Hi Sydney,

Spring is finally here! 

While much of the world celebrates New Year's Eve/New Year's Day as the symbolic time for a new start, where I live, the shift from the end of December to the beginning of January simply means going from cold days to more cold days. If it weren't for calendars and social media posts, I wouldn't even notice.

On the other hand, the shift from late March to April is huge. I don't need a calendar to tell me that Mother Nature is waking up from a long winter's nap. The days get warmer and longer, birds start singing, and blossoms are starting to emerge from trees and plants that showed no signs of life a few weeks earlier.

As entrepreneurs, Spring is the perfect time for us to experience renewal, growth, and new opportunities. It's a great time to plant new seeds for our businesses - new ideas, new collaborative relationships, and new intentions.

I'd like to suggest that one of those new intentions be a renewed commitment to self-care. Between caring for the needs of our businesses, our clients and customers, our strategic partners, and our family and friends, we convince ourselves that we don't have the time or energy to care for ourselves.

It's easy to forget that the best way to take care of others is to first take care of ourselves. If we're physically, mentally, and/or emotionally exhausted or burned out, every part of our lives suffers.

Trust me, I know from personal experience that recovering from burnout is a lot harder and takes a lot longer than developing healthy self-care and work habits to avoid it in the first place.

For me, self-care means gardening, reading, meditating, walking, and eating healthy foods.

What does it look like for you? Shoot me an email and share your tips.

However you choose to practice self-care, be like Nike and Just Do It!

Blessings,

FEATURE ARTICLE:
Finding Perfectionism in the Strangest Places 

My name is Sydney and I'm a recovering perfectionist. 

I was reminded of how much more recovering I still need to do recently while I was preparing to install fencing around my garden. To save time on fencing day, I posted all the stakes in advance, spending I a lot of time (and energy) trying to make sure all of the posts were the same height. It was unbelievably frustrating because the ground wasn't level.

On the day of, as my friend and I started attaching the wire fencing to the posts, I grabbed my 4-foot level tool in a feeble attempt to make sure the fencing was going to be perfectly even. The expression on his face immediately told me how ridiculous I must've looked. I can laugh at his reaction now, but I have to admit that I was pretty embarrassed at the time.

It's a veggie garden. Outdoors. That's going to be full of dirt, compost, wood chip mulch, and raised garden beds. What was I thinking?

That's just it, I wasn't.

Sometimes it takes being away from our work to be reminded of how deeply ingrained certain mindsets and the work habits that support them can be counterproductive to the goal of working smarter, not harder.

There was absolutely no need for my garden fencing or the ground beneath my compost bin and raised beds to be perfectly level. I don't want to think about how much time and energy I mindlessly wasted trying to make them that way.

The fencing is up. I'm sure it's not perfectly aligned, but it doesn't matter.

The sobering lesson from my garden fence experience was that my natural perfectionist expectations are unrealistic because they are unattainable.

When I started my business, it was sobering to realize that some of the same expectations and pressures that had contributed to my burnout from my former life as an employee were showing up in my own business. As unsettling as it was, I'm thankful that the realization became apparent so soon, because it caused me to be much more intentional about what I'm doing in my day-to-day work, in terms of both why I'm doing it and how.

Of course I want to do and be my best, but that's very different from striving to attain the impossible goal of perfection. So, as I continuously refine and simplify my workflow processes, I'm embracing the wabi-sabi principle of accepting the imperfections in life and appreciating their authentic beauty.

I invite you to do the same and would consider it an honor to support you on the journey.  

COOL TIPS/RESOURCES

• 2 NEW offerings - Taming Your ToDos and Calm the Chaos: I've been listening to so many women solopreneurs and small business owners saying how overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted they are with everything they think they need to do to be successful in their businesses. These feelings can almost always be directly related to ever-growing to do lists and information overload from a variety of sources.  Whenever I dig deeper with my clients, we discover that the root cause of the overwhelm is almost always a lack of clarity and alignment between their core values and vision.  Simply put, when it comes to focusing our efforts on what's really important in growing our businesses, if everything is important, nothing is important. That's why I've created two personalized 1:1 coaching programs, a 3-month jump start program and a 6-month deep dive program offering a step-by-step process to move my clients from being totally overwhelmed to reigniting the creative spark and the energy that comes with it that made them want to become entrepreneurs in the first place. Click here to learn more about both programs and then schedule a complimentary Clarity Call to see if working with me in either of these programs would be a good fit for you.
  
  
• Wounds to Wings Virtual Summit for Female Leaders (Video Replay): Last month my coach and dear friend Blanca Vergara hosted a 3-day Virtual Summit for female leaders. The Summit consisted of enlightening and inspiring conversations and powerful wisdom from 10 amazing women from around the world dedicated to empowering women leaders to unapologetically embrace their feminine energies at a time when the world needs that more than ever. A replay of the entire summit is now available here at no charge.
  
  
• Women-Owned Business Certification: The U.S. Small Business Administration offers two types of women-owned small business certifications, women-owned small businesses and economically disadvantaged women-owned small businesses. Click here to learn more about the free certification benefits, requirements, and application process.
  
  
• Insight Timer: Hailed as the #1 free app meditation app, Insight Timer has over 130,000 FREE guided meditations. Evidence-based research has consistently proved that meditation offers substantial benefits for emotional and physical well-being, including stress-reduction, enhancing self-awareness, reducing pain, regulating physiology, and much more. That's why meditation is recognized as one of the most powerful self-care tools available, it can be practiced any time and any where, and it's free! InsightTimer can be accessed online or from your smartphone.
  
  
• The Savvy Solopreneur - a curated digital e-zine. New articles are posted nearly every day.  I sift through dozens of new articles each day and only publish those that seem both timely and relevant. I do the searching for valuable content so you don't have to. Be sure to bookmark The Savvy Solopreneur and check back often for new articles.

HOW TO CONNECT:
My goal is to help female entrepreneurs find creative and low-cost strategies and tools to help them work smarter, not harder. The myth that the most complicated and expensive solution is usually the best one is a lie, and I can usually prove it!

Have questions or want to share feedback or suggestions for future issues? I'd love to hear from you:

Website: www.sydneytylerthomas.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/coachsydney
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sydneytylerthomas/
Email: coachsydney@retirementdivas.com

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