with this, but I’m requesting you to do this because we feel so alone during these times.

Especially as solopreneurs, who don’t have colleagues or managers, it can get lonely. Add mental health into the mix, and it might feel like a shit hole.

I remember being in a group of 5 women, and we used to gather once a week just to rant. No giving advice, no judgment, only listening and empathizing. A sisterhood that felt powerful.

And it felt so therapeutic!

I also remember when I spoke about it on Twitter and started getting DMs from friends I had not spoken to in a long while. Asking me how I was and sharing their stories of they went through similar phases of life.

It probably didn’t “heal” anything in me, but I felt so grateful and good. I don’t care who says what; we all want to feel like we aren’t alone in our journey. And some external validation from time to time is okay:)

If you’re not comfortable with either option, it’s completely okay too. Do what works for you.

Again, I cannot wait to take on this journey with you.

If you want to forward the newsletter to someone who might find it helpful, please do. It’ll also mean a lot if you could share it on Twitter.