16. Are You A Busy Mom & Salon Owner or Productive: How to Enjoy Your Journey

The word busy is used so often when we ask someone how they are doing. This tells us a lot about how they are feeling. It's likely overwhelm or stress. Can you relate to this as a mother running a business, trying to find time for yourself and your family?

Imagine your day starting calm and slow. Intentional. The positive ripple effect this creates flowing into your children's morning, your drive to work, your interaction with people in your business throughout the day or the tasks in your office and finally the feeling at the end of the day when you reflect. How was your interaction with those around you? Were you noticing how you were feeling throughout the day? When we feel like we were productive it creates a positive experience instead of just putting out fires all day long.

Do you desire more quality time? 

The three things we focus on in The Integrative Mother Experience course are: Well-Being, Family and Business. 

Ask yourself if you are feeling energized and inspired when you spend time with people, not exhausted or angry. What do you want to do moving forward if you don't like the answer?

In This Episode:

-You are worthy as you are as a human being, you don't have to earn it 

-Quality of your time and the outcome is how you experience it as a human 

-Building a strong foundation first before layering on more information is step one 

-Choosing the right guide that is on the other side to help you stop wasting your     precious time is essential

-Integrating the different parts of your life allows you more freedom to enjoy all of   them

Resources for this episode:

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Transcript

Sarah Swift 0:10

Welcome to the Integrative Mother Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Swift, wife for twenty-seven years and mother of three teenagers. I want to have conversations about why so many mamas wearing multiple hats, working, serving others, or owning a business, especially in the beauty industry, feel like they need to choose between their work and their family. We'll also uncover common causes of overwhelm, lack of wellbeing, and joy. I am here with over three decades of experience working in the beauty industry, owning several types of businesses starting in my twenties, and sharing stories to help other mothers avoid feeling that they're always missing out. Time is an asset we can't get back. I can't wait to dive into these deep conversations. I hope you will join me. Don't forget to check out my free checklist for joy and fulfillment on my website, theintegrativemotherexperience.com, and join my free private community of mamas supporting each other. Welcome back, mamas. Today's episode is something I've wanted to talk about for quite some time. It's the idea of being busy or productive. For me, the question I ask is, are you missing the experience? Because really, when you think about being busy, you're doing things, but are you really actually enjoying the process? Are you enjoying the journey or the experience, or is it just to get to an end result? For me, I'm not waiting. I'm integrating, and that means my point of view is making choices from where I am now as a mom, so that I can experience joy and fulfillment every single day. I can choose to see the things that are joyful and feel fulfilling for me if I choose to have the mindset that they're there every day, and I'm going to pause and I'm going to enjoy them. So something that I think about is what is the actual story and why is the word busy something that's used so commonly? I think that it ends up being a recurring issue, and a lot of times I think that it's the mindset of I have to earn my worth. And if you're not doing something or being busy, maybe the mindset is nothing's being accomplished and therefore you're lazy or therefore the outcome isn't going to be as good. And I don't believe that to be true at all. For me, I think the quality is determined by if it's something coming from a human, how they are able to perform. And if they're depleted and exhausted or physically hurting, it's not going to be a good outcome, whether they're busy the whole time doing it or they take their time and have a wonderful time listening to music or if they're with another person maybe having a deep mindful conversation that feels good. Maybe it's just actually being productive being alone in stillness. Maybe you're just taking time to sip your drink, taking in the sounds of nature around you. There are so many examples of this. And so really you have to ask, whose story is it? Is it your story that you have to be busy or did that come from parents or grandparents or from somebody that you used to work for? Is this really what you believe or is this something that is just carried over year after year or generation after generation? I believe it's a choice. And when I made the choice and I decided I don't want it, I don't want to be constantly moving and busy, stressed out, and overwhelmed, and not present for anything, whether it was physically, mentally, or both. That wasn't joyful. And I learned the lessons that I needed to learn from my past, and that's brought me to where I am to this point now. I understand the overwhelm of business owners that become moms, and they're serving in many other roles. I don't want that for you. What I want for you is for you to be able to have somebody guide you to build a strong foundation first. Then after that, you can take more classes, take in more knowledge, and do what you have to do for the other aspects of your life to perform. But without that strong foundation, the experience is not going to be the same. I know my vision and my why, and I'm choosing steps daily towards it. And as I enjoy these precious moments, I'm so grateful for them. I choose to have a healthier life. I choose the discipline of my AM routines, my daily walks in nature, drinking my water, taking the supplements that I know my body specifically is lacking. My body told me over and over again. It screamed at me in my 20s already when I developed my chemical sensitivities, and then later had multiple frozen shoulders. And running around for therapy and trying to just perform when I was in extreme pain, that was being busy. I don't think that it was necessarily being productive. It was my body telling me something needed to be done. And I did choose to listen. And the chronic stress and the burnout, it was not worth waiting, and I don't want you to wait like I did. So instead of continuing to pile on more and get further and further away from your why or your North Star, I want you to think about these things. And being part of a community and having somebody to guide you in what you really care about most in your life experience, which is multiple roles for most of us as moms. I don't need to please out of fear. This is the other thing that I want to talk about today. Recently, at my work retreat in San Antonio, I was having a beautiful conversation with another salon owner, and she was telling me about this beautiful idea of two different types of businesses that she would like to pursue now that she's a mom. And it was really interesting because I could tell, the expression and the tone of her voice, which one was the one that she should, in my opinion, choose because she was so passionate about it, and I believe it was coming from her soul, and she had some fear around it. And we talked about it. We talked about the spirit of fear is not from God. It is not one of the spirits that is sent from God. And so when she paused after I said that, I could tell that that sunk in. The other thing I want to cover is what is caused by emotional suffering. It's typically not even the situation or the circumstances, it's the emotions that you're attaching that's creating the suffering. So when we think about how we experience things like fear or overwhelm or even blaming others or not reflecting on how we could choose to take better steps towards a solution to whatever's going on, we can make it so much worse if we are actually suffering an emotional state and we're not focusing on, it's about who I become in the process of your journey and not the end results alone. So I think of all the roles, and we've talked about this before, of a mom, and as a business owner, all of you have so many more multiple roles, and because you are in a service industry, you also are either serving a staff or clients, patients, or others as well. So these are a lot of roles, and then you have all your business roles. And then just part of being a mom is all the appointments and the sports. So most moms experience the multiple driving back and forth between the orthodontist, any of the activities. Maybe it's the religious ed, maybe it's their jobs before they can drive. Maybe you drive your kids back and forth to their schools or their daycare. There's so many different roles that day in and day out we performing, and it's part of our life. So the integration of you're not separate from your role as a mom driving your child to the orthodontist appointment versus performing in your business or doing the taxes for your business or cooking dinner from your family. They're all part of the integration of you as a mom that has multiple roles and tasks to do. And you're not going to get to some end result where you're not going to have to do that again if you're blessed enough to be here another day. These things continue to occur day in and day out. And I think as moms, it's really common to overgive, and that ends up affecting our health, our finances, and our children, most often. Because when we don't prioritize how we are going to integrate and how we are going to prioritize what matters most to us so that we can continue to feel good and invest in the resources that are important to most people, commonly known as time, money, and health. In my course, The Integrative Mother Experience, acronym being TIME, it's the wellbeing and it's the family and the business. So three things that we're focusing on when we're building the five elements of your foundation. When you spend time with people, the thing I want you to notice is you should leave feeling energized and inspired, not exhausted and angry. So if this is not resonating with you or you have a lot of experiences in your life where you are feeling exhausted and angry, it is time to pause and think about what you want to do moving forward. When I just went to my most recent salon owners retreat, there were salon owners that had large staffs, there were studio suite owners, and there were educators. And I went last year. It was the first year that they offered this experience, and it was absolutely wonderful. I had such a great time. But I will say, this year I chose to bring my daughters along, and that was a completely different experience for me. It was wonderful because I was integrating a work trip along with the joy of spending time with my daughters. And when I was learning, they were spending time with each other, and that was beautiful too. We had so much fun by the pool. We had wonderful dinners together. They were able to meet some of my dear friends. And it was just such a great way to not separate the roles of my life, but still be able to enjoy both. And it was really productive. I was able to meet new friends in the wave pool this year as we were just talking and sipping our drinks, enjoying the beautiful scenery of our resort. And then we also learned in the classrooms. Of course, that was part of why we went, and it was just beautiful that we were able to do both. So my takeaway from all of this is it's not one or the other. It's not mom only or business owner only. They are both true, and they are both here to fill my cup. So you have a choice. You have a choice on moving forward. If you need help in these areas and you want a community to support you and you want a guide that has been there and who is on the other side now, I am here for you, and I encourage you to go to my website, theintegrativemotherexperience.com, and to sign up because I have some really fun things coming up I'm going to be announcing, and I don't want you to miss out. Have a blessed day. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you found this episode helpful, please follow or subscribe to the Integrative Mother Experience on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen so you're notified about the new episodes coming up. Please also take the time to leave me a review. This really does help me. I would love to see your beautiful faces. If you want to take a screenshot of this episode, I would love it. Tag me on Instagram or Facebook at timewithsarahswift, period between the word time on Instagram, so then I can re-share your post. You can also start today by grabbing my free checklist and check out some of my favorite things on my website, theintegrativemotherexperience.com. Until next time, my beautiful mamas, thank you so much.