Beware of Falling Into the Entrepreneurial Loneliness Trap
I used to isolate myself during this time of year. Instead of spending Christmas with family and loved ones, I’d work through the holidays in pursuit of business success, and it just served as a reminder of the lack of relationships in my life. That loneliness as an entrepreneur is something that many may fall into.
In this episode, I talk about how you can get caught in the entrepreneurial loneliness trap and how to find your way out of it.
3:00 - Why the old adage of “It’s lonely at the top” isn’t the magical thing it’s made out to be
5:06 - How you get to a place of experiencing entrepreneurial loneliness
7:37 - How a good thing can turn bad if you don’t monitor it
10:20 - The first thing you can do to make sure you don’t fall into the entrepreneurial loneliness trap
11:54 - Suggestion #2 for avoiding the entrepreneurial loneliness trap
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Transcript for Beware of Falling Into the Entrepreneurial Loneliness Trap
Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.
Hello, party people. It’s Leslie, your embodied sales and leadership coach. I pray that you guys are winding down and you’re preparing for a restful holiday season. I know I am. I think it's been about 10 years since I got into the habit of taking off at least two weeks for Christmas. I usually take off that week of Christmas depending upon when it falls, but like that week of Christmas, and the following week, the week of New Year, I take that time off to spend time with my family and my loved ones. I'm praying that you are doing the same.
This time of the year though, it brings up conversations and thoughts for me about when I didn't have the ability to take this time off, and painful memories for me, to be quite transparent, of what it looked like to work through the holiday season. Not because I just had so much work to do, but that time of the year reminded me of the lack of relationships that I had. Because at Christmas time everybody's talking about traveling and going to see their family or they're preparing for family get-togethers, and there was definitely a point in my life where I had isolated myself in the name of business success. I isolated myself in the name of I was pursuing success in my business. It just wasn't a good time for me.
It reminded me of how lonely I really was. I really want to talk about entrepreneurial trauma. I've talked about that before and how entrepreneurial trauma could be showing up in our lives. If this isn't for you, maybe there's someone you know who could benefit from this conversation. You've heard the old adage it’s lonely at the top. I think a lot of that though, I have to be candid, is self-imposed. It’s not this magical thing that some prosperity preacher is telling you, “Oh, when you fly high, when your an Eagle, you fly higher than other birds, you're not a chicken, you're an eagle. When you fly high, the air gets thinner, so can’t everybody fly with you,” and all that mess child.
You've seen the means or you've heard those types of sermons that really kind of encourage you to be by yourself. I saw one the other day about Alpha females don't run in packs, like this lone wolf thing and I'm like, “That might work for wolves.” But for people, that isn't very healthy. I'm actually scared of people now that I've matured and had experience with some less-than-stable people. I guess that's the best way for me to say it.
A lot of people, those people who are really insulated, who don't have connections, now we ain’t talking about being introverted, we're not talking about wanting to spend time with yourself. I think that's very healthy. I'm a manifesting generator in human design with a 6’2 profile, which is the hermit, meaning that I have to have alone time during my day. I'm not talking about needing time to yourself to recharge. I'm talking about people who don't have social skills.
Can I just come out and say what I mean? Can I just come out and say how I really feel, we friends here, right? [inaudible] But people who don't have the social skills to maintain relationships, it can put you in a really dark headspace as an entrepreneur. Like I said, the constant narrative around that this is to be expected in entrepreneurship is what I want to debunk.
How do we get to a place where we experience entrepreneurial loneliness? I think it starts out with subtle things. Subtle things like your current friend group, like before you started your business, suddenly, all you want to talk about is your business. When you go out, that's what's on your heart, that’s what's on your mind. There are things that happen in your business that your friends just don't get and don't understand.
Have you ever felt like that as an entrepreneur? Like, “People just don't get me, they just don't understand it.” You get to the point where either by force or just by you conceding, you stop talking about it. Force, meaning your friend saying, “Don't bring that sh*t to dinner. I don't want to hear about your Facebook woes and I don't want to hear about your issues with your employees. I want to talk about the latest episode of Love is Blind, Bridgerton, or something,” and they don't realize how easy it is for you to get obsessed when you're building a business.
It's like it's all consuming and so they might shut it down and be like, “Look, I ain’t going to invite her out because all she going to talk about is called Facebook Ads account that got shut down. Really not interested.” Or you can see because you pick up on social clues that “Hey, they really aren't interested. Their eyes glaze over and they don't understand. They don't know what I'm talking about. They're actually tired of hearing about this. They really do want to talk about Bridgerton.” So you stop. But you still have this angst that you're carrying around.
It becomes easier just to say, “You know what, I'm not going to hang around my friends anymore because they just don't get me.” You start to isolate. I've even seen this even worse inside of romantic relationships, like with people with their spouses. Like at the dinner table, or worse yet, pillow talk about all the sh*t that's going wrong in your business. Leave that sh*t out of your bedroom, like seriously, it isolates you because again, what you're telling yourself is that people don't get me so I'm better off being alone and this is the price, this is the cost to be the boss.
What happens is, and I hate to sound cliche, but it's true, there are so many people who get to the end of their lives, and they're evaluating their lives and they're looking around to see like, “How did I spend my time? Did I spend my time doing things that are really in alignment with my values?” I know so many entrepreneurs and like myself, when I first started my business, I was starting my business because I was a single mother and I wanted to be able to provide for my daughter. That's a noble thing. That's a good thing.
But how many of us know that a good thing can turn bad if you don't monitor it? So I started out with a noble reason to want to be successful. But I got so involved and so engrossed in my business, that the thing that I started the business to do was the thing that I was neglecting. I was working so many hours that I couldn't even spend time with my daughter when that's the reason that I started my business so it's easy to get lost in the sauce.
You can forget the reason that you did this and start neglecting the things that matter most to you. It's a slippery slope, guys, it's really tricky, and it's really subtle. It’s the little foxes that eat away at the vine. You'll look up and you'll find yourself like the only people you even have conversations with are your employees. That's a whole nother episode in and of itself. I talked before about not calling your employees a family and not having strong boundaries with your team.
One of the quickest ways to lose respect with people is for you to start having conversations with your team because they're the only people who are as intimately involved with their business as you are. That’s really inappropriate, something that would have been better off being held in a community or relationships that can hold that type of information. But unloading on your staff is never a good idea.
But it happens all the time, especially in nontraditional businesses. Because again, we're small, a team of five people, a team of three people. We're always working together. It's easy to forget that these people are not your friends, they're not your family, they’re your employees. Then you find yourself saying things that really take you down a notch in your employee's eyes.
What can we do to make sure that we don't fall into that loneliness trap? “Nobody can understand me. Nobody gets me.” Well, find a community that gets you. I cannot over suggest the importance of being in some type of group-coaching program. I love me a good one-on-one session. I love a good-attention-on-my-business, help-me-grow-my-business session, but I know how important it is for entrepreneurs to have community. It's not just about strategy. It's not just about how you can grow your business. It's about how you're growing emotionally.
As humans, we are wired for community. We are wired for relationship. You come here needing community. When you unplug from that, it’s just not healthy. My first piece of advice would be find your mastermind. Find your group coaching situation. Yeah, I have a group of female entrepreneurs who run nontraditional businesses, and we relate to each other, we meet weekly. That's a community for us, which is why some of my clients have been with me for four or five years, because they realize it's not just about the strategies, it's the support of the community that I've cultivated.
That's step number one, or suggestion number one. Suggestion number two, and this is really, really important to me because I value marriage, I value marriage and I just know what it's like, nobody wants to get to the end of their life alone, nobody does. I don't care what people say. That's a miserable way to die. What is all the good in the world to make all this money and not have anybody to share it with? I know to introverts, it sounds really good to travel the world by yourself. But at some point, if people are being honest with you, they want someone to share those experiences with at some point. It's going to happen.
Invest in your marriage, invest in those relationships. Like I said earlier, keep your business out of your bedroom. Stop telling your spouse about everything that happens in your business. [inaudible] business partners, they don't need to hear that, let them be your husband. Like seriously, let them support you, let them be a soft place for you to land without always bringing home what's going on in your business. How about you just bring your heart home and let your spouse nurture you?
I think that I don't have the stats on this so I don't want to quote it but I have experience with it. Entrepreneurial divorce is at an all-time high. It seems like every day, I'm reading on social media about some entrepreneur who we thought had a picture-perfect relationship that has fallen apart. Because it's something about that boss b*tch energy, man, if you don't learn how to turn that off and leave that at work, leave that at your business, it will wreak havoc in your household.
If you don't want to be the proverbial lonely old woman with 15 cats, and I like cats, by the way, you don't want to be the only person you like in the world and the only thing that can deal with you is your dog, you might want to spend some time cultivating those human relationships because you're going to need them. Community, supportive community, love, kindness, relationship is essential to human thriving.
You might be surviving right now, meaning you’re like, “Well, Leslie’s sh*t. My business is growing. I'm seven figures. I'm doing great. I don't need nobody,” trust me, sis, there's going to come a day when you need somebody. There's going to come a day when illness knocks at your door. There's going to come a day when grief hits your door. There's going to come a day when you need community. Don't forsake it at the altar of your business.
I hope this gives you something to think about. If you need community, join one. I'd love to have you in mine. But let's make that a priority and 2023. Alright, my loves, until next time, grace and peace.
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