Some days self-employment sucks the big one.

Today is one of those days.

And because I know that my current trauma is only an illusion, I find this Lynn Anderson song from way back stuck in my head:

I beg your pardon,
I never promised you a rose garden.

I could sing you a tune or promise you the moon,
But if that’s what it takes to hold you,
I’d just as soon let you go, but there’s one thing I want you to know.
You better look before you leap, still waters run deep,
And there won’t always be someone there to pull you out,
And you know what I’m talkin’ about.
So smile for a while and let’s be jolly:
Love shouldn’t be so melancholy.
Come along and share the good times while we can.

I beg your pardon,
I never promised you a rose garden.
Along with the sunshine,
There’s gotta be a little rain sometimes.

Little did I know, all those nights I laid awake as a kid, listening to the only radio station my little transistor radio could pull in at night after my mother threatened to take me out if I didn’t go to sleep, would have any kind of positive effect on me 35 years later. It was a country station, and to this day, I can sing along with just about every Top 40 country song from the late ’60s to the late ’70s. (Which is why I sometimes go to sleep with my MP3 player playing audio training calls I’ve recorded – the information still goes into the ol’ gray matter, whether I’m “paying attention”, or not. Weird how that works.)

The point is there are going to be days when you call up your coach and say, “Please remind me again why it is self-employment is better than a job. Why is this better than going somewhere, doing my thing for 8 hours and collecting a paycheck? Because you know everything else I’m responsible for will still be there waiting on me…I just wouldn’t have all the responsibility of an entire business piled on top of it all.” (Note: this is one very good reason – of many – to have a coach. So you have one to call up to talk you down out of whatever tree you find yourself in.)

Every successful entrepreneur you have ever looked at and thought, “I want what s/he has,” has had days like this…and likely still does. I do. Some of you out there look at me and think this very thought. (That realization still surprises me, by the way. Because, you know…I’m just me, after all. But I know some of you think it because you’ve said it out loud to me.)

So, if I’m sitting here thinking it about the people I admire and aspire to be like, and you are sitting there thinking it about me…guess what? There’s probably someone, somewhere, thinking it about you. (Gasp!) But it’s very likely true.

Now, does just knowing that someone else has a really crappy time of it in their business on occasion really make me feel any better? Should it, you?

Yes. Here’s why.

Bad days are just part of the deal. It’s not just me. It’s not just you. Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometimes.

Some days self-employment sucks the big one.

But – by far – most don’t.

And in the words of my most excellent coach, “…But mostly self-employment is better because you get to do your own shit in your own way.”

Amen.

I just finished reading Tim Brownson’s post, Work/Life Bullshit, and began to leave a comment. When I realized that I had a full-blown blog post on my hands, I thought I’d bring it over here so some of you could get in on the conversation, should you care to.

I, like Tim and many others, do what I do because I love it. While I’m lucky enough to create my income doing what I love, I do still ‘have’ to do it.

Ok, that’s a lie, too. I don’t ‘have’ to do it, but I choose to because the consequences of choosing not to are not attractive to me. (I’ve grown accustomed to my home, my car, among other things and Lord knows I’m not trying to live without my computer and Internet service!)

However, I think you made a very good point, Tim, when you said that when employers are yapping about work/life balance, most of the time it’s because they don’t want you to have any. I agree. But I think the bigger point is when you find yourself worrying about work/life balance, that means it’s already out of whack…like noticing you’re thirsty means you should have had a drink hours ago.

I think there are as many ways to get out of whack balancing work and the rest of your life as there are people on the planet. Loving what you do for ‘work’ doesn’t automatically make you immune to imbalance. On the contrary, I think it sometimes makes you more susceptible.

I don’t think Tim’s wife, at least on the evening mentioned in his post, thinks he’s got the balance figured out anymore than my kids did last night when at 9:30pm I was still absorbed in a new site I am building…lost in the bliss of “ooohh..I wonder if I can make it do this…oooh, I can!…then, I wonder if I can make it do that…oooh, yes, I can…so does that mean I can make it do this, too?…OMG…yes, I can!…”  I finally stepped away from the computer at 10, and that completed a 12hr stretch of design bliss.

Granted, not every day is like that for me. Not even most are…but enough are. My 16y/o cooks dinner more often than I do (like…a LOT more often!) And no, that won’t kill him, and yes, it’s good that he’ll go out into the world knowing how to cook…but it’s kinda not the point.

Of course, this example may not be the best one to use, because I abhor cooking dinner with a vengeance. I’d do a whole lot of things I don’t love to do to get out of daily chef duty.

Maybe I stress too much because now that I work at home, I get wrapped up in the illusion that my kids should get ‘more’ of me than they did when I was in the corporate world. Where’s the logic in that? I traded doing one job – granted, away from home and for extended hours each day – for doing ALL jobs related to my business.

I will say this: It’s a whole dang lot easier to keep track of them and be where they need me to be when I’m my own boss. And often, they’ve lamented that their mom is ‘all up in their business all the time’ because I’m not stuck somewhere downtown at an office all day long. Other times, and especially here lately, I think I’d be a whole lot less stressed if I didn’t have such a front row seat to what they’re up to.

So if I’m still working a lot of hours, what’s changed about the balance in my life? Am I still out of whack?

It’s all relative. My kids think it’s just fine if I spend 24 hours a day on the computer, unless and until they want something. Then I work too much.  What they’re really wanting to is to dictate even more of my schedule than they already do. If it were my attention they were craving, I wouldn’t get turned down for movie nights or family outings as much as I do because they’ve got ‘other plans’.

Even as I write that, I realize that what’s really different today (as opposed to the corporate days) is that when I’m not ‘working’, I’m not in a bad mood.  Used to be, I’d come home all jacked up about stuff at work and it took more than the drive home to decompress. The mommy time they got back then was polluted, if you will, with leftover work garbage.

Another thing that’s really different today is the quality of my life. It’s gone way up. WAY up. It’s filled with far less of the stuff I don’t want in my life and far more of the stuff I do.

For me, the work/life balancing act was made exponentially easier when I engaged in work I love versus the kind that made me want to stick needles in my eyes. But it’s still a balancing act.

But then, isn’t every aspect of life a dance in and around a proverbial sweet spot?