Broke & Bothered: Where is the bar?

No, I don’’t mean the bar…as in drinking! I mean where is the bar in your business?

I remember shortly after I’d shifted out of broke to woke...I had booked a getaway to a beautiful house in nature. There were floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the water and the bedroom ceiling was glass, I fell asleep watching the stars. It was magical and I couldn’t believe how quickly my financial situation had changed. 

I remember looking forward to getting out of the city to truly unplug from work and technology altogether for a few days. It was a magical vacation and it was a fantasy of mine. Inclusive of luxury and simplicity at the same time. 

It was far beyond anything that I could’ve afforded previously and the banger was that I was crystal clear that I could afford it because my money muscles had gotten into a groove of budgeting like no body’s business.  This was largely due to getting clear on my boundaries in business and actually enforcing them.

Not only had my relationship to money changed dramatically, but so had my relationship to vacation. I realized that I had previously experienced vacation as an escape from burnout.  I would arrive on vacation tired and often leave tired trying to make the most of my few days “off”.  I could never fully relax.  I looked forward to blacking out & forgetting my name at least one of my vacation days.  I used to associate vacations with the relief of forgetting what my day-to-day felt like. 

While I thought these vacations were an anti-dote to stress, they were merely a temporary bandaid for the stress, exhaustion, and mental fatigue that I had normalized as part of the “work”.  As soon as I landed in New York, Broke & Burnout always greeted me as I deplaned.

My finances were such a mess that I had to work myself into the ground before & after vacation to even have a “vacation”. I couldn’t afford to decompress! I could barely say the word “budget” without anxiety, much less maintain one.  

What associations do you have with vacation? I’ll admit that I didn’t know how to handle going on vacation when I actually loved the work I was doing, when I regularly had time off and I wasn’t trying to escape anything.  I had to rewire my brain as I began to experience vacations in a new way. I had raised the bar in so many areas in my life. I was done normalizing “getting through” and “just dealing" with the bullshit.

This isn’t really about vacations.  This is about YOUR bar, which is one thing that you have full control over.  However, many times in private practice, we continue to work with the bars that our previous jobs or bosses made for us, forgetting that we have a say...the final say. Even after being my own boss, I continued to work hours I didn’t want to work because I had been conditioned to put others’ needs before my own even if it cost me my sanity.

There are just a few examples of where I discovered that I needed to raise my bar (for myself AND my clients) in my business.

*Going over session time consistently, especially with chronically late clients in an attempt to make up the time because it wasn’t their fault that there was traffic.

*Not charging no-show or late cancellation fees and then getting resentful because I could’ve offered that time to someone else.

*Feeling persistent resentment for not enforcing my policies, flaky clients, and all the money I was leaving on the table and not doing a damn thing about it but pout.

*Seeing too many clients back-to-back, working too late and eating 10pm dinners multiple times a week with a grimace on my face.

*Being complacent, isolating & not nurturing friendships and relationships because my tank was literally on E after giving all my gas to my clients. I needed a jump for my battery every freakin’ Friday and often none of my colleagues had one to give me as they were stranded too.

*Feeling stress every month around the first when rent was due.

There are many more “norms” that I had become accustomed to, but you get the picture.  I felt helpless as Broke & Burnout, the two evil stepsisters, skipped around me day after day taunting me.  The more exhausted I was, the blurrier my boundaries became, and the broker I was.  In this cycle, I continued to lower the bar just so I could crawl over it to get to my office.

 Where do you need to raise the bar in your business?  And how does that impact your life? How does it show up in your clinical work?  

If you know your boundaries are a bust in your business and you need help getting out of the blurriness, my 1:1 VIP Slay-N-Get-Paid is just what you need. 

My VIP Day is an intimate 1:1 intensive where we do an appraisal of your business boundaries and we do a tailored policy makeover based on YOUR needs and your situation.  I believe in personalizing your plans for that paper.  You in? 

At the minimum, I want you to think about one action that you can take TODAY to raise the bar a bit if yours is laying on the ground scratched and beat up.  Remember raising the bar isn’t just about boundaries in business, but also at home.  Maybe your action is asking your partner to manage dinner for more days a week. Heck, maybe it’s asking them to take a walk for an hour and you just need some me-time in this endless pandemic. Whatever it is!

The work that we do can be incredibly fulfilling personally, clinically AND financially.  You don’t have to choose, unless you decide that you do.