How to Achieve Balance in Your Life and Business When You’re a Mom

Do you often find yourself torn between whether or not you should spend time with your family or go ahead and attend to your business?

It so happens that you have a scheduled vacation with your family on the weekend, but clients would start bothering you on the phone, and there is so much on your to-do list that things just become overwhelming? You’re not alone; these things happen to everyone.

BeLive’s live streaming host Molly Mahoney interviews Kim Garst on this topic which is perfect for Mother’s Day.

Molly Mahoney is a mom herself and she is joined with another awesome mom, Kim Garst as her guest on her show.

Kim is an international best-selling author, international keynote speaker, marketing strategist, live streamer, and entrepreneur. She shares with us her journey of being a stay-at-home mom taking care of her two kids and at the same time building her 7-figure business. You’ll learn from her what matters most with these steps.

Setting Boundaries

First thing you need to do is to set boundaries. Kim started out her business when she had her first child. She was supposed to go to law school, but her decisions shifted, and she chose to become a stay-at-home mom instead. It was challenging, in the beginning, to start her business since there weren’t enough sources to look for information back then like YouTube. Instead, she juggled between growing her business and taking care of her first kid.

It took five years for her to make the first $60 and soon enough she was able to build a 7-figure business in her dining room. Eventually, when she had four businesses, she experienced burnout and decided to sell those businesses. She kept some high-end clients and took a step back because she felt that she lost track. She lost the connection with her family when she focused on the monster business she created.

Being a stay-at-home mom is hard. -Kim Garst

There is a big difference in having an office job versus working from home. When you have a 9 to 5 job, the moment you get off work, that’s it. You can go home and spend time with your family. With our kind of work, we are no longer able to leave it because we have this device with us 24/7.

That’s when she learned that she has to set some boundaries and expectations with everyone she serves. She believes that it’s not actually a balance thing but a boundary thing. You have to set boundaries for yourself, your business and your family.

Make sure that you don’t make your business more important than the things that truly matter. It may be a hard thing, but you have to put boundaries around it. Being crazy with your business won’t help.

Kim would not miss any game time with her youngest son and she would turn down all other opportunities. This doesn’t happen 100 percent of the time. You have to answer these questions to know what to do next:

• What boundaries can you commit to?
• What do you not want to miss out on your life and your kids life?
• Is this a good opportunity? Is it really a once in a lifetime thing or will it come again?

From there you can start establishing those boundaries, and if you give it a level of importance, you’ll protect it. When unexpected things come up, Kim also says that you have to give yourself some grace in every opportunity.

Setting Expectations with your Clients and the People you Work with

Do you receive messages during the weekend from your co-workers? You want to help them out, but you’re on vacation! How do you handle situations like these?

After you have figured out how to balance your time with your family, start to set expectations with the people you work with. When you start to achieve a level of success with your business, your team members will constantly be asking questions, and they will need you more. They would text you at midnight or when you’re on vacation with your kids. This is another boundary moment Kim says.

You can handle this by setting time for those you serve. You have to set their expectations. If you’re always on, they’ll expect you to be always on. You give people opportunities, but you’re not always going to be there. Let’s say your work schedule is 8–5 Monday to Friday; you have to set their expectations by saying “We’ll see you on Monday morning” and sticking to it.

For online businesses, you can set up a bot to take charge while you’re away from your computer. You can set the expectation so people won’t think that you are ignoring them. You can also tell them, “Hey I’m taking my kids for the weekend so don’t think that I’m ignoring you. You’ll hear from me first thing on Monday morning.”

You want your clients to feel that they are the most important person in the world, but at the same time, you want to set the boundary that this happens during working days. When Monday morning hits, they’re on top of the list. If your client still gets mad and doesn’t understand you, it means that you are not meant to serve them. If you set the right boundaries, you attract the right type of clients who will understand you and will cheer you. Then you get to spend time with your family while maintaining quality clients.

You can only do what you can do. Any reasonable person, be it an existing customer or a prospective one, would respect the boundary if you explain it clearly to them in a professional manner.

How Outsourcing Helps

Kim Garst recommends outsourcing as quickly as you can. When you’re starting to build your business, you should focus on the things that you are good at and find a way to outsource what you are not good at.

If you spend more than an hour trying to figure out something, you need to find somebody who has that skill set because you can be using your time for something more productive.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the series of things we do every day that we don’t actually get to do what needs to be done to generate revenue for our business. When we get to the end of our day, we don’t want to say, “I did so many things today but what did I really accomplish?”

If you’re not sure whether you are ready to outsource yet, here is something that you can do to determine whether you are ready. Commit for two weeks that when you wake up in the morning, you will write down everything that you do every day. This includes little things like replying on messenger, doing a group engagement, so on and so forth. You can use your notepad or Slack to do this.

For those who are not familiar with Slack, Slack is a communication tool that can be used to communicate throughout the day. You have your own Slack thread that nobody sees but you and on your own slack thread create a numbered list there and put everything you do for 2 weeks. This will help you see what you accomplish on a daily basis. With this, you will be able to gauge how much of your time is allocated to certain tasks.

In other words, you’ll identify where you need help. You will be able to gauge if you need a virtual assistant or group management. You’ll see where you’re spending time on a task which someone else could do. Kim makes a generic list in the morning and when she gets confused and starts doing other stuff, she goes back to her list, and it helps her get back on track.

You’ll be stunned where you are spending your time, but you’ll also identify what types of help you can ultimately get. You can also list down what you have done for yourself or your family. If you’re not able to do a task assigned on that date, give yourself some grace, just move some things you have not done for the day and move that for the following day with the focus of ticking it off your list.

So, if you think you need help, you have to take a leap of faith and look for someone with the right skill set so you can save your time and use your energy to help make money for your business and have more time for your family.

Balancing your life and business is a struggle if you don’t know how to set your priorities well. Time is your most precious thing. Spend the time that is important for you. Set expectations ahead of time and stick to it. Build a better life for your family not just by building your business but by building relationships and memories with the people who matter to you most.

Want to get more practical wisdom from Social Media Power Influencer Kim Garst? Watch the full show here:

You can also follow and learn more about Kim on her Facebook Page.

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