FINDING OUR FEET

As an Adventurer (more on that here), anxiety isn’t something I feel typically overcome by.

Being dropped in the middle of nowhere solo and spending weeks navigating my way home, negotiating impassable gorges and waterfalls, and coming face to face with wild dogs alone in the bush, all help to compartmentalise most every day stresses into manageable things to be dealt with.

That was before I opened my own business. With two children in the Christmas school holidays.

The doubts crept in.

The days started like this for weeks (definitely for every week of the 6 week holidays I was trying to juggle 2 businesses, 2 kids and 0 husbands). I’d wake up and be hit by it in a way I never had been before, and as a career chameleon well-used to working in the space outside my comfort zone, this was uncomfortably unknown territory.

It took some regrouping and some earthing, but ultimately, guess what realigned the un-resourceful patterns I was running? The very business we were building: the co-working environment. It was the cups of tea I was having with Nav Fox every day, the ones we were able to enjoy, presently, and guilt free because we’d crushed two hours of productive work earlier on and had time to chat. It was the knowing hugs and good natured debriefs I was catching with Brad Bricknell, the brainstorming mama chats with Shannon Langton, and the belly laughs I’d have at Irons & Craig grabbing a morning coffee that reminded me who I was and why I started.

And that’s the EPIC thing about this whole caper; that we’re all just humans on this journey. All just people trying our best. Waking up every day finding new ways to hack it. As entrepreneurs, freelancers, contractors, business owners – whatever – we’re always going to ride peaks and troughs. There’ll be days when it’s just easier, and days when it’s just damn hard. And that’s the mad crazy beauty of it all. That’s what connects us. The wins are the wins and they’re amazing, they’re what we’re here for and why we turn up, but the lows, the losses, the fails, the trench moments, where we’re blindly wallowing and hoping for the best – those are the moments when camaraderie is built. When ranks are closed and the energy of others has the rallying power to lift us and carry us up and over. The striking epiphany that to go fast, we must go alone, but to go far, we must go together.