5 Ways to Keep Your Entrepreneurial Spirit Up

This post is sponsored by Visa Business. For more information, please see the end of this article.

Being an entrepreneur is exciting, empowering, and can provide you with the authentic life you crave.  But, it can be emotionally and physically draining, lonely and sometimes, not a lot of fun. Without tools to get through these trying times, you’re at risk of losing the entrepreneurial spirit that helped you venture into business in the first place. Here are five ways to keep your love for your business going! 

5 Ways to Keep Your Entrepreneurial Spirit Up

1. Stick Together with Birds of a Feather

The thing is—you can’t do this on your own. Running a business is hard work. Add in a couple of kids, and you’re hands are sufficiently full. You need help, sister! The best place you’ll ever find support, valuable business information and sisterhood is from other women entrepreneurs just like you. If you’re not already involved in small business groups, either online or in your community, now is the time to look. Consider our Marketplace. Utilize social media to see where other women business owners are hanging out. Not only will birds of a feather help you with business things, they can be the perfect sounding board when you need to vent, or cry, or eat too much chocolate. Or all of that, at once.   

2. Be Well

Never, ever, underestimate the super-power of a healthy lifestyle. The better you treat your body, the better it will treat you, and that goes for your brain, too. Pretty simple, right? Well, not always. When you're an entrepreneur, it’s easy to sit at the computer for hours at end, grab a handful of potato chips for lunch, drink soda, and go to bed too late. Time to change it up! Exercise and good nutrition boosts your mood, fuels your brain and helps give you energy—all of which you need for your business and your family. Here are some ideas to keep you healthy: 

• Make breakfast and lunch a part of your day, every day.
• Water hydrates, flushes out toxins and energizes you. Replace soda with water, or keep a water bottle full, cold and handy to sip on throughout the day.
• National health studies have proven that sitting too long increases your risk of cardiac disease. Make a point to get up and walk, move around, or do simple stretches every hour.
• Make exercise part of your day. Walking for twenty minutes a day can relieve stress, improve brain function and get you healthier! If you can’t walk once a day, consider thirty minutes, three times a week.

3. Beat the Blues

Working from home can be isolating. Going without social connections can make even the strongest woman a wee bit blue, so beat isolation before it can nab you! Consider activities outside of your business that will get you out of the house. 

• Join a book club
• Join a gym
• Be active in your child’s school
• Go to the coffee shop and actually sit down and drink your coffee.

 Find an excuse (yes, you can make excuses in this case and it’s OK) to leave the house at least once a week. You’ll feel your mood greatly lifted and keep the lonely blues away.   

4. Stay On Schedule

Missing out on your children’s activities, or forgetting a key business appointment can quickly drain your giddy-up. Life will be a lot easier if you’re able to follow a schedule built around your business and family activities. Create a calendar that outlines your children’s activities, family events and business meetings, phone calls or deadlines. Using Google calendar is a great way to keep everything organized. Google calendar lets you: 

• Keep track of business and family events, appointments and activities
• Access your calendar from your home, your cell phone or your laptop
• Share your calendar with other family members like your partner so everyone’s on the same page
• Get reminders by email or text to help you stay on schedule
• Create different calendars for business, dinner menus, kid's activities, etc.

5. Call It Quits

Just because you don’t have to enter a time card, doesn’t mean you don’t have to punch out at the end of the day. And not at one in the morning, either. Working all hours of the day and night quickly drains you, and your business-enthusiasm. You have to be a quitter, each and every day. 

• Set boundaries around your business time. No interruptions. No exceptions.
• Set a firm quitting time each and every day. It can be a different time, say earlier on Saturday and later on the weekdays, but set one. Then stick to it.
• Say no if business things come up after your scheduled quitting time! You’re the boss. You get to say no. If you don’t, work will always creep in, even after you’ve promised yourself, and your family, that it won’t. Don’t be that girl.

 The best way to keep your entrepreneurial spirit? Say yes to the tools that can help you get through the hard times, and reap the best from your business for years to come!Check out Visa Business’s awesome infographic about entrepreneurial spirit below! (Click on the image to see it in full size.)  I am blogging on behalf of Visa Business and received compensation for my time from Visa for sharing my views in this post, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Visa’s. Visit http://facebook.com/visasmallbiz to take a look at the reinvented Facebook Page: Well Sourced by Visa Business. The Page serves as a space where small business owners can access educational resources, read success stories from other business owners, engage with peers, and find tips to help businesses run more efficiently. Every month, the Page will introduce a new theme that will focus on a topic important to a small business owner’s success. For additional tips and advice, and information about Visa’s small business solutions, follow @VisaSmallBiz.