SoGal Ottawa: Guilty Pleasures
How do you take the edge off after a long work day? And how long does it take before the guilt creeps in?
As creatives and entrepreneurs, almost all of us have been up to our eyeballs in guilt at some point. Whether it’s thinking you don’t “deserve” a day off because you didn’t hit every item on your (mile-long) to-do list, or you’re worried that your business is sucking up all your time and taking you away from loved ones — trust me when I say, we’ve all been there.
So, how do you overcome the guilt?
For the third instalment of the SoGal Ottawa series — a compilation of events for creatives, founders and entrepreneurs with a mission to close the diversity gap in funding and entrepreneurship — we had an open invitation to everyone that struggles to find work-life balance. And to our surprise, this call to action resonated with a lot of people , proving once again that no one is ever alone.
To kick off the event, we invited founders of Ottawa based wellness app, Nurtured Life, Bree Jamieson-Holoway, Emma Pearce-Mogridge, and Stéfanie Bolduc for a conversation about why we should make wellness a priority despite all the responsibilities that mount in our career paths.
They began this discussion by describing their entrepreneurship journey and some of the challenges they’ve faced along the way , such as finding a balance between following their passion and maintaining the responsibilities of being mothers, spouses and other social roles most of us play. Navigating through some of these inherent responsibilities, on top of those placed on women by society, can be a strenuous task.
With this in mind, it was important for the founders of Nurtured Life to find a wellness practice — one that actually worked! Their intention was to build an app that made wellness accessible by bridging the gap between wellness practitioners and the general public. Today, they successfully achieve this by offering personalized and customizable wellness experiences. And in a room of about 100 creatives and founders, with approximately 70% identifying as women, Nurtured Life’s mission had many supporters.
Growing a wellness app as three women-identifying founders comes with its own unique set of challenges. Despite this, all three agree that it helps to face these obstacles when they’re in their optimal wellbeing — especially if they are to boost productivity and creativity, and in turn make their app a hit success.
As the event continued, we aimed to provide a few applicable techniques for the audience. Nurtured Life invited one of their wellness practitioners and certified Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) educator, Laura Thomas, to lead an activity. Laura provided a quick five minutes overview about the relevance of daily EFT practices, before demonstrating an easy 10–15 minute EFT exercise with everyone in the audience participating.
Once this exercise was completed, you could instantly feel a lightness in the air — as if all of our anxieties had dissipated.
To further contextualize the relevance of wellness, we asked a series of questions:
- Has your to-do list given you anxiety in the past two weeks?
- Was your sleep disrupted by something that happened at work or in your business in the past month?
- Have you found yourself comparing yourself to others in the past few days?
In a room filled with around 100 people, most of the responses to the questions above appeared to have been affirmative. So, we invited members of the audience up to the mic, to share wellness routines that have worked for them. It was fascinating to hear advice like:
- Daily meditation practices of at least 5 minutes;
- Embracing the guilt and walking through it;
- Get through the most daunting task on your to-do list at the start of each day;
- Go on hikes and long walks when you feel anxious;
- Invest in sleep and a lot of rest to recharge your body
At times, we believe that our bodies are machines that can get through anything — but just like every other medium, our body feels strain. It is important that we find ways to re-energize across all levels: physical, mental, emotional and social.
