Your Business, Your Life, Your Heart and Your Head Are All One Thing
There’s a list in your head right now.
Not a written list or a tidy, colour coded Notion board. A live, constantly updating, never quite finished mental ticker tape that runs from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep, and sometimes a fair bit after that too.
Part of it is work. Is the new offer ready? Has that invoice been chased? What is the social media plan for this week and why does it feel like such a massive undertaking? How much has sold, will it sell, and does that person who went quiet actually hate you or just have a busy inbox? It is the inbox, it is almost always the inbox.
Part of it is life. Did the holiday payment go through? Did you plan the meals for the week? Has the food shop been sorted? What about the cleaner, is she coming Thursday or did that change? Did you actually book those tickets, or did you just think about booking those tickets, which in your head had the same energy as doing it?
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you are trying to run a business, a real growing one. One that has clients and deadlines and a strategy that you can see perfectly clearly in your head, but which gets a bit blurry by about 3pm on a Tuesday when the mental load has been running at full capacity since approximately 6am.
This is not a productivity problem, or a discipline problem and it is not evidence that you are not cut out for this, this is just what it looks like when a whole life and a whole business live in the same head, and nobody has ever told you that you are not supposed to carry all of it alone.
“It’s just little old me doing this little old thing.”
I hear this from women constantly, and every single time I want to very respectfully challenge it.
Because here is what that actually looks like from the outside: a founder managing client relationships, new business conversations, delivery, invoicing, social media, email strategy, offers, pricing decisions, team management, content creation, reputation building, and whatever operational chaos the week has decided to throw at her, while simultaneously being a person with a body, a home, relationships, responsibilities, and approximately 7 other things that need to happen before Friday.
That is not a little thing, it’s an enormous thing and the fact that you are doing it in a way that looks seamless to everyone watching does not mean the weight is not real.
When I look at the women I work with, I see CEOs running their businesses. They can see what they are building but somewhere along the way, they absorbed the idea that needing support with it is a kind of failure, that if they were truly capable, they would simply cope and that idea is doing a lot of damage.
Your business and your life are not two separate things
We talk about work life balance as though the two exist in separate boxes. Work goes in one, life goes in the other and if you can keep the lids on both simultaneously, you are doing well.
But that is not how it actually works, is it?
When something is hard at home, it follows you into your work, when something in your business is stressing you out, it sits at the dinner table with you. When you are physically depleted, your strategic thinking suffers, when your heart is full, your work is better. Your business, your life, your heart and your head are all one thing, and they always were.
The idea that we should be able to compartmentalise them completely, to arrive at our desks as a clean, unencumbered professional person entirely separate from the woman who also did the school run and the food shop and the worry about that friendship, is one of the great myths of modern business culture.
And it particularly affects women, because women are often managing not just their own mental load but the emotional atmosphere of the whole household, the invisible admin of everyone around them, the caring, the noticing, the remembering before they have opened a single work app.
So when I say you are carrying too much, I do not mean you are weak. I mean the load is genuinely heavy, and I mean it is heavy in ways that are not always visible, even to the people closest to you.
The dentist at 10am on a Thursday
I will give you a small and slightly ridiculous example from my own life, because I think it illustrates this perfectly.
I have a tooth extraction booked for 10am on a Thursday, the week before I go on holiday.
Now, one of the great joys of running your own business is that you can build it around your actual life. Need a late start? Fine. School play on a Wednesday afternoon? Absolutely. Dentist at 10am? Usually, yes. Except that right now, the week before I go away, every single day is doing something. There is content to finish, clients to hand over, things to get in place before I leave. Thursday is not a day I can comfortably write off, and because it is a tooth extraction rather than a polish and a “see you in six months”, there is every chance Friday will be a write off as well.
The flexibility is real, the autonomy is real, but the operational weight of a week that has to work hard enough for you to actually be able to leave is also very real. Even with all the systems, all the support, all the processes I have built, the mental load of running a business still finds its way into a Thursday morning dental appointment. The difference now is that it does not derail me, because the business does not live entirely inside my head anymore.
The calls that start as strategy and become something else entirely
Some of my client calls start as strategy sessions and become something else. A founder arrives ready to talk through her next offer or her Q3 plan or the team structure she has been thinking about, and then something slips. She mentions she has been struggling, that it has been a hard few weeks at home, that she cried in the car on the way back from a meeting last week and has not told anyone.
So the call shifts, not because we have abandoned the strategy, but because that woman cannot do her best strategic thinking while she is also holding something heavy and unspoken. The business and the human being are the same person, and you cannot pour everything into one while the other is drowning.
I do not think this makes my clients broken, I think it makes them human beings doing an incredibly demanding thing in a world that sometimes forgets to account for the whole person.
The support that actually helps is not always the kind that ticks tasks off a list, sometimes it is someone who can see into your chaotic brain, translate what is actually there, and show up, professionally, practically, warmly, for both the strategy and the human.
One client told me that without Mavenly she would not have a business.
Another said that in six months her business changed massively and she can pinpoint the start of that change to when she brought support in.
Another said that working together gave her so much faith, confidence and growth that she has since expanded her team even further.
That is what happens when the whole person gets supported.
Support is not a reward for getting it together
The version of support that most people imagine is the version you earn. You get to a certain size, hit a certain revenue, prove conclusively that you are serious about this and then, then, you are allowed to ask for help.
This is completely backwards.
Most growth problems are capacity problems, and the women who are scaling sustainably are not doing it alone, they are not superhuman and they did not suddenly acquire more hours in the day or a brain that stopped needing rest. They stopped asking one person, themselves, to carry an entire business and a whole life and a full emotional load simultaneously and indefinitely. There is only so far you can get as a one woman show, and that is not a reflection of capability, capability and capacity are different things entirely. You can be completely capable and still be limited by how much one person can hold, and that is not a character flaw. It is arithmetic.
The support that changes things is not a sign you have finally got it together, it is often the reason you finally do.
If any of this has felt familiar
If you have been nodding along and you know that what you actually need right now is an hour to put things down and think clearly, the Reset Room is exactly that. It is a free monthly session, structured but warm, and women arrive with a head full of chaos and leave with something they can actually act on. It is one of my favourite things I do and it costs nothing, details are below.
Or, if what your gut is actually telling you is that the operational side of your business needs sorting before anything else can move, that the inbox and the systems and the admin have piled up then my wonderful team of Virtual Assistants and Executive Assistants can help.
Either way, you do not have to keep carrying all of this alone.
Lois Bates—Stubbs is the founder of Mavenly, a VA and EA agency based in Manchester. She works with women in business who are ready to stop carrying everything alone.