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Finding moderation as an entrepreneur

Feb 15, 2021 | Limiting Beliefs, Soul Purpose

We’ve all been brought up on films and TV shows with characters who fit into either the ‘love for life’ category or the ‘workaholic’ category. We never see a character that loves their job, works super hard but also makes sure to take time off and relax. They’re always on holiday and having to check their phone or being drawn away from their family time by a demanding boss or work emergency. But what if you could love your job and still have healthy boundaries for personal time?

As a society, we seem to have decided that we can either have a successful business, or we can have an exciting and fulfilling personal life, but not both. Well, that’s just bollocks. There is no rule that you have to sacrifice your health, your family, your friends or your personality for your business. So, how can we make sure that we have both? Is there anything we can do today that can start creating that healthy work/life balance we all crave?

*Blog recommendation: Is your business your life’s purpose?

Setting up boundaries early on

As soon as you even think about becoming an entrepreneur, you should be thinking about the boundaries you need to set. One of the first things I did was set clear working hours and times of the day when I was free to be contacted. These were non-negotiable, because as soon as you say ‘oh just this one time…’ you’ve opened flood gates that are very hard to close back up.

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“Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management. Balance means making choices and enjoying those choices.
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— Betsy Jacobson

Sometimes it may seem like you’re being unreasonable when you ignore a call from a client or customer because you’ve committed to taking a break or you’re working on another task, but your time is your own, you decide how you spend it. Time is the most valuable asset we have as entrepreneurs and if we’re not careful how we spend it, we can find ourselves always feeling like we have a lack of it, resulting in stress, panic and overworking.

Placing your value in the right places at the right times

This idea around time flows nicely into my next point. You need to be clear about what you value in your life as a whole. Just because you love your business and you want it to succeed more than anything, it doesn’t mean that you can’t value other aspects of your life.

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“Strive not be a success, but to be of value. ”

— Albert Einstein

Choosing where to place your value and when is another way to build those boundaries. During work hours, your value may be placed with the tasks you’ve got listed on your to-do list or the meeting you’ve got set up. Once you log off, where do you then place your value? Is it in your wellbeing? Is it with your family? This is another form of boundary setting, which will help you find more focus and intention in the present moment, instead of allowing your thoughts to roam all over the place and leave you feeling frazzled.

Paying attention to your energy

Every morning, take a second and think to yourself ‘What does my energy feel like today? What energy do I need more of?’ If you’re struggling to get motivated, or you know for a fact that the day isn’t going to productive, then adjust your day accordingly. Do tasks that are quick and don’t require you to focus for long periods of time. Do things that require you to be moving about a lot to keep your energy flowing. Set yourself an early finish time. Pay attention to how you feel throughout the day and keep adjusting to accommodate.

I know that if I’ve had insomnia the night before, I won’t be able to get a huge task list done, so I move things around so that I can still be productive, but in a way that takes my energy levels into consideration.

Flexibility with your working hours

This is one that has taken me a while to get used to coming from regular 9-5 jobs. I’m now a lot more flexible and forgiving with my working hours, pushing tasks back an hour or two, or starting later and finishing later. However, I always make sure I have time for myself, both in the morning and in the evening. What I physically can not fit into one working day, gets pushed back to the next day.

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“You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.”

— Oprah Winfrey

Having complete flexibility with your working hours is yet another perk of working for yourself, so don’t be afraid to indulge in it, especially when you’re feeling a bit rundown or in need of a slower working day.

Having moderation as an entrepreneur is completely unique to you, your needs, your values, your energy, so there is no one size fits all solution. A lot of what I’ve learned about moderation as a business owner has been through trial and error. If you put something into place that you think will make you more productive, but actually just leaves you feeling tired and stressed, scrap it and try something else. Nobody gets it right on the first go, so be kind to yourself and be mindful of your wellbeing.

7 ways to better track your achievements

Feb 9, 2021 | Soul Purpose

Be honest with me, how much do you track your achievements? I bet you do the bare minimum right? Occasionally look at your bank statement or tax document to see how much you’ve made that year and then move on your merry way? But what if you went deeper? What if you really started to make tracking your achievements a staple of your daily workload?

I’m definitely guilty of half-assing it when it comes to tracking my achievements and business wins, but I’ve been making a conscious effort to spend more time and energy on it these past few weeks. The result? Not only have I managed to smash my financial goals, but I also feel so much more motivated in my work and inspired to try new things and take risks with my business.

I’d always known about the law of attraction and how it works and I was always like ‘yeh I’ll try that’ and then lazy me kicks in and I do nothing. Tracking your achievements helps you to show gratitude and pride in your work, it helps you to feel content with how things are right now and so the universe rewards you with a healthy dollop of progress and forward movement.

So, I’ve used my other business skill, digital marketing, to come up with a few practical ways you can start to better track your achievements. All these techniques are things I’ve used to track client progress and it can be just as easily applied to you and your own business. So here we go, my top 7 ways to better track your achievements.

Monthly goals and deadlines

This is something I do every month for myself and I have two different ways I like to do it. The first is to use my Breathe Magazine 52-week planner to set myself deadlines for big projects I’m working on. The second is to create a goal list on Canva and set myself around 5-6 goals, both business and personal, that I keep above my desk, so I can keep checking in. Having these monthly goals keeps me focused and moving in the right direction. Without it, I would procrastinate so hard nothing would ever get done.

Business journalling

In volume 2 of Witchness magazine, I’m going to be looking at assessing your relationship with your business and this point feeds into that nicely. There’s a lot of emotions that come up when we’re running our own business, so keeping a business journal, where we can focus on our achievements and feelings about our business, is a great way to keep on top of everything. This is also the ideal place to write things like achievement lists, gratitude lists and potential dream goals for the future.

Income tracking

Something that I have neglected for way too long. I have accounting software that helps me keep on top of the really important stuff like tax, but when it comes to actually acknowledging the amount of money coming into my business, I tend to cringe away from it. Mostly because I’m always expecting to have done worse than I think. I don’t know why though, I’ve never done worse than what I’ve initially thought. My fear of money has stopped me from really taking a close look at the money my business was making, I always focused on what my business was spending. Having a simple income tracker has made a huge difference though. I use a really simple Google Sheet and update it daily, it takes like 2 seconds. It tells me the full amount of money that has made its way into both my personal and business accounts. This helps me to see how much I’ve made altogether and I always get a boost of confidence when I see that final total at the end of the month.

Google Analytics

I use Google Analytics a lot for my marketing clients, but I also use it a lot for The Self-Care Emporium. If your website is a key part of how you do business, like mine is, then it is essential you grasp at least the basics of Google Analytics. The main ways I use it for myself are to see how many users have visited my website, which of my marketing channels are working best for me and to compare month by month so I can see how my efforts have helped improve my business. I can also track the revenue of my shop and see how things are going with the e-commerce side of my business.

A glimpse at my analytics for Feb compared to Jan. I can see that I’ve increase my website visits by 34.79%.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is best if you want to track the SEO of your website, so this is handy if you have an eCommerce website or you’ve been working on getting found in those all-important Google Searches. I tend to use Search Console to help me figure out which of my blog posts are doing the best and also how I’ve been doing in terms of appearing in people’s search results.

Here’s a little look at the growth of my website over the last 12-months. See how there’s a big rise over the last few months? Huzzah!

Image boards (with a twist)

I love a vision board for goal setting and manifestation purposes, but you can also flip it on its head (adopt some of that Hanged Man energy from the tarot!). Instead of putting visuals onto your vision board of what you’d like to achieve, why not try putting visuals of what you’ve achieved that month? This can help to keep that firey motivation burning and really raise your vibes when starting a new month.

KPI tracking

This is a tool that I’ve used for clients in the past and it helps to not only chart new goals for the future but also see how much you’ve smashed your previous goals. For example, I use a KPI (key performance indicator) spreadsheet to help me set website visitor goals for the future because more website visitors equals more shop orders, more tarot clients and more growth for my business. I’ve also started using it to track shop orders and set revenue and order goals for the upcoming months.

Tracking is the key to future success

You should make sure that you’re using at least one way to track your progress and your big wins. Without this, it can be easy to let the moments worth celebrating fade away without acknowledgement. It’s not only good for your business, but it’s also good for your mind and spirit. It helps you to feel like you’re actually moving forwards.

Is your business your life’s purpose?

Jan 18, 2021 | Soul Purpose

Yes, I will be the first to admit that this post is very much inspired by the new Disney movie Soul (2020), which seems to follow a new Pixar trend in causing an existential crisis in adults and children alike. However, the themes of Soul was already on my radar and have been for quite some time.

As someone who grew up with boomer parents, the attitude towards work and job security was that you worked to get as much money as possible, to be able to pay for a roof over your head and food in your belly. The idea that you would strive to find a job that actually made you happy was a fantasy. Only those that were born into wealthy families were afforded such a luxury.

As a millennial, my own attitude towards work is very different. I’m not naive to the fact that a lot of people don’t have the luxury of saying no to a job they won’t enjoy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe they can’t want it and have it be a genuine and realistic hope. However, there is an issue when it comes to those that want to start a career because they feel like they were called to do it, or that it is there life’s purpose. There is a philosophical conflict somewhere embedded in this way of thinking and I wanted to see if I could unpack it a little more here.

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“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

What are the pros of thinking your career is your life’s purpose?

Let’s start with the positives of this approach to work. For one, it means that you’re putting your own happiness first and you’ve realised that in order to keep your vibes high, you need to do work that actually means something to you on an emotional level. This way of thinking has given the world a lot of indispensable people. There are some essential vocations that can only be done by those that feel they were called to do it, such as doctors, nurses, firefighters and other essential personnel.

This dedication can give you passion, motivation and a drive like nothing else. It can give you a purpose in life and give you a sense of self that other things might not be able to. It can help you feel like you’re always moving through life and not wasting a single moment, but the main thing is that it gives you a sense of control. Freedom in knowing that you are the one in the driver’s seat and the choices you’ve made and continue to make are serving a higher purpose. When we declare our career our life’s purpose, we may feel:

Like we’re making the most out of life
Like we’re leaving our mark on the world
Like we’re helping our fellow man
Like we have complete control over our own destiny
Like we are being watched over by a higher power
Like we have the support of the universe and things will work out in our favour

It all sounds great, right? Well, it’s a very thin line you walk when you declare your career or vocation as your life’s purpose. If you lean too far into it, you’ll start to notice more negatives than positives creeping into other areas of your life. You may even start to put too much faith into your self-proclaimed prophecy and forget that the world is not that black and white.

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“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there”

— George Harrison

What are the cons of thinking your career is your life’s purpose?

Now I’m not saying you can’t feel like you’re called to do a type of work without risking your grip on reality. What I do want you to keep in mind are the pitfalls of thinking about your career in this way.

I love what I do, I love getting up in the morning and working on Witchness Magazine, writing up tarot reading reports and posting off orders around the world, but do I think I was always meant to do it? Probably not. I do think I was always going to be an entrepreneur of some sort. I’ve always been a workaholic when it came to things I felt excited and passionate about. I enjoyed doing it, so why not do it all the time? This is something that many people who declare their work their life’s purpose fall into. They have such a strong connection with it that it completely occupies their conscious mind. They are unable to pull themselves away, even when they have nothing left to give.

Let’s circle back to talking about Soul for a second. The idea of the film (as I understand it, it’s open to interpretation) is that no human being is born with an overall purpose for their life. They aren’t thrown into this world with an end goal in mind. The purpose of life is unknown and it’s something humans have been trying to figure out since the beginning of time. We all want to know why we’re here, what we’re supposed to be doing. It’s a bit like starting a new job without an orientation or job description, you’re just left to figure stuff out for yourself, that’s life.

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“To empty the heart does not mean to not love. On the contrary, true love, as God intended it, is purest when it is not based on a false attachment.”

— Yasmin Mogahed, Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life’s Shackles

Economy, business, money and materialism are all man-made things, so even if we were put on this planet for a specific reason, it wouldn’t involve any of those. They are just the parameters that have been created by civilisation, to give us a sense of direction and purpose. Basically, we couldn’t figure out the meaning of life, so we created one from scratch.

More often than not, the drive and sense of purpose we feel for something is our passion. It’s not a divine call to take a specific road in life, it’s a desire to take that road. We have free will and we have a choice around which paths we choose to tread.

If we label our career as our life’s purpose, then we place it above all other things. We value it above other aspects of life such as health, hobbies, interests and personal growth. We crown it as the sovereign of our lives and all decisions we make are to appease the sovereign, but that means we can effectively become a slave to it. We become blind to anything that lies outside the realm of our vocation.

Work is not and should never be your main reason for living, no matter how much you love doing it. Like Allen Saunders once said, “Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.“.

What does it mean to have courage as a business owner?

Dec 7, 2020 | Soul Purpose

It’s all well and good me telling you to ‘have courage in your business’ but what does that actually mean? What do you have to do, think and believe in order for you to be able to finally label yourself as courageous?

As spiritual entrepreneurs, we have to be more courageous than most. We’re building a business from the ground up after all and we’re putting our hopes and dreams on the line. There’s a level of vulnerability that comes with building a soul purpose business and with that comes a need to go against our most basic human instincts.

We have to learn to ignore anxiety, gamble with finances, take responsibility for our successes and our failures. We have to put ourselves into positions where heartbreak and disappointment are a possibility and rely only on our own intuition and knowledge when deciding if risks outweigh the rewards. Our courage is an anchor for us and without it, it can be easy to feel lost, alone or without direction.

What does courage mean to you?

The first thing we need to get clear about is what courage means to us as individuals. Having courage can mean something different to everyone, depending on a number of different factors.

The overall definition of courage is:

The ability to do something that frightens one & strength in the face of pain or grief

and what frightens you is completely unique to you. Our fears or sources of grief and pain are our own, so our courage, by association, is completely unique to us also. Have a think about what courage might look like for you based on your own personal fears and experiences. It may be:

having the courage to start your own business
having the courage to invest more money into your business
having the courage to do something unique
having the courage to branch away from tradition or what is expected of you

Think about what your current challenges are and start to think about how you can face them head-on and overcome them.

How can you actively be more courageous?

This is where self-awareness becomes very important. It’s only by knowing what our fears and weaknesses are that we can understand how we can be more courageous. Our fears stand in the way of our goals, so one way we can start to understand what our courage should look like in the practical sense is by practising a bit of visualisation.

Imagine yourself on a road with a tall wall in front of you. You know that at the end of this road lies what you’ve been working towards, so getting through this wall is essential.

We need to figure out what this wall is representing for us, what is our fear? What is the obstacle we just can’t seem to overcome? This might be a fear of failure, a fear of being in debt, a fear of a failed business. Allow your subconscious mind to create an image that best represents this fear, by relaxing as much as possible and really focusing in on that fear and how it makes you feel. Once you’ve got your fear or obstacle in front of you, how can you get past it? What does it look like? What is required of you in order to overcome it?

Something that I find when I do this is that the thing in front of me has no actual power over my actions. It’s the fear of the thing that stops me from getting past it, not the thing itself. For example, if my fear was the fear of losing money and I see that fear represented before me as a big pile of money in front of me that I’d have to walk away from, the likelihood that it would physically stop me from moving forward is zero. I can choose to walk past and not look back and deal with whatever comes my way after the fact.

Overcoming obstacles in the way of courage

The root of most of our fears as business owners is the belief that we’re either not good enough or simply not capable of doing what needs to be done. This is never true. Never.

I’ve never done a tarot reading for a client and had the cards tell me that the person is not good enough to succeed, or that they aren’t able to do what they want to do. These are beliefs that live inside your head, not out in the real world. Yes, there may be obstacles, whether material, emotional or mental, but there are always ways to overcome obstacles. Actual physical blocks, things that quite literally prevent you from doing what you feel called to do, are extremely rare.

All of us have the courage we need to tackle anything that comes our way. Tap into the passion and connection you have with your business or project and use that to power the courage you need to get through.

A guide to becoming an intuitive business owner

Nov 9, 2020 | Blog

Building any kind of business is a land of trial and error, excitement and crippling disappointment, the highs and lows can be energetically draining but it’s all worth it. The prize at the end of the rope is an intense freedom and flexibility that only self-employed life can offer. But how can we weather this rollercoaster of emotions as we try and reach our goals? How can we stay sane?

The answer? Intuition.

Developing and building your intuition as a business owner can make or break your success. Being able to rely on your gut feeling and emotional decision making means that dealing with obstacles and challenges becomes second nature. Once you’ve got that all-important intuition in your corner, you are ready and able to take on anything that stands between you and what you desire.

How does intuition play a part in business?

Do you ever have that deep gut feeling that something is going to happen and then it does? Like being able to predict when someone is going to call you, or knowing what someone is going to say next before they say it? That’s your intuition. It can also play a big part in decision making, and choosing what the best course of action is for the situation we are currently in.

Apply all this to your business and you’ve got a pretty powerful skill on your side.

When it comes to your business, your intuition can help you make tough decisions, such as where to invest in growth, the best platforms for promotion or understanding the right people to target your services to. It can also help you choose new projects, feel more confident in your chosen career and even help you better serve your customers or clients.

There are multiple ways that strengthening your intuition can make you a better business owner but most importantly of all, the better the business owner, the more successful the business.

Testing the strength of your intuition

In order to strengthen your intuition, you need to understand how strong it is already. The way to do this is to be mindful of the decisions you make throughout the day. Pay attention to where your decisions come from, do you go for the logical choice or do you feel your way to your answer? These decisions can be tiny ones, like what to have for breakfast, what channel to watch on TV or whether you choose coffee or tea for your afternoon beverage.

If you struggle to do this, then your intuition needs a bit of TLC. If you can make gut decisions with ease, then you’re already on the right track to becoming an intuitive inspiration.

5 ways you can start to strengthen your intuition

Now that you’ve got a bit more awareness around your own intuitive skills, it’s time to start building on them. I’m going to give you two different options for each point, one for complete intuitive beginners and one for those of you that already have a strong foundation.

1) Daily card pulls

for beginners try oracle cards, for more advanced use tarot cards

Each day before you start work, choose a card and use your intuition to decide what that card wants you to know on that day. It could be that the card is showing you what you need to focus on, or it could be what you need to watch out for as the day unfolds.

View my full range of oracle cards right here! Or grab yourself a tarot deck here

2) Meditate on your goals

for beginners, start with just 5-minutes a day, for more advanced aim for 10-20 minutes

It’s easiest to write down 1-3 key goals you currently have before you slip into relaxation. This helps to create a focus and context for your meditation. The aim is to get a better understanding of where your goals come from, why do you want to reach them? What’s driving you to achieve them?

3) Be mindful of your choices

for beginners, this should start with smaller choices like what you choose to eat, why you choose a certain time of day to do certain tasks etc. For more advanced apply this to your work and life choices, as well as your thoughts and ideas

We want to start to notice if we use our head or our gut to make decisions and question the root of our final choices. We want to know why we choose what we choose, this helps us to create a stronger connection with our subconscious, the home of intuition.

4) Start a dream journal

for beginners, start by writing a few bullet points of what you remember about your dream as soon as you wake up. For the advanced, write your dream out as a fleshed-out short story, if you can draw, try and draw the images you saw in your sleep

Your dreams come from your subconscious mind and they are released in your sleep because your conscious mind is finally out the way. Our conscious thoughts often suppress our subconscious thoughts, which is why they try to communicate through feelings and behaviours when we are awake. Making a note of what our dreams are telling us can help us start to decipher what is happening down in our subconscious, again helping us to form a stronger connection with it while we’re conscious.

5) Stop being scared of your hunches

for beginners, it’s about simply recognising those intuitive feelings when they arise, for advanced you can work on showing gratitude to your intuition for giving you the information

We’ve been conditioned by the media and in some cases, our culture, to believe that intuition or being able to feel something before it happens or something that is meant to happen, is some sort of supernatural phenomenon. It’s not and that’s coming from someone who actively practices witchcraft. How many times have you said ‘I knew that was going to happen’ and then immediately said ‘spooky’ or ‘I must be psychic’’? When you brush off your intuition in this way, you’re suppressing its true potency. You’re belittling it and putting yourself in the mindset that it must be a coincidence, instead of a deep subconscious understanding. Recognise when these intuitive events happen, make a note of them and then give thanks to your intuition for delivering this information to you. Show your intuition that you value it as a partner in this life.

Intuition is an invaluable skill

I promise you that if you start to actively strengthen your intuition, you’ll start to notice some seriously amazing things happening in your business and your life. Keep track of the changes in how you feel day to day and make sure to set goals to keep track of how your intuition is helping you along your journey.

Enjoy becoming an intuitive megastar my dears! x

Want to take the very best step to strengthen your intuition? Check out my online tarot reading course!

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