Finding Balance

I come from an entrepreneurial family. My father quit his union job and started a health food store in New Jersey in the early 80’s. This was not popular at the time. It was very costly to start up and risky given the lack of interest in the vegan lifestyle in the Black community. My grandmother was also an entrepreneur, after her retirement sold her homemade veggie patties, not because she needed the money, but because there was a demand for vegan versions of Jamaican patties. She mostly supplied the health food stores in Brooklyn, then branched out to the mainstream Jamaican bakeries. I say all that to say, being an entrepreneur was not a foreign thought, it was in my blood.

Before I studied to become a nurse, I was an entrepreneur at age 19. I was a travel agent, registered my own business, went to trade shows and booked trips for people all over the world. Then I got married at 23 and everything changed. My ex-husband was very linear, very structured, very type A personality. He did not support my vision, my dreams, he could only see success as a stable job with benefits. But I never gave up on being my own boss even after becoming a nurse. I was always doing something else “on the side”. I started Juicy Media Group LLC in 2011, a digital media branding agency, as a result of my social media activities, when people valued relationships and followers and would pay you to “promote” them. My cousin encouraged me to take it seriously, but I never fully committed to being my own boss until I decided to retire from nursing in 2014.

I worked harder than I ever did in my life. In my 21 years working in hospitals, nursing homes and private practice, I worked harder and longer hours for myself than I ever did working for someone else. I worked 24 hours a day. I’d be up all night, till sunrise, not sleeping for days at a time, thinking that was the right thing to do. My family suffered, my body suffered and my mind suffered. By 2017, I was quickly burning out. I wasted so much time making myself available to everyone with not much to show for it. The lines between my business and personal life were blurred. I allowed everyone access to me that they would normally not have to any other CEO of a company. If you called me at 2 am in the morning, I answered, 8:15pm at night, I answered. I had no balance and no boundaries. I thought that because I worked for myself, I had to work all the time. I was so wrong.

There must be a balance, it’s how the universe works. I had to develop a system that allowed me to decompress, to be with my family, to take care of myself. I had to learn to say no, learn to pass up on opportunities, learn to draw the line. Over the years, Karate was one of those things I worked into my schedule as if it was a job. For two hours, three times a week for eleven years, I had nothing on my mind, nothing else mattered. I was fully committed to unplug from the matrix for those designated sessions in the dojo. Although it was a great outlet to work on myself, I was slowly burning the candles on both ends. After 2 black belts, my health suffered, I developed nerve pain, arthritis and disc degeneration. Karate was no longer an option, I had to find something else.

I got my wake up call Christmas, 2018. I spent months working on a huge off-ledger download deal worth billions of dollars, I invested so much of my energy into it, only for it to collapse shortly before New Years. I looked back on my life, my personal relationships, my children and regretted everything. I kept telling myself I was doing it for them, to give them a better life, but when the deal exploded, it put everything into perspective. I stopped taking phone calls after 6pm, no more calls before 10am. I drew a line in the sand. I ended up blocking quite a few people who just didn’t respect my time (energy vampires). I stopped taking my sleeping pills and worked on removing the stressors in my life. I still haven’t mastered meditation, but when my mind slows down, I listen to binaural beats music on YouTube, music recorded on a certain frequency. Sleep music, healing music, miracle music, etc. anything that relaxes my mind.  What I learned is that the world won’t burn down to the ground because I’m not available. The emergency at 2:30am wasn’t really an emergency at all. There is a time and place for everything. Deadlines can be renegotiated, nothing is written in stone.

You must find that balance, find something that makes you happy, find time to heal your mind, body and soul.