Episode 170. How to Create a Relaxed Lifestyle While Growing Your Business: Chill AF Solopreneur (Part 3)

This episode unpacks ways to be successful not just by working hard and growing your solopreneur business, but also through creating work life balance and a lifestyle that lets you prioritize the other parts of your life that matter to you. 

This is Part 3 of a 4-Part series, where we focus on how you too, can build a chill AF solopreneur business and lifestyle. This series is dedicated to those of you whose goal is to build a highly successful and creative business as a solopreneur, and at the same time, have a very relaxed, stable, and comfortable lifestyle.

In This Episode:

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How to be successful in both life and business

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What is your dream lifestyle?

Let’s kick off this episode with some Pen & Paper Time. Yes, this means you have to pause the episode and continue listening to it after you do your Pen & Paper Time. I’m dead serious. Because this pen and paper exercise will set the stage for the rest of this conversation. 

Let’s do a classic mind map for this.

In the middle, I want you to write down “My dream solopreneur lifestyle”.

The specific prompt I want to offer here is: What is the vision I have for my dream solopreneur lifestyle? What is the vision I have for my dream solopreneur lifestyle? 

Start writing whatever comes to mind when you imagine your dream solopreneur lifestyle. For example, who am I when I’m living my dream lifestyle? What qualities or character traits do I embody and express? What habits and routines do I have in place? What will my physical environment look like? How will I spend my time?

Whatever you can visualize for your dream solopreneur lifestyle, I want you to write it down on your paper.

Again, I would really encourage you to pause this episode and come back to this after you’ve spent maybe 20 minutes just writing out this mind map on paper.

Go WILD on this exercise. Don’t let constraints or concerns about whether something is realistic or not hold you back from writing something down on your paper. Just. Write.

When you’re ready, come back to this point of the episode and let’s continue.

Now that you’ve done your Pen & Paper Time, I want you to look at what you’ve written down, and start to identify which parts of your dream lifestyle are ALREADY happening right now. Use a pen or highlighter, and start annotating which parts are ALREADY happening in some way shape or form.

Because here’s the thing, when it comes to living your dream life, it’s never 0 to 100. It’s never black or white. It’s never such that either you ARE living out your dream life fully, or you’re not even close.

If anything, building your dream lifestyle  is INCREMENTAL. We’re constantly adding small new increments to our dream life. We’re making progress towards our dream life every single day, with every single decision and action that we take. 

But what often happens is that we DISCOUNT the increments we’ve already built in our life. We feel like, “Oh I’m not there yet, I’m not even close…”

Even if you’re, let’s say, 17% living your dream life, you still feel like you’re at 0% because everything feels so far off still. But the truth is, without those increments, we can’t get any closer to the dream life we so deeply yearn for. You can’t get to 50% without first reaching and then surpassing the 17%.

Truthfully, this is a lesson I continuously have to learn over and over again.

For myself, one of the ways my brain tries to discount my growth towards my dream solopreneur lifestyle is that it will ferociously tell me, “Oh, Cheryl, you didn’t hit your income goal for the month. Or quarter. Or whatever time frame. There’s no way you can continue your current lifestyle unless you make X income goal now.”

As you can probably guess, this way of looking at my business and lifestyle is clearly not conducive to me being able to BE PRESENT in my life, right now, at this moment.

The more I stay in the state of defeat, feeling discouraged, feeling behind, the more powerless I feel in the current moment. And hence I don’t take empowered, committed, consistent action.

When I am so focused on how uncertain my business revenue is, for example, it’s a lot harder to redirect my attention to what I DO have control over and remember how good life is right now.

This is why I have to actively PUT myself in the headspace of, “How am I ALREADY living my dream life, EVEN IF, I did not hit a business income goal last month or last quarter or whatnot.”

Because THAT is going to keep me in the momentum of taking repeated, consistent, committed action to continue to build not just my business, but also incrementally build my dream lifestyle.

But if I stay in the vicious cycle of feeling so defeated, that’s just a dead end way of killing my business and all progress towards my dream lifestyle.

If you are committed to becoming a chill AF solopreneur and build your dream solopreneur lifestyle, it is VITAL, FUNDAMENTAL, NON NEGOTIABLE, to first remember what the hell your vision and goals are.

Second, stay in the headspace that will therefore allow you to take empowered, committed, and consistent action to keep incrementally building towards that dream solopreneur lifestyle.

What changes can you start to create, right now?

After you start to be super attuned to how you are already making major incremental growth towards your dream solopreneur lifestyle, the next question is naturally going to be: What shifts, changes, or tweaks can you start making right away to move you closer to your dream lifestyle?

What shifts, changes, or tweaks can you start making right away to move you closer to your dream lifestyle?

For myself, I have identified a few particular areas where I’d like to make some changes in order to move me closer to my dream solopreneur lifestyle.

These areas include: 

  • Create more weekly reading time to strengthen my reading muscle (as well as broaden the range of books I read)
  • Create more weekly time for exercise and movement 
  • Look out for more social or networking events to meet new peeps and expand my network (This could also look like having virtual coffee chats, etc)
  • Create more monthly opportunities to learn from experts so I can curate quality information (from outside of the online coaching/marketing space)
  • Create more monthly opportunities to speak with more peeps from all walks of life and expertise so I can broaden my scope of awareness and knowledge (and hence level up my content skills)

That’s the first step – Make a list of all the areas you would like to see more incremental growth in.

That said, I would actually suggest making TWO lists for this:

  • One list of changes or tweaks that you would LIKE to commit to consistently, on an ongoing basis.
  • Another list for one-time “projects”. Meaning, once you complete it, you can move onto the next project. Then, pick one from each list. JUST ONE.

For the first list, the area I would like to commit to making changes in right now, in order to move me closer to my dream lifestyle is cooking more healthy meals at home.

The plan is:

Every week, I’ll 1) schedule time in my calendar to GO to the supermarket twice a week and buy the ingredients I need to make lunch and dinner on the days I plan to WFH and stay in for dinner and 2) schedule time in my calendar to cook. 

Knowing myself, if something is in my calendar, I will do it. So I need to capitalize on this particular habit/characteristic of mine to help me start building my commitment to cooking healthier meals at home. 

Honestly, as much as I want to overhaul my health and nutrition habits entirely, I know that I need to first start with ONE doable change that I can start committing to implementing, over and over.

Because sure, there are a lot of things I can do to overhaul my overall health and physical wellbeing, lose weight and get in shape. There’s no shortage of changes I could make.

But because it’s already something that FEELS like SUCH big tasks, I gotta start with ONE THING. JUST ONE THING. And practice actually doing it. Practice committing to it. And practice my consistency with it. 

As for the second list, the one-time project I’ve recently started on is redoing my workspace/home office. As a solopreneur, I spend a lot of time at my computer. I’ve been feeling that my workspace was good, but it wasn’t quite conducive to my creativity or focus. It was clean and simple, but I realized something was off about my workspace. Although I could still get a lot done at my home office, I decided to refresh my workspace.

For the past month or so, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time reading online review articles on different ergonomic tech stuff like using a vertical mouse and what are the benefits of having two monitors.

I also spent a lot of time scrolling on TikTok to learn about mechanical keyboards and to get inspiration on how I might want to refresh my workspace. This has been SUCH a fun project and I’ve been enjoying working with my new tools like my SUPER, SUPER, SUPER CUTE CAT MECHANICAL KEYBOARD. I genuinely look forward to sitting down and typing on the keyboard because it makes the creamiest, thockiest sounds when I type.

Those are my examples. What about you? What are the small changes or one time projects you’ll start to implement, right now? 

For real, I genuinely want you to make the decision to commit to making some sort of small change, starting now. And continue to do it repeatedly until it’s an ingrained part of your weekly routines.

Because no matter what your schedule looks like right now, there is always something you  can exert control over, little by little, such that you start to compound those small decisions into larger ripples and waves in your business and life. 

As a chill AF solopreneur, remember, it’s not about going from 0 to 100 instantly. But rather, it’s about implementing those small action steps to create your dream life.

We always, ALWAYS, have control and agency over our actions, our decisions, and ultimately, the incremental growth we make towards our dream lifestyle.

Let’s continue to keep it light, keep it moving, and keep taking action towards building our dream solopreneur life.

COWORK & CHILL with Cheryl

In the same vein, I want to quickly touch on the topic of taking consistent, committed action in your business. Because we are chill AF solopreneurs, we are building a business because not only do we want to do work that we are proud of, we also want to build a business that can let us build our dream lifestyle.

Here’s what I want to say, if you’re anything like the awesome peeps who’ve joined COWORK & CHILL with Cheryl, my 3 month 1:1 container where we essentially sit down and get our ass to work, then you are probably super, super brilliant at coming up with fresh new content ideas.

At the same time, you probably have tons of bullet points written on your notes app or notebook, but it’s just been sitting there for months.

Or, maybe you’ve taken it a step further and started to draft some posts, but you felt like they were good, deep, or clear enough, so you felt discouraged and scrapped them entirely.

And right now, all your cool perspectives and thoughts are half baked drafts just sitting in your Google docs or Canva.

Honestly, months have passed since you set your 2024 goals. You initially planned to write one LinkedIn newsletter a week. Or maybe you wanted to publish a podcast episode every two weeks. But now, four months have passed and you still haven’t started or written anything substantial.

And to top it off, you feel pretty shit about yourself. You feel like you can never do what you say you’d do in your business. You feel so inferior compared to all the other solopreneurs who are showing up consistently and publishing new content every week. You also feel hopeless about whether you have what it takes to grow your business.

The truth is, you’re not alone. Truly. So many entrepreneurs have brilliant ideas of all the things they want to build and create, but fail at execution. But guess what? Cheryl is excellent at execution. This is exactly what I coach on in COWORK & CHILL with Cheryl (CCC).

When you join me inside COWORK & CHILL with Cheryl, we will do Pen & Paper time and co-working together to help you shorten the time you spend overthinking on what to do, whether to do it, or even how to do it. 

Together, we will help you to *actually* start and be consistent at that LinkedIn newsletter, podcast, or YouTube.

*Actually* write those weekly emails or LinkedIn posts, and be consistent from now on. *Actually* see your ideas translate into tangible, needle-moving pieces content on the Internet.

Give yourself the time and space via CCC to GET THINGS DONE. Let your ideas SHINE BRIGHTLY online. And most importantly, continue to compound those consistent, and committed actions that will grow your business and ultimately pave the way for your chill AF solopreneur lifestyle.

This is seriously going to be SO. MUCH. FUN. So, get your pen and paper ready and come join me inside CCC. We got work to do and amazingness to create.

Book a discovery call with me to explore:

1) What are your dreams in terms of business and lifestyle are, in the next 1-3 years

2) The coaching, skills, and actions you need to make these dreams happen, and

3) How coaching together will support and guide you with all the above.

The link to book your discovery call is in the show notes below. FANTASTIC.

Now. Let’s segue into talking about scheduling and making time for rest.

Scheduling mandatory time-off for rest

Let’s be really honest here. We solopreneurs struggle to “rest”.

On one hand, solopreneurs are “the CEO of their own business and life” so they have the “freedom” to create their own schedule.

But on the other hand, we tend to hesitate to rest or restrict our own downtime.

If anything, we solopreneurs are scared to take time off because we don’t want to stagnate our business momentum.

If anything, any extra hour is a time that could be used to do more, create more, and *potentially* grow your business.

Over the past few years, the concept of taking a sabbatical has been increasingly common. There’s a lot of research showing that taking extended leave from work is helpful for reducing stress and increasing overall wellbeing.

I did a simple search on Google Scholar and it gave me a number of research papers that support this notion. But for many of us, we are excellent at coming up with a million reasons why taking time off from our business is NOT practical, sustainable, or feasible.

But what if we schedule MANDATORY rest time ahead of time into our calendars?

What if we literally schedule MANDATORY days or weeks to simply just rest and rejuvenate? 

Or what if you take a week completely off, let’s say every 7 weeks (so the 8th week would be a break)?

What if you take a week off every 11 weeks, so the 12th week is a full week off?

These are ideas that are currently circulating in my head. 

Because I KNOW for a fact that if I took 6 continuous weeks off instead of taking 6 separate weeks off that are spaced out in regular intervals, IDK LOL I DO NOT WANT THAT.

The *concept* of having a higher number of mini breaks REGULARLY, that sits well with my brain. And the idea of scheduling it ahead of time in my calendar? Yes. If it’s in my Google calendar and in my physical planner, I will make it happen. 

That’s the idea I want to present to you all: When are your mandatory breaks for the rest of 2024 going to take place? And have you scheduled this into your calendar yet?

Intellectually, we already know that our well-being as solopreneurs is CRUCIAL to the long-term, sustained success of our business and work. It is our responsibility as a business owner to take care of ourselves, mentally, physically, emotionally, so that we don’t overexert ourselves, burn out, and then quit our business altogether.

For myself, after having burned out in 2020 and shut down my business for 7 months in 2020, today, I would much rather be that solopreneur who has a relatively slower trajectory to “business success”, if it means I’m here for a long time AND a good time.

No, seriously. I am okay if it takes me longer to make 500k (let’s say, lifetime sales in my business) if it means I can live a good, healthy life while working towards this goal.

Sure, my brain may want to worry about “falling behind” or “being less than so-and-so entrepreneur making more money than me”… But honestly, FUCK THAT.

Being well-rested, energized, and genuinely grateful for my life MATTERS. This matters not just to me, but also to the people around me, my clients, and my community at large  

All that to say, if taking mandatory scheduled breaks is going to make a positive difference to your business, then it’s time to schedule these breaks in your Google calendar now.

Ultimately, I want all of us to be genuinely joyful and chill AF solopreneurs who are proud of the work we do AND who are able to make time for the other parts of your life that matter to you. 

That in my books, is what it means to be a chill AF solopreneur.

A breakdown of a week in the life of Cheryl’s chill AF solopreneur lifestyle

I’d love to share a bit of what my non-work life looks like and how I’m making time to live my dream life, outside of work and business.

I want to share this not because I see my schedule or lifestyle as a golden standard, but rather, the message I want to convey through sharing about my own attempt of a chill AF solopreneur lifestyle is two fold.

1) Even if I myself don’t think I’m at my dream life yet, there will always be someone who sees me and what I’ve built as something they want to aspire towards.

2) Stay in AWE of what you’ve built. Even if you feel like you are still lacking in some parts, always be highly attuned to how you ARE already living parts of your dreams, right now. 

Right now, as I’m writing this script, it is Thursday May 9 2024. Let me share what has happened in the past ten days, since Monday April 29 and I’ll add commentary along the way.

Monday April 29:

Held a party at my place for 8 of us who recently went to Taiwan for the Asian Wander Women Business & Travel Summit. We had a few people who were visiting Singapore from all over the world, and some guests didn’t leave till past 2am. I also welcomed a new client on this day, and wrote a newsletter. 

Tuesday April 30:

Had brunch with a friend from Malaysia, who I’ve known online since 2019! It was our first time meeting. I also had coffee with a friend. A very chill day overall. But honestly, my energy was very very low today from all the social activities recently so I didn’t do anything work related on this day. 

Wednesday May 1:

Sent my friend Jennifer off. Some of you may recall Jennifer, the life coach for introverts, from a number of episodes on this show. She was visiting Singapore for a week and she stayed over at my place. It was a really wonderful time. Today, I did some miscellaneous work like reviewing clients’ content and submitted a pitch to speak at a podcast conference later on in the year. 

Thursday May 2:

I had 3x 1:1 client calls. Then, in the evening, I went to a dinner event. It’s hosted by a group called Genie Friends. It’s where you meet friends near you and they match you and where you sit based on common interests, experiences, and such. It was nice!

It definitely felt out of my comfort zone because everyone who was at my table are in professional industries that I know literally nothing about, so I mostly listened.

One interesting thing that came up was the guy next to me knows a lot about ergonomic chairs. Since I recently started doing some research about how to have a more ergonomic work set up, I was able to have a conversation about desk chairs with him.

Friday May 3:

Welcomed  a new client, then had a date night with the husband. We tried a new cocktail bar and our favorite drink of the night was a drink infused with cumin. It was creamy, it was cumin-y, and honestly, I didn’t expect to like it. But both of us were blown away by this particular drink. The drinks here are inspired by Indian cuisine and culture, and they use a LOT of strong spices.

Saturday May 4:

I spent a few hours updating my blog on my website. I started writing the script for this episode you’re listening to right now, but didn’t finish it. In the evening, we attended a wedding and then had some more drinks afterwards. 

Sunday May 5:

I wrote the newsletter for the next day because I knew I’d be very occupied with miscellaneous errands tomorrow. Then we attended the wake for my husband’s late uncle for the rest of the day and evening.  

Monday May 6:

I had 1:1 client calls, had a lashes appointment, did miscellaneous errands before my Manila trip like exchange cash, went for a swim, and also packed for my trip. 

Tuesday May 7:

1:1 client call in the morning then went to the airport and flew to Manila for Podfest Asia. I arrived at night, went for a drink at a nearby cocktail bar, then reviewed a bit of client work before going to sleep. 

Wednesday May 8:

Starting at 9am, I had a full day at the Podfest Asia. I spoke on a panel, met some cool peeps in the podcasting space, had dinner with a friend who’s from Manila, then went to the after party at a bar. 

That’s a snapshot of my business and life in the past ten days.

Some of you might be like WOW, I would love that solopreneur lifestyle. Some of you may be like EH, sounds nice but probably not for me.

But what’s most important here is for myself to STAY IN AWE of the life I’ve built, no matter what others think.

Because there will always be varying opinions of what I’m doing and how I’m living my life. But I need to always be PROUD of what I’ve created and always have my own back. 

Compared to 5 years ago when I first started my business, I’ve seen tremendous growth in terms of my work life balance. I am now light years ahead of where I used to be when it comes to balancing work and the non-work parts of my life.

Even though I’m able to appreciate my own incremental growth over the years, at the same time, I’m not going to lose sight of the vision I have for my dream solopreneur lifestyle.

I can have both: Both the gratitude for who I’ve become and what I’ve built. And at the same time be able to hold the vision that I want to continue working towards.

The best part is: I can continue to live a chill AF solopreneur lifestyle no matter how far or how close I am to that vision.

Taking small steps that will compound to create your dream solopreneur lifestyle

I hope that today’s conversation gave you something to start percolating on and that gave you a starting point to thinking about what decisions you can start to make, right now. 

Because irrespective of whether it’s your dream lifestyle or your dream business, the same principle or thought process applies.

What’s one small, simple decision you could make this week that is very within your control, which would ultimately compound if you continue to implement that decision and ultimately make waves in you living your best chill AF solopreneur lifestyle?

Let’s start there.

You don’t need to go from zero to a hundred right now.

Zero to one, zero to two, is what’s required before you go from 0 to 50 , 0 to 75, and 0 to 100.

These small steps matter. So please, start today and start creating your dream solopreneur lifestyle, right now.

Listen to the Episode

Additional Resources

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP STRATEGY AUDIT

– Audit the 9 parts of your thought leadership strategy

– Identify the specific areas you can improve on to build a substantial and compelling body of work

Get the free audit: https://cheryltheory.com/audit

Other Episodes You’ll Enjoy

Episode 168. How to Plan Your Week as a Side Hustler: Chill AF Solopreneur (Part 1)

Episode 169. How to Plan Your Week as a Full Time Entrepreneur: Chill AF Solopreneur (Part 2)

Episode 171. Feeling Stagnant in Business, Inconsistent Income, and Other Q&A’s: Chill AF Solopreneur (Part 4)

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