How to Be a Fun (Business) Mum

Guest Post by Alli Price from Motivating Mum

It’s hard work juggling a business and kids. You’re constantly feeling guilty that you haven’t given the kids enough attention and then, because you’re feeling crappy you can’t give full attention to your work. It’s a constant merry-go round. But how to get off? I have a few tricks that just might help stop the ride:

Open your diary and look at a day, how much time have you diarised to spend with your kids? And I’m not talking movies or playcentres, but time while you’re at home. Planning time to spend with your kids in a day can:

a) ensure you take the time to spend with your kids as you’ve planned for it,
b) ensure it is more productive as you can plan, in advance, what you will do,
c) make you feel better about working as you know you’ve spent quality time with your child.

If you’re feeling guilt, stop and think about why you’re feeling it – and then think about whether you can do anything to alter the situation. Do you need to change your situation or maybe your expectations?

You can set a red flag for yourself. This is when a particular event or situation arises it will be your notice to stop working and spend time with your kids. Whenever I hear myself say, “just one more minute” twice, that’s my red flag to shut down the computer and walk away.

Sometimes it’s hard to disengage from work and engage with the kids when they want to play Barbie for the 50th time that day. I don’t know about you but I am fast finding games that bore the socks off me! If this comes up, I suggest Barbie for 10 min and then colouring for after. Now colouring I love!

I send my kids to childcare on different days. I know this sounds crazy, as it doesn’t give me as much time to work on my business, but what it does do is allow me special one on one time with each of them. A whole day of one on one gives me such amazing quality time and I can also do my business while they’re sleeping or doing a little art.

Allow yourself those times, when you have a deadline or additional work, to do the extra business (and forgive yourself). Life is never a perfect balance and there will be ebb and flow, with both your family and your work.

Write down your motivations and then put them up where you can see them. Mine would be to make money to support the family, to allow me to bring my children up happy and healthy, to allow me to grow and learn and to be a good role model. It’s often hard to remember this when you’re busy beating yourself up, so having them in a place you can see them will remind you to stop.

So I hope these help. I’d love to hear from you if they do – or perhaps you have some of yours to add?

Enjoy, both your kids and your business, Alli x

Alli Price runs Motivating Mum, a website and events service offering support and advice to mums in business, or those wanting to be. The business was born of necessity – having just given birth and launching a home business at the same time in the UK, Alli found the situation both isolating and lonely. The Businessmums’ Networking Lunch was born!

A successful business, five franchisees and a new baby later, Alli and her family moved back to Oz … to start the business all over again! Although at least this time she knew what SEO and blogging were.

She now lives in Melbourne, loves watching her daughters play in the sunshine (the exact reason she moved back to Australia) and is typing this at 12.24am (some things never change)!

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