Surviving Small Business Fatigue

How are you doing?

I hope that you’re going okay and that you’re not feeling completely reamed up the proverbial.

Because let’s face it, if you’ve got a small business you would’ve experienced severe fatigue at one point or other.

Firstly, I just want to state that this article is not about small business owner burnout. That’s a very important topic, but a very different one to what I’m looking at here.

This article is simply about those periods we all experience when our small businesses seem to need every available second of the day, week or month. And when our own beautiful wayward souls have to handle absolutely everything all by ourselves.

*uck, we’ve all been there.

We all know how fatigued and stretched we feel. We’re all just surprised that our spirit is still carrying us through somehow, because there’s nothing else left.

The worst part is, small business is often lonely at the same time. There’s no counselling agency to lend an ear to small business people who are doing amazing things but feeling completely buggered and at the end of their *ucking tether.

As a small business person, you simply wear all the shit on your own broad shoulders.

And you need those broad shoulders, because small business involves constantly making mistakes and then picking yourself up and starting again every day.

Broad shoulders are also an indicator of the fact that you’ve stood up and taken responsibility. Responsibility for the success of an enterprise. Responsibility for getting jobs done even if you’ve under quoted on them. Responsibility for looking after clients and creating solutions for them. Responsibility for your bank account and its contents.

As small business owners, we stretch ourselves as far as we possibly can. We find out what our limits are because we test them on our business journey. It’s like Margery Williams’ beautiful story, The Velveteen Rabbit about a boy’s stuffed toy rabbit. Most of our hair will have definitely been rubbed off in the end and we’ll definitely be real people as a result.

And the fact that we do stretch ourselves as far as we possibly can makes us strong and beautiful people.

Yes, when we go through one of these periods we all know that it’s our own good self who is to blame for basically tearing ourselves a new arsehole.

And yes, we do then work out ways to both reduce the craziness of our lives and make our businesses more profitable at the same time.

We always find a solution somewhere and somehow.

Essentially, the point of this article is just to say that when you’re going through a particularly challenging and busy part of your business journey remember that:

You are strong and you are rare. And you are getting stronger every ducking minute, thank you very ducking much.
And as one of my beautiful sister’s says, at least you won’t die wondering.
Even if you feel like you’re a bumbling idiot who goes from one hideous business mistake to another, (or in my case, makes the same business mistake more than once and has five jobs on the go at the same time that are a complete bloody nightmare), you’re not. You’re an innovative problem solver and you are learning from those mistakes, even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.
You’ll come out the other side of this, and you’ll find a way to give yourself some rest and to get to where you want to be at the same time.
You have an A class work ethic and a remarkable capacity and ability to give, which will always be in huge demand in the world and will make you plenty of money. As Kahil Gibran so beautifully states, “Work is love made visible.” And you have shit tonnes of both love and capacity within that precious soul of yours.