Written by: Janna Holterman, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The moment you have the desire for more the ideas start flowing. You can imagine your business growing and flourishing in your mind’s eye. You want nothing more than to quit your current job and go all in on your business. You start to develop resentment and frustration that your job is keeping you from bigger and better things.
I was there, I wanted to create something incredible, and I thought my job was holding me back from doing that. I pushed ahead before I was ready and left my nursing job to go full time in my business. Some things worked, but a lot of things didn’t work.
I want you to imagine going from being an employee to an entrepreneur, a little bit like the culture shock of moving to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and expecting yourself to get a job and earn money right away. People are resourceful, you’ll probably be able to scrap by, but thriving will take time.
The same is true for business, 3 factors need to happen before success comes. First, you need to fully own the identify of your new role; shifting from takes orders to being the person who gives them. Second, is the ability to self-validate, there is no one looking over your shoulder telling you, you did a good job. In fact, there will likely be many people telling you that you’re crazy for even considering something different. Lastly, it takes self-belief in your ability to help others, this is overcoming the imposter syndrome and believing that you can and have every right to do this work.
Once all three pieces are in place, business growth becomes inevitable. However, it can take time to reprogram your brain to own entrepreneurship. If you place pressure on yourself to perform and create income before you do this, you can develop the same resentment and frustration to your business and clients, that you had for your old job. This can lead to the exhaustion and overwhelm of burnout and even to you fleeing your business, feeling defeated and insecure.
Because of this, I encourage my clients to keep or find another job that can support their growth as a business owners and here is why. When you have enough income to cover the necessities of living, you can remove the pressure from your business. Which often means your business stays more fun and exciting to work on. You are able to show up and serve people from an authentic place, when you’re not telling yourself you need to close this sale so you can eat dinner tonight. This energy shifts from desperate and needy to at ease and secure, this is all felt by potential clients who are interacting with you and directly affects your sales. So, having a job can increase your business sales.
Having your living expenses covered by a job means that all income coming into your business, can stay in your business. Investing in yourself is the biggest indicator of your success and your ability to handle and overcome obstacles that come up in business. Being able to afford to hire coaches who have done it before to guide you on your way, can prevent you from making long term mistakes and skip some of the learning it the hard way.
When you decide you are doing a job because you want to, it feels a heck of a lot better than when you feel that you have to and that the choice is out of your control. You get to choose to use the job to give yourself the income to support building your business with a strong and solid foundation that can stand the tests of time.
Ultimately you have the choice, you can allow yourself the time to learn the language and culture of entrepreneurship while you build, or you can jump in headfirst and see what happens. You know yourself better than anyone else.
What do you need most?
Janna Holterman, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Janna Holterman uses her personal experiences in burnout as a Registered Nurse and entrepreneur. She transformed from hustling to the point of exhaustion and overwhelm to an energetic and self-confident entrepreneur. Now Janna helps ambitious women go from overwhelmed and exhausted to creating lives they’ve always dreamed they could live. Janna uses mindset, structure, and resiliency tools from her own recovery, along with training from CTI and The Life Coach school to create results that last a lifetime.
