Boost yourself, your vision, and your values

In this guest blog, Beckie Sanderson, Branding designer, and publishing specialist at Miss Digital Media explains how businesswomen can use journaling to help boost yourself, your vision, and your values.

The struggle with the juggle!

As a busy businesswoman, how often do you find yourself thinking you'd love just 5 minutes of peace? Do you feel stressed and overwhelmed? Are you struggling to juggle your business and personal life with your self-care and wellbeing, while developing your business and your brand?

In business, self-care is so important, it is especially important for those who are stressed and overwhelmed. It can feel so lonely at times, but I want you to know that you are not alone, many businesswomen feel like this and many of us experience the struggle with the juggle of managing our business, home, and family life. 

As Shona Chambers, founder of the Self Employed Club explains, “Daily stress and juggling are two of the topics that get discussed all the time in freelance groups.” 

Ambitious businesswomen can sometimes feel stuck and blocked by limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome, which only adds to the stress and anxiety many of us experience. We constantly push ourselves to be better, to do better, and to achieve more and we end up teetering on the edge of burnout, or worse still we fall in. 

Speaking from my personal experience of depression and anxiety, I realise only as I write this now that I’ve been burned out several times throughout my life and business journey. How crazy is that? It’s only in reflecting on how far I’ve come that I can see that now. 

Stress and overwhelm manifest themselves in so many physical and emotional ways, but there’s nothing like a health scare to give you a wake-up call, and shift your focus onto self-care and improving your health and wellbeing. 

Journaling for self-care, personal and business development

Many businesswomen practice Journaling, it is a popular tool and technique used for personal and business development. It can be really helpful to take time out to reflect on the progress and achievements we’ve made in our businesses, work on creating new ideas, to plan and set goals to grow our business and our brand to the next level. 

Like a lot of businesswomen, I have done a lot of learning and personal development work, workshops and challenges. I’ve joined many different Facebook groups, paid memberships and I’ve invested in courses and coaching programs. In the last year, I felt that I wanted to journal and put into practice all the things I’ve learned about personal development, mindset, business development, planning, goal setting, and manifesting but I simply felt that I didn’t have the time to do it. 

I love to mind map, colour, and doodle and I have many notebooks, sketchbooks, and colouring books which I like to use to help destress, organise my thoughts and get creative. However, the practice of journaling was something new and alien to me. 

Journaling was really difficult for me to begin with, it felt awkward like it was something ‘I should do’, rather than something ‘I could do’. I resisted and avoided it, told myself I didn’t have the time to do it, or that I should be doing something more important. 

Over the last few years, I’ve brought many different types of journals and business planners, with dated pages or lots of different sections to fill in. I would end up beating myself up because I couldn’t manage to journal daily or fill in all the different sections. It became quite frustrating for me, so I didn’t do it. 

Nikki Sawyer, a coach supporting mum's with anxiety, has been a big inspiration for me in my journey with journaling. Nikki encourages women to practice journaling. Nikkie has a fantastic Facebook group called ​​From Fear to Freedom - for mums with anxiety where she shares her journaling tips and explains the benefits of journaling for self-care and personal development. Nikki suggests that when you start a new journal you should begin by creating a permission slip to give yourself permission and make the commitment to journaling regularly, 

Nikki says: 

“I highly recommend defogging in a messy head with a beautiful journal. There are many ways to journal, you can journal positivity and shift mindset, you can journal to get things out on paper. Once you actually see it, it jumps into your conscious mind and you can work on moving forward and clearing the blocks. Journaling is also a huge element of self-care time. Self-care time is key to moving forward with positivity.” 

Boost yourself, your vision and your values

As a branding designer, I think a lot of people go into business without really looking into the values and vision of themselves and their business. I also see that many business owners I work with haven’t done their research on their ideal clients. 

These aspects are equally important of course, but I also feel it is so important to review these things as regularly as we can, as our businesses and brands develop and evolve. 

I suggest asking yourself these questions: Who? Why? What? Where? and How? These powerful questions help us to explore and discover things about ourselves, our businesses, and our ideal clients. The mission and purpose exercise allows us to remind ourselves who we are, why we do what we do, and why we are good at it! Where do we work, and how do we do what we do? 

You can ask the same questions to identify and understand more about your ideal clients too. Who are they? Why do they need our products and services? What problems do they have? Where are they online and offline? and how will your product or service help to transform their lives? 

It might sound silly, but I think there is a common problem particularly affecting business mums returning to work. The loss of identity, lack of self-confidence, and the struggle of seeing where we can fit into the world other than being a mum has such a great impact on us and our business development. And when the imposter joins the pity party it can become crippling! 

Doing that core work on your mission and purpose and carrying out research on your ideal clients gives you a boost. it is a useful technique you can use to gain clarity and to act as a reminder about who you are, what you are good at, why you do what you do, where you want to go in life and how you are going to get there.

The results you get will help you to gain a deeper understanding that helps you to translate your mission, purpose, values and vision into your brand identity and brand values, even down to your logo, what colours you should be using and how you work with your customers. It transcends all of those aspects of business. 

Revisiting these exercises time and time again has been so helpful for me. Now I use them when working with my clients. They are such a positive way to boost yourself, your vision, and values, and therefore help to develop your business and your brand too. Get access to my mission and purpose and ideal client worksheets here.

How journaling has helped me

Since creating my own journal I feel more connected to it. Having signed the permission slip at the beginning of the book I have now committed to giving myself permission to journal, create and be grateful in a way that is messy, incomplete, strange, or unplanned from now until always!

Also, I’ve found the more journaling I do on my personal and business development the more I’m learning and understanding about how our own personal boundaries play such a big part in our business growth. 

I now journal regularly, not daily, but at least a couple of times a week, over the last few months. I’ve learned and identified new things about myself, and I have enjoyed this self-care time. It no longer feels awkward. It’s helped to keep me more balanced and self-aware. I’ve used my journal to practice gratitude and reflection. I’ve written down my frustrations, journaled about my limiting beliefs, and reframed new positive beliefs and affirmations. I’ve mind-mapped my ideas and planned out my business goals. I have written, coloured and doodled away my stress! It has been so helpful, I now realise what I’ve been missing!

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