Three Unique Ways that Women Entrepreneurs Exhaust Themselves (and how to resolve them)
Are you exhausted? If you’re like most of my female clients, you are—and that exhaustion is not just physical. Most of the women who come to me are mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally exhausted.
In order to start to recover from that exhaustion, I think it’s really important that we understand the special circumstances of being both a woman and an entrepreneur—because entrepreneurship can be very different for women than it is for men.
So I want to share with you three examples of situations my clients have been in.
Now, I’m not saying that the situations I’m about to describe are experiences that only women have, because I think they happen with men, too. But it’s important that we, as women, recognize them so that we can give ourselves the grace and the time that we need.
Each of these three clients was in a place where they needed rest and recovery, but weren’t necessarily giving themself the permission to take it, because they didn’t think that they had “worked hard enough for it” or that they “deserved it.”
But that’s because, for so many years, we have been trained to believe that the only work that really “counts” as work is what we do for a business or a job—which is not actually true at all.
We do so much work that goes way beyond what we’re doing in our businesses or our jobs.
One of my clients, June, has three kids under the age of seven. At Revenue Breakthrough, I recommend making every Monday a Money Monday—a day to work on building revenue and generating activities for your business.
And June said to me, “Monica, I just can’t seem to get anything done on Mondays. I am distracted. I’m unfocused. I end up watching videos on Instagram and Facebook, and I just feel like I don’t have the discipline that I should and I’m doing something wrong.”
When we got further into the conversation, I learned that, every weekend, from Friday morning through Sunday, she had no childcare and very little support from her husband. He worked on the weekends and, when he was home, he was resting.
That meant that she was the primary caretaker of her kids for those three straight days when they were out of school and daycare. That took up a lot of her energy and time, and it left her exhausted.
So she didn’t really get any rest and recovery on weekends. And I think that’s true for so many parents out there.
To resolve this, we gave her full permission to take Monday for herself: to watch TV, to write in her journal, to sit on the couch and zone out, to stay in her pajamas all day. The kids were at school and at daycare, and she finally had the time to rest and recover.
When she made that change, her Tuesday through Thursday became so much more productive. She got three to four times more work done and was able to build a very successful business.
The time you spend on your business is more about quality than it is about quantity. It’s about focusing on the right activities instead of trying to do a hundred activities. But you have to have energy in order to figure out what to prioritize.
And for June, she was going into every week so exhausted that she couldn’t even prioritize her tasks, much less get them done.
So if you’re in a situation like June’s, whether you’re a parent taking care of kids all weekend or you’re taking care of an elderly parent or sick family member all weekend, know that you may need to take some time or the whole day off on Monday.
And if you do, that is completely okay.
My second example is a client who wasn’t a parent. She came to me and said, “All weekend long, I’m enjoying my time with my partner, but we’re often doing activities that, you know, are out with friends. And then on Monday, I have meetings with my team all day, and by Tuesday I feel completely drained.”
And when we started talking, I realized that she’s an introvert. And while she loves being with people and managing her team, by the end of three or four days spent talking to people non-stop, she’s out of energy.
So to resolve this, we made Tuesday a silent day. That meant that she had no client meetings, no team meetings, no family meetings—just time to work quietly on her own stuff.
She could write her newsletters, get ahead for the week, and do all kinds of creating and organizing—but there was no talking. And that refueled her and gave her so much happiness and momentum for the rest of the week.
So if you, too, are more introverted and find that, while you love managing people, it’s tiring for you, give yourself some quiet time or even a full quiet day.
The third situation is exemplified by one of my clients—let’s call her Mary. When Mary came to me, because of COVID, she hadn’t been seeing her family or friends or networking the way that she used to be.
And she couldn’t figure out why she was feeling depressed. It was starting to turn into full-blown sadness every day.
Eventually, we realized that she’s an extrovert. Mary gets her energy from being with people, and she had been spending way too much time alone. So, for her, we found circles of friends and networking events that she could engage with online to replenish herself.
Now, we didn’t overdo it. We made sure she still had plenty of time to actually work on her business. But in intentionally taking time to socialize, she started to feel like a wilted flower that had finally been watered again.
So if you normally spend a lot of time with people and find that energizing, but you’ve fallen out of that pattern and are suddenly starting to feel anxious or sad, it could be that you need people in your life again, and that you need to find a consistent way to engage with them.
If you want to dive deeper into the myriad situations concerning women and money-making, I highly suggest that you join us at our Women & Money Event. It’s a virtual event happening on July 8—and it’s the only event of its kind.
We’ll be breaking down all the particulars of navigating the world and making money as a woman and entrepreneur. I invite you to join us—you can register here.
Wishing you grace, rest, and rejuvenation for the week ahead!
