Business ownership is self empowerment.

The average person will spend around 1 third of their life working. An estimated 90 THOUSAND hours. Considering we spend around a third of our life also sleeping, that means that HALF of the waking hours of our life are spent working.

Half your life.  HALF YOUR WAKING LIFE!

And if your experience of having a job was anything like most of my career working for other people. That means half your life spent showing up the way someone else wants you to. 

Half your life living by the “rules” of what it means to be an employee. 

Half your life being on someone else’s timeline.

Half your life doing “tasks” that someone else decided on for you.

Half your life with someone else having direct influence over your career progression. 

How much money you earn.

How much time you work.

Who you have to work with. 

HALF YOUR LIFE BEING a person you are required to be so that you “FIT IN WITH THE WORK CULTURE.

As if women don't already have enough cultural influences telling us who we need to be at home, we also get to have someone else dictating who we are at work too. Because being an employee doesn't just mean that someone pays you a wage in exchange for doing what they ask you to do, it means BEING who they ask you to be.

Which is so frustrating when you're faced with the messaging that tells you to just be yourself!

Except we need you to be less assertive because people don't like that.

Be yourself, unless you're a big personality then tone it down.

Be creative and innovative, unless your ideas are too big then you need to reign it in!

Be open and honest, but don't tell us anything that we don't like to hear…

When you’re playing by someone else's arbitrary rules, you just can't win.

I remember when I finally had the courage to let go of having a job, I felt like I could BREATHE again. It was the weirdest sensation. 

Being self employed and running my own business gave me the space, freedom and permission to truly BE WHO I AM. TO show up as I am without fearing that I was going to be punished for it or forced to minimize myself. 

It meant letting go of other people's rules and expectations. 

Owning a business is about pushing back against a system that encourages us to disassociate from ourselves in order to survive.  We are taught to put everything else before our own needs and desires. We’re taught to spend the fast waking majority of our lives dedicated to being something that someone else wants us to be. 

Having our own business gives us the opportunity to use the time that we spend working, to decide how and what we spend our precious life creating, and who we want to be and become in the process of doing that.

For me, business ownership is one of the greatest pathways of self discovery and creation we have.