246: You Don’t Have to Choose Between Business Success and Personal Well-Being

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady podcast. I’m your host, AliceAnne Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life starting now. Lead yourself, the rest will follow.

Hi there, leading ladies, and welcome back to the Leading Lady podcast, where we talk about all things leadership, business, and the beautiful and sometimes messy balance of it all. I’m your host, AliceAnne Loftus, and today I wanna have a conversation about something I know so many high-achieving women entrepreneurs struggle with: feeling like you have to choose between building a successful business and maintaining your personal well-being.

If you have ever felt like you’re working in your business 24/7, but not actually moving forward, or if you’re constantly questioning your decisions and wondering if you’re doing enough, then let me tell you, this episode is for you.

Why So Many Women Feel Stuck

So here’s what the problem is, and why so many women feel stuck. I see this all the time with my clients. They are ambitious, they’re driven, and they have built something truly incredible. I mean, when I say that I get to meet the most interesting women, I am not being hyperbolic. The women I work with have truly built incredible businesses. They are visionaries. They believe in things, they have passions, and they’re just really wanting to put their products and their services out into the world.

However, they come to me feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and oftentimes they’re second-guessing themselves at every turn. Some have worked with business consultants before, and okay, they’ve walked away with some great strategies, but they felt like something was missing. And I tell you, that was me. I had gone through so much professional development, gone to school, learned business administration, and I still felt like there was something missing.

We can have that plan, but implementing it, well, sometimes that can feel really overwhelming. Others that I’ve worked with have worked with mindset coaches, and they felt inspired and motivated, but they didn’t know how to translate that energy into actionable results. And that’s because success isn’t just about strategy, and it’s not just about mindset. It really is a blend of both.

Blending Business Consulting and Coaching

So here’s the solution. I take a unique approach to my coaching practice, and I actually blend coaching and business consulting. That’s why at Leading Lady, I don’t make you choose. My approach blends, like I said, that business consulting and coaching to give you the best of both worlds.

So here’s how it works. It’s not easy. I don’t wanna lie to you, and I’m giggling a little bit, because oftentimes women come to me and they want this secret formula: follow steps one, two, and three, and they’re gonna have all the success that they dreamed of. And it’s just not that simple, but it does work.

On the business consulting side, I help you create a clear strategy (you can start on your own by downloading my strategic wheel, and I’ll put it in the show notes), whether that’s refining your operations, streamlining your marketing and your visibility, or making sure your business is financially sustainable. I give you the tools, the roadmap, and the expertise to build something that truly works for you.

And I wanna touch on that expertise. While I have built multiple businesses, I am not the expert in all things, and that’s why I pull in the support and resources from the Leading Lady Ambassadors, because they are experts in their niche. And we have built an arsenal, so to speak, of women that can support women entrepreneurs in so many different facets of their business and personal development.

But here’s the thing. A strategy is only as strong as the person leading it, and that’s where coaching comes in. I work with my clients to help develop the mindset, the confidence, and the leadership skills to actually implement the strategies we create. If you don’t believe in yourself, you’re stuck in self-doubt. If you’re afraid to set boundaries, no amount of strategy is going to help you.

Strong on Paper

I actually want to share a personal story with you. If you’ve read my book, Take the Lead, which came out in, I think, 2022, I go a little bit deeper into this story, but for the sake of this episode, I’m gonna give you kind of the CliffsNotes. Okay.

So I started my first business in 2004, just 10 days before I gave birth to my daughter. I was young. I was about to turn 23 years old. I was a brand new business owner and a brand new mom. And what was very fortunate for me is I’m also a pretty good student, so I was gathering all of these resources on business systems. And my husband had been in business for a while, and so he was really mentoring me in those business systems and operations and building my business strategy of how I was going to do this.

And because I was also juggling motherhood, I had to be pretty organized with my time and how to be efficient in things. It was through those years of building efficiencies in my business, documenting all my processes, and being organized in the business operations that really gave me the foundation to have a strong business on paper.

Okay, I wanna emphasize that: on paper. Because everything looked really good on paper for the business, and I had all the record keeping and contracts and how I got paid, and all of that stuff was pretty solid in business. And I’m very fortunate for that, because I know that starting a business, you can be very overwhelmed, and oftentimes you get working in the business without building in those systems, and it can be quite precarious. It’s just chaos. And so I do not take for granted that I had a lot of support in setting up my business operations early on.

But remember, I was also a brand new mommy, and life was crazy and hectic, and I was going through all kinds of changes with myself. I was in my early twenties also. I hadn’t been married for very long. My life was, oh, it was just a tailspin of a lot of newness, and I was still maturing, still growing very much as an individual and growing a family. So not on paper, things were really difficult for me.

I’m thankful that during that time, when I kind of fell apart behind the scenes, because my business strategies were so solid, the business was able to function with me not operating at full capacity. I took some time to really focus on my mental well-being, my physical health, my social-emotional needs. I did all the things.

Nurturing the Whole Person

When you look back on early childhood development, which is my background (I do own private preschools), I think I found myself at one point looking at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: that children need to be physically, socially, and emotionally supported before they can actually be cognitively thriving. And I was looking at that, and I thought, “Along the way, did we forget to nurture who we are as a whole person?”

I am more than just my business. I am more than just being a mother. I’m more than just being a wife or a daughter. I am a whole person all on my own. And I actually took quite a bit of time to develop who I am and who I want to be, and through that process, I learned a lot about self-leadership.

When I really did the work to work on me, which is the greatest asset in my business (my business could not function long-term without me), when I did that work, I immediately saw benefits and impact to my business, and not just my business, but in every aspect of my life: how I was showing up, how I was leading myself, and my resilience. It was just so much. And I thought, “Golly, if high-achieving women just took the time to focus on their well-being just as much as we focus on the strategy and the operations of our business…” If you could see me, my fist is up in the air. That’s the thing. That’s the thing that really brings us to sustainable success.

And so I created an entire coaching program around that. Working in childcare, I was seeing, day in and day out, these amazing high-achieving mothers with incredible careers who were doing incredible things in their life. They were showing up, picking up their kids, and they looked absolutely burnt out and frazzled and exhausted and harried. And I thought, “Oh, I wish someone could just tell her that everything will get better if she takes care of herself.”

It’s so cliché: put your oxygen mask on first, you can’t pour from an empty cup, all of those things. And yet we hear them over and over again, and we still struggle to put that into practice. So that is what the entire coaching program of Leading Lady stems from. I was there, and I saw the immediate positive impact that it had on my business when I didn’t push my well-being aside, but when I actually addressed it.

What This Means for You

So what does that mean for you, or for my clients? Well, when my clients work with me, they’re not just getting another business consultant that tells them what to do. I’m never, ever, ever going to be that person that says, “Okay, you wanna make six or seven figures? Here’s the formula.” I mean, I wish it was that easy. I wish it was, but it’s not.

You’re not just getting a mindset coach who cheers you on. I mean, cheerleading is great. Having a champion in your corner is great. But you need both. You need both. And I even sprinkle a little bit of tough love in there. Not brutal honesty, loving honesty, because I think all honesty should come from a loving place.

But when you work with me, you’re getting that business mindset, and you’re getting that cheerleader, that champion, that person in your corner that is helping you see the strengths in you that you might not see, or maybe you have forgotten. So what this approach allows you to do is to stop second-guessing yourself and make confident, strategic decisions for your life and your business.

It helps you to build a business that aligns with your life, not one that runs you into the ground. Can we please stop glorifying busyness? Can we stop glorifying running ourselves ragged? We serve no one when we are operating from that place. And it also helps you fully step into your role as a leader, a leader of your life, without feeling like you have to sacrifice everything else.

You Don’t Have to Choose

So, key takeaway for today: you are capable of so much more than you realize. I want you to hear me when I say you don’t have to figure this out all on your own. You don’t have to choose between being successful and having a healthy life, a healthy life of well-being, overall well-being. You don’t have to settle for either strategy or just mindset work. You deserve support that honors both, that honors who you are as a whole person.

So if this resonated with you, I would love, love, love to invite you to learn more about working with me. Again, you can start with just downloading the strategic wheel and doing a self-audit of what areas of your life you need support in, and maybe just a little more focus and a little more encouragement. So you can start there. But you can also head over to leadinglady-coaching.com and see how we can work together.

And if you enjoyed this episode, I do read and respond to every email sent to me. I wanna hear from you. Tell me what resonated with you. Tell me what you need, what you want more of. And I’d love it if you’d share this with a fellow entrepreneur, with a fellow leading lady who needs to hear this.

So until next time, take the lead.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the Leading Lady podcast. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at www.leadinglady-coaching.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss any future episodes. And while you’re there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. This will allow me to help other high-achieving women find inspiration, connection, and develop strategies to live and lead with purpose and intention. See you here next week.