by Kimberly Design Love | Business Start-up, Dream and Decide, Lifestyle Design
Are you wondering how you can build a business and not another job?
Many people dream of working for themselves, being their own boss, and having the freedom to only take on clients and projects they love.
What they don’t realize, though, is that there is a huge difference between building a business and being self-employed.
Business owners scale their income. Self-employed people trade dollars for hours
Business owners leverage the skills and talents of others. Self-employed people rely only on their own skills.
Discouraged yet? Don’t be. Every business owner started out self-employed. Just don’t stay there.
These tips will help you build a sustainable business instead of just another job.
Make a List of What you Hated about your Corporate Job
Often times we don’t know what we want in life but we sure as heck know what we don’t want. Make a list of everything you hate or wish you did not have to deal with at your corporate job. For me, it was pointless meetings without an agenda and dress codes.
Take a solemn vow not to let any of those items creep into your new business.
Don’t Try to Do It All Yourself
Building a sustainable business requires that you leverage the talents and time of others. While it might seem cost-effective to simply do everything yourself—especially in the start-up phase when you likely have more time than money—it’s a path to burnout and stress.
Instead, separate your tasks into those that you love and are especially suited for (such as marketing) and those you dislike and aren’t good at. Then make a solid plan to get those that you aren’t good at off your list of things to do. If you feel like you can’t afford to outsource it all right now, start with what you tend to procrastinate the most on, even if it’s just a few hours each month.
Don’t Allow Yourself to Work All the Time
The trouble with working at home is that you live at work. And that means that there’s no clear line in the sand between your work day and your home life.
Since there’s always work to do, it’s easy to find yourself working every available moment—often to the detriment of your family relationships.
You can help avoid this by:
- Setting—and maintaining—clear work hours
- Having an office with a door you can close when you’re done
- Scheduling time for family and other activities
- Taking time for yourself
Vacations and Downtime Are Important
Don’t create a business that requires you to be “in the office” every day. At the start, you may need to be available more, but you should definitely be planning for the day when you can be “off the grid” for extended periods of time.
- Have trusted contractors who can handle things when you’re not available
- Leverage automation tools such as autoresponders and autowebinar systems
- Create repeatable systems so you’re not always re-inventing the wheel
While you might not be able to hit the road with no internet access for weeks at a time, at the very least you should be able to reduce your workload to a daily check-in.
Sound impossible? It’s not. With some forethought and planning, you can create a team—and the systems they need—to successfully run your business without becoming overwhelmed and overworked.
I am launching a workshop for new entrepreneurs called Design a Business You Love.
Please Check it Out.
by Kimberly Love | Podcast
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In this episode, we talk to Jacquelyn Gioertz about women in business and relationships. We also discuss the law of attraction.
Jacquelyn is a business coach for women. She shares her story of losing her husband at a young age and how she found a new purpose.
Jacquelyn’s Favorite Quotes – “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.” Mike Lightman
“When sleeping women awake mountains will move.” Chinese Proverb
Jacquelyn’s Advice “Follow Your Gut, Follow Your Instincts, Follow Your Passion.”
Jacquelyn Recommend the Mike Dooley’s Book Infinite Possibilities
Jacquelyn’s Book –
Jacquelyn’s Website – AwakeningWomen.net
Click Here To receive your free gifts of Kimberly’s Vision Board Guide and Jacquelyn’s Manifesting 101
by Kimberly Design Love | Motivation Mindset
Have you ever considered how much you could learn from criticism? Really, think about it. If you can keep an open mind and not get defensive, then the more criticism you receive, the more you would learn about your field and your audience. And the more you learn, the more talented you would become. It’s a cycle. With knowledge comes confidence and through knowledge and confidence, incredible work develops.
You are Going to Get More Criticism
Of course, in this day-and-age, you are going to get more criticism from not only experts, but from people who don’t even have a clue. People love to give their opinions, even if they don’t know anything about what you do. But the beauty of criticism is, you can learn from both groups of people.
Most people can easily blow off negative comments from someone who has no experience in their field, although you really shouldn’t because you can still learn something from them. But it’s with experts and with colleagues that people tend to have a hard time accepting negative observations. For some reason, people have a very hard time seeing past it.
A Critic is an Expert in Your Field
But by definition, a critic is an expert in a particular field, who uses his or her vast knowledge to evaluate the authenticity of someone else’s work. Let’s take a food critic for example. The only way they get that job is by proving, through years of hard work, that they would be a superior judge of food quality and taste. So if you’re a chef in five-star restaurant and you receive a bad review from one of these critics, you have a choice to make. You can get angry and write them off as an idiot, or you can find something positive in that review. Now with the first option, you really don’t learn anything, and honestly, you just look like an arrogant snob.
Look for the Negative and the Positive in Criticism
But with the second option, by looking for the positive in a negative, you will be able to gain knowledge based on that critic’s experiences; experiences that are different from your own. You will also develop as a chef and as a person. Not to say that everything the critic writes is 100% truth. There could be several points that you do not agree with and rightly so, but if you can train yourself to take a deep breath and pull at least one or two positive aspects from their criticism, you will be amazed at how much you can learn. So bring on more criticism! And who knows, with enough criticism, maybe someday you will become the critic, and think about how much knowledge you would be able to share then.
by Kimberly Design Love | Motivation Mindset
The fact of the matter is, no matter what you do in life, you will be criticized on it. Whether you’re a writer, an artist, a designer, a chef, an executive, it doesn’t matter. No matter what career you choose, there will always be criticism. It’s how you respond, not react to criticism.
Now if you are not the best at receiving criticism or if you are the type of person who is easily offended by criticism, this could really hurt your career and ultimately your ability to develop as a person. Often times, when we are upset by something, we, as humans, have a tendency to react, sometimes overreact.
Respond! Don’t React to Criticism
Ultimately though, with criticism, it is much better if we can reach a point in our lives that we have the ability to breathe, think on it and then respond, not react to criticism. There are three very simple steps that you can practice in your life and then put into action when it comes to criticism.
Number one, love what you do.
Seems simple enough, right? The truth is, if you really love what you do, then your work will reflect that. And if you truly love what you do, then you will find yourself becoming more open to outside criticism. If your work is nothing more than a hobby or something you do just to make money, it will be much harder for you to receive criticism.
Number two, believe in what you do.
You should only do something that you truly believe in. If you have strong convictions about what you do, then someone’s criticism of your work will fuel those convictions, not dismantle them. Plus, you will be able to not only receive the criticism graciously, you will actually be able to have conversations about it!
Number three, find the positive in everything.
Unfortunately, criticism inherently carries a negative connotation. As a design teacher, I never heard my students say, “Oh how wonderful! I am being critiqued today.” So with any criticism, it is imperative to find the positive aspects of it and learn from it, no matter where or who it comes from.
There will be critics
Let’s face it, you are going to be criticized by people in all facets of your life. But if you can integrate these three very simple steps into your life, you will find that that terrible feeling will begin to go away, and you will be able to respond, not react to criticism and to the comments being made. Over time, you will actually welcome criticism. It may sound crazy now, but give it time. It really can happen for you!
by Kimberly Design Love | Motivation Mindset
Criticism, for many people, carries the same meaning as judgment. In fact, one of the top synonyms of criticism is judgment. And one of the top synonyms of critic is judge. No wonder people have such a hard time with this term! Who wants to be judged? Obviously, people get defensive when it comes to being criticized. They can’t see the benefits, because the judgment side of it is so overpowering. And in today’s society, the word judgment doesn’t exactly carry a good connotation.
But if you go back in time, a clearer picture of why those two words are synonymous with words like judge and judgment begins to form. In the English language, we often forget that our words have a social and historical context to them. Language develops out of culture, and it affects how we perceive the words we use. There can be so many connotations to a word, and if we don’t look at the historical and social context, we can miss the whole point.
Let’s take just two words as an example. First, the word “awful” used to mean something that was inspiring. Today, awful means something bad or terrible. Quite a difference, right? Complete opposites really. For the second example, take the word “thongs.” Thongs used to refer to a pair of flip-flops, but we all know very well that that is not what people refer to now when they say, “I want to buy thongs.” In fact, I can just imagine the reaction of a teenager who overhears that sentence, especially if it’s their grandmother who says it.
Judgment and criticism have also suffered the same, although not as comical, misconceptions. A judgment was the opinion of a person of high regard. It used to carry the meaning of a belief or opinion based on study and higher education. Today, we often think of a judgment as an opinion based in ignorance, not education.
The word judge has gone through even more changes. In Jewish history, judges were leaders. The word had a positive connotation of strong, protective individuals. Then, judges became those who bore the responsibility of sentencing those who committed crimes. Again, not meant to have a negative connotation, but perhaps during the years of slavery, that all changed. Today, we tend to think of judges more so as those on American Idol or The Voice.
The point being, we need to take a deep breath and a step back when we think of the words criticism or critic. Although they have been distorted over the years, they truly do represent concepts that mirror our idea of positive feedback, which is only meant to help you develop in your area of expertise.
