The One Thing No One Tells You About Starting Your Own Business

One thing you might not know about me is that before I decided to turn Life Coaching into my full-time business, I had another successful business. I was a cake business owner - I made a beautiful variety of wedding, birthday & celebration cakes, with an emphasis on catering for dietary requirements. My cakes were all gluten free, able to be made vegan, dairy free, or whatever dietary requirements my customers requested.

I put my all into that business, it was my baby. I received so much support from everyone around me, with everyone telling me how proud they were of me, and how it looked like my business was doing so well from the brief glimpses they got on social media. And yet, deep down, a little over 6 months before I closed up for good, I was resenting it. But here’s the one thing no-one told me:

It was OK to change my mind.

I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone I’d started to resenting it, because everyone kept telling me how inspired they were by me, how well it was doing. And every time someone told me how good it looked like my business was doing, I just wanted to scream inside. I would shut them down as quickly as possible; I didn’t want to talk about it. And yet, whenever I saw someone for the first time in a while, they’d go straight for the sucker punch; how’s business going? In my mind it would make me close off straight away. It felt like all they saw me as was a business, my work. I wanted to shout from the rooftops that there’s so much more to me than my work. Ask me about my hobbies, biking, hiking, skiing, ask me what’s lighting me up at the moment, ask me what I’m reading, what I’m learning about. Ask me anything but how my business is going.

And because everyone kept telling me how good my business was, I didn’t have the guts to tell anyone how much I was resenting it. I was scared that if I told my truth, everyone would think I was a failure. And the more people asked me about it, the more I began resenting it. This made the work so much harder, because I kept checking out and trying to dissociate myself from it.

Then I started delving back into my spirituality again. I’d experienced burnout and lost my spiritual practices a couple of years before - that’s a whole other blog post for another time. Connecting back to my practices gave me the chance to connect to my intuition, to listen to my inner voice. It had been trying to talk to me for so long, and I just kept pushing it down, because no one else had given me the permission I thought I needed to be able to listen to it. Once I really started listening, I began to realise that the cakes weren’t for me anymore. For one thing, I’d pretty much cut out sugar from my own diet, so it no longer felt aligned to me to be selling sugar to other people. Something that had once been a hobby had become a chore. And it was so hard to make the decision to close the business, but I’ll tell you a secret - the day I came home from the kitchen and told my partner I was thinking of closing my business, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

It was a few months before I started telling anyone else, I was so scared of people thinking I was a failure, and honestly, my parents were pretty much the last people I told. I was so worried about letting them down, they were always telling me how proud they were of me, and I was scared they’d not feel proud of me anymore. And I came to realise that while I’d love to have their support and understanding, it didn’t actually matter if they didn’t understand. It also didn’t matter if anyone else thought I was a failure. Afterall, it’s my life I’m living, not theirs. I’m the one that I need to keep happy, and I’m the only person who knows my truth. The truth was, running the cake business was no longer keeping me happy. Of course, everyone fully supported me once they got their heads around it, and I’m so grateful that my parents are supportive & understanding of everything I choose to do. I acknowledge this isn’t the same for everyone, which is why I’m so glad to be able to offer that support to other people.

If any of this resonates with you, and you’re looking for change, but you don’t know where to start, please reach out. I’d love to discuss this with you and help to support you along your journey.

As I’m sure you can tell, there’s so much more to this story, and I can’t wait to share it with you one day.