Parent-Cubator Day 3: Managing Your Time & Wellbeing

In last week's session, our mum  entrepreneurs looked at the resources and passion they will bring to running their new businesses.  This week it was time to get real about how they are going to look after themselves, and manage the inevitable stress of caring for their little ones along side building a new business.  Experienced entrepreneur, mum and wellness expert, Yvette Hoskings-Jones shared her story and guided us through a series of simple exercises for creating a better work/life balance.    

1. wheel of life: using each other as co-coaches, we looked at how satisfied we are with each aspect of our lives (family relationships, career, fun and recreation etc), on a scale of 1 to 10.  We then picked a couple of 'areas for improvement' and talked about the steps we could take to raise our score.

2.  What does stress look like?  oh yes, we were experts on this one!  A very cathartic exercise where we got in to groups and drew a life size mum (stressed Stacy), her chaotic life and labelled her with an array emotional and physical symptoms of stress.  The morale - to recognize the symptoms we are experiencing, realize that others have them too, and to seek help if we need it.  

3.  managing our time: we are all very, very time poor.  Building on the work last week to focus on the essentials, and not frills of building a new business, this exercise was to develop a weekly timetable, with identified times to work on our businesses.  

and finally....1 small change: we each came up with something we would do that week to contribute to our sense of wellbeing: running home from nursery, drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning, restarting visualizations.  Our Whatsapp group provided accountability, and while few of us have achieved our goals yet, we are all making excellent progress towards them.