Adopt a Life-Friendly Business Approach with Erin Thomas Wong

Meg Brunson

Hey Hey. FamilyPreneurs. I'm so excited to have you with us here today. Today I'm really excited to be joined by Erin Thomas Wong. We are going to be talking about boundaries, success and being more effective with our time. Erin is a business mentor and coach and host of the Life Friendly Business podcast. She left a career in TV production 13 years ago when she had her first son because she was in search of a better work life balance. I feel like so many of us can relate to that. She is the author of Mumpreneur Evolution sharing the Stories of Women building business around Family Life. Over the past six years, Erin has helped thousands of women grow their business through her Facebook groups, the Cocoon Business Membership, Live Events, Mentoring and Masterminding. Erin, I'm so excited to have you here today and I cannot wait to chat about this topic.

Erin Thomas Wong

Thank you so much for having me.

Meg Brunson

I have to as an American, I stumbled a little bit on mumpreneur. It's not natural for me. I love it. I love it.

Erin Thomas Wong

I always get myself stuck on mompreneur as well.

Meg Brunson

Right, so that's where we're going to have our little hiccups in this episode. So let's start with what I think everyone struggles with and it's setting our boundaries. Like, how do we even start to identify what that looks like?

Erin Thomas Wong

Well, I think that what's really easy to do, actually, is to give you some examples of what life looks like when you don't have the boundaries in place because people recognize those things. So I find that a lot of women that I work with, we all love what we do so much that we're happy to do it for free. So we give extra, don't we? We give more. We offer free course to people. We offer to do things to people. And what happens is that eventually we burn out because that's not sustainable. And at that point, we start feeling a bit of resentment. We might start feeling resentment around the people around us, even resent ourselves or the fact that we put ourselves in this position. And it's because we didn't put our boundaries in place and we didn't set those expectations with our clients and customers and what we were going to deliver. But that is also the same for people around you. So many of us are people pleasers. So when people ask us to do things, even though we know that we don't have time to do it, we know that we've got other stuff that's more pressing.

Erin Thomas Wong

We find ourselves saying yes. And I think that there are so many of us who just find ourselves in that vicious cycle. And then you feel like you've got no time to do anything and you don't have time to run your business and you don't have time to be the mum that you want to be. But it all starts with deciding on what's important to you and what are the things that need to take priority. And sometimes that means saying no to other people because every time you say yes to something, we're saying no to something else.

Meg Brunson

Oh my gosh, I feel like you were speaking right to me with the people pleasing and the overbooking calls. And it's not just the free calls, right? There comes a time where even if people are paying you, you still have to know what your limits are and you may have to say no to money coming in in order to preserve your sanity and prevent that overwhelm.

Erin Thomas Wong

And it's also, like you say, it's about how much energy we have and we have to protect our own energy at all costs. Totally. When it comes to having calls and things like that, there is going to be a limit to how much you can manage without getting exhausted and without feeling like you're really stretched and it's working out. And I think really, for me, the whole thing about having a life friendly business is being very in tune with how your energy works, what's important to you and what you need in order to feel in control, in order to feel resilient. We need to be looking after ourselves and we need to be protecting ourselves because we are our businesses USP, most of the time for solo business owners, we are the business. So it's so important to be looking after ourselves, protecting that.

Meg Brunson

And one of the I have discovered and it took time, it took like learning myself that phone calls are just something that drains me. So that's an area that I've discovered I really need strong boundaries and I had to reflect that in the contracts that I created for my clients where it specifically outlines how long we will be on the phone together. So that I guess it puts that boundary in place, right?

Erin Thomas Wong

Yes, totally. And but that's the thing, it's like, you know, sometimes we feel like we should be doing things in a certain way, but we don't have to. And as long as we are communicating what those expectations are, actually, I love it when people lay the ground rules. I think it helps our clients as well as us. I mean, for example, you've got an amazing process for doing a podcast interview. You've got all the information laid out. Like, I read it and I was so impressed because I was like, I know exactly what's required of me, I know what you're going to do. And I just think that that makes people feel safe as well. Whereas if we don't put those things in place, then we're going to find that people impinge on our time and our energy and then we're just going to get really annoyed and it's not actually their fault because we've let that happen, right?

Meg Brunson

And it's a process, right. You got to start, you got to build. You got to self correct. It's a process. So how exactly do we go about figuring out what those non negotiables are for us? Because we need to know what those are before we can really set our boundaries, right?

Erin Thomas Wong

Yeah. And I think one of the important things to do is to define if we're looking at a life friendly business, for example, it's like to define what that means for you, because we are all different and we have different things going on in our lives. Some of us might have kids, some of us might not. Some of us might be caring for someone. We've got these different things going on and we've also got a different idea of how we want our day to day life to look. And so I think the first thing is to really think and dig deep on how you want your daily life to be and what that means. And for me, a non negotiable is that I want to be able to pick my kids up from school. And I was like, when I can, it doesn't mean that I do 100% of the time. But I was bought up by a single mum. She had to work several jobs to keep us afloat and there were many times when she wasn't able to pick us up from school and we had a child minder pick us up. And I think that was something that to me, I thought, wow, if I could create a job where I can be there at school gates at 03:00, then that's what I'm going to do.

Erin Thomas Wong

So that's one of my non negotiables. But everyone is going to have different things. And it might be that you don't want to have to be doing calls during school holidays or tea time or bedtime, but it also might be things like, you know, what I need for my own sanity? I need to have time for myself each week. I need to have time to go out for a walk, I need to do my exercise class. So what are the things that you really need in order to thrive in your life?

Meg Brunson

And I think, too, it all comes down to another thing we struggle with, is taking care of ourselves. Like, we have to recognize that, like those selfcare tasks. And I don't want to say nonnegotiables again because I know that's what we're talking about. That's all I can come up with. Those selfcare tasks have to be non negotiable too, because we need to take care of ourselves. So blocking that time off in your calendar and treating it like any other client appointment, that's something that's helped me.

Erin Thomas Wong

Yeah. And I think we're so good at looking after other people and putting other people's needs first. And one of the phrases that I really love, which I've adopted for this whole life friendly approach, is about giving yourself grace. And I find that so many people are so hard on themselves. They beat themselves up, they criticize themselves, and it's really destructive. And actually, if we can give ourselves grace for all the stuff that we're trying to juggle on a daily basis, if we're actually kind to ourselves and we recognize that we're under a lot of strain and that we're not going to feel amazing today because XYZ happened and that's okay, and it's human to feel like that. I think we need to be a lot kinder to ourselves and, like you say, understand what self care means for us.

Meg Brunson

Yes. So getting clear on the non negotiable things for us, for our business, for the way that we want to interact with our families, all of those things, and then I feel like you touched on this and it kind of leads us beautifully into the next piece, which is defining your own measures of success. So just like your non negotiables are going to be unique to you, your measures of success are also going to be unique to you, right?

Erin Thomas Wong

Absolutely.

Erin Thomas Wong

And I think this is one thing that I find a lot in the online world which can feel a little bit toxic when it comes to small business owners. There's a lot of stuff out there about earning six or seven figures and what success should look like. Maybe you're driving a Tesla or living in a fancy house or going on amazing holidays, and it's very easy to get sucked into other people's measures of success and then feeling like a failure when, A, you don't reach it, and B, actually you're not bothered about reaching it, maybe your measure of success is something completely different. And so I really encourage people to understand for themselves what success looks like to them and work to that basis, rather than feeling like they're trying to keep up with this vision that someone else has created for them.

Meg Brunson

Yeah, and I feel like I was in the same boat at one point. The goal should be to make six or seven figures, and then I realized that's not what drives me. My current measure of success is being able to travel with my family, and that means we live in a 35 foot box, which for a lot of people is like, not what they want to do. But that's fine. It's fine, right? We can have different goals and different paths in life, and we can be successful even though we make different amounts of money. So I love this concept and I feel like it's something I've really.

Erin Thomas Wong

I love exactly what you're saying. And that's proof as well that everyone has got their own measures of success today. I had one of those moments where I was sitting on the sofa. My husband is self employed as well, and we're together in the house during the day, the kids are at school, and I felt so calm and I was doing bits of work and I just thought, wow, this is my life. I'm earning enough money and I'm calm and I'm not stressed out and I love the work that I do. I literally love everything I do. If there's a task that I don't enjoy, I outsource it. I don't do things in my business that I don't enjoy. And then I was able to pack up and go and pick my son up at 03:00. That success to me. One thing that's really interesting is that over here in the UK, I was looking at some kind of figures and the average UK salary for a full time job is £35,000, which is actually $40, $40,000. And it just made me think, because when you look at that, you think there's lots of people that would say, how amazing to be able to earn that, but working my own hours, part time around the kids.

Erin Thomas Wong

But yet we've got all these messages online that we should be earning six or seven figures when most people are earning the average salary. I just wonder where this has all come from and it's just kind of exploded. So if your goal is to earn six or seven figures, there's nothing wrong with that. But I just think that we need to be taking back the power and deciding for ourselves whether that aligns with what we want.

Meg Brunson

And I think another piece of that discussion is the fact that I can't say, all right, but most six or seven figure business owners are not solo printer's, so they have built a team, however that may look, and that, quite honestly, is a lot of work in itself and it may not be something you want to do, like, and it's fine, right? Like, your family probably doesn't need a six or seven figure income to survive. Now, maybe you maybe you want that, right, for whatever reason, but then you have to be willing to do extra work. And like you said, if that's not aligned with what you're good at or what you like to do, we have the opportunity. It's one of the most beautiful things, I think, about entrepreneurship is that we have the opportunity to really define everything, what it looks like, what we need.

Erin Thomas Wong

I absolutely love that we have the opportunity to define everything. That is so cool. It's really interesting. I've got a few mentoring clients at the moment who have done the whole thing of building and scaling and growing teams, and do you know what? They've got to the point where they're like, this is too much and I am going to scale down and I'm going to go back to being a solopreneur. But actually, I've worked out I'm going to earn the same money without all the stress. So it's really interesting. I think that there is definitely a sea change on the way about how people see that because like you say, managing people, managing a team, all those big things that running a bigger business or a medium sized business bring with it. Some of us don't want that. I see it as an amazing challenge that I can build my business using Kajabi, doing it all myself, my own website. I've got an online business manager and I'm like, how far can I get with just me and my online business manager and my accountant? They're friends. And how awesome is that?

Erin Thomas Wong

I don't need a team of ten people to do what I do and I find that so empowering.

Meg Brunson

Yeah. And it's not to shame anybody who has that path. And it's beautiful that it's fluid, which you touched on too. You can build and grow and then realize maybe that's not really what I wanted, and dial it back. And that's where those measures of success are always changing.

Erin Thomas Wong

This is the thing, you're absolutely right. This is not about shaming people's decisions in what they're doing. It's about recognizing that we each are individuals and we have our own drivers of what we want and what we want to achieve. And that's brilliant and we should totally lean into that. What we should not do is feel pressured by other stuff around us to fit into a box that actually is not the right box for us.

Meg Brunson

And I think luckily a lot of those messages are starting to shift and these conversations are becoming more commonplace. But I still get bombarded with the messaging all over social media and social media ads that you should be making more money. Like you should want more money, you should be making more money. But I love that we're having this conversation that there's more to success than dollar signs and money in the bank.

Erin Thomas Wong

Yeah. And I really think that culturally we are in this place of always wanting more and always needing more and never really being grateful for what we have is with everything, isn't it? It's what we consume. It's everything. It's always like and I just think that actually we can be really happy. And I'm not talking but yeah, this is why I don't want people to mistake me. I'm not talking about making do. I'm talking about let's take a moment to recognize what we've achieved so far and the moment that we're in now. And rather than feeling like we're on this hamster wheel where we have to constantly be moving forward and trying to catch up with other people, like carve your own path.

Meg Brunson

One of my favorite people, Caz Gadis is her name and she always talks about that hamster wheel and it can feel like you're going in circles and going in circles. But how she explains it and I'm going to butcher it because she does a beautiful job explaining the visual is when you're looking at that circle it's like you're looking from the top down. But from another perspective. You are going in circles. But it's a spiral staircase. So even though you're going in circles, you're constantly moving upwards. And like I said, I butchered that visual. I'm sure. Go follow Caz and she'll explain it much more beautifully. But the way she explained it, that has stayed in my mind. So when I find myself feeling like I'm just on the hamster wheel and going in circles, I shift my perspective to imagine those circles are still going up. We're not in the same place we were yesterday, even though it may feel like you're on that wheel.

Erin Thomas Wong

Yeah, that's great. Actually, you've really made me think with that with the spiral thing, that one of my favorite analogies is about success in terms of what I find a lot when I'm speaking to people, is that they've made that decision, they're going to step up. Yeah. They're going to level up in their business. They're going to do something. They're really determined, they're excited to do it and they start taking those steps to grow their business. And then something happens. The kids get ill, they get ill, something happens and knocks them off course and they feel like it's all been for nothing and they're tumbling back down to the ground. But I always say to them, imagine it like a staircase and you're climbing up the staircase and something goes wrong and you just hang out on the landing for a little while and you haven't lost all that progress that you've made since the ground floor. And when you can, you just get back on the staircase and you keep going up. And I really love that because I think that it is so easy to feel disheartened when life throws a curveball. But that's what life does, isn't it?

Erin Thomas Wong

Sadly, it sure.

Meg Brunson

And that too, reminded me. I've had those instances where I'm like, I'm going to do real great at email marketing. I'm going to email my list every single week and then curveball COVID or whatever it is, and just be honest with your people. That's the thing. Come back, be honest. I'll tell you, I feel like just acknowledging those things has, in my personal experience, strengthened my relationship with a lot of my people. You know, a lot of the people that are on my list are following me on social where it's like, yep, I disappeared for a couple months, but I'm still here and I'm back. You know, life happens. And I think if we normalize that it's okay to fall off the wagon and come back.

Erin Thomas Wong

Absolutely. I think being real, like, you know, we know that people buy people, but I think that you're right, there is a bit of a change there. And especially on LinkedIn, it's really interesting, isn't it, on LinkedIn? Because more and more people are doing these vulnerable posts. Like, I didn't know whether to share this here, but actually they're getting amazing reach and engagement because we love that. We love seeing that people are real. And I don't think it does anyone any good to have this facade of everything being perfect in our lives and it's always feeling great and all these things. I think it helps to show people that we're human and I think it makes it more okay than for other people to be open about the challenges that they're having.

Meg Brunson

I agree too. All right. I feel like we've had some really great conversations and some little detours and flutters around success. And the biggest message is don't compare yourself to other people. You do you and be proud of that and embrace that. And then once we've got boundaries, non negotiables, measures of success, I feel like the next step, the next step is to actually design that work life balance and be more effective with our time. So can you tell us how to get that all together?

Erin Thomas Wong

Yeah, definitely. Well, go back to what I was saying. I definitely think that being in tune with your energy levels is a really important one. So what time of day do you work best? And I know it's hard as well when you've got kids because sometimes that might be out of alignment with the time that you've actually got to work. But definitely recognizing also with cycles, menstrual cycles and things like that, like during the month, you might recognize that you have different weeks that are better for different things. So definitely checking in on your energy. I really love James Wedmore's stuff about concentrating on your 5% activities because he says that really it's only 5% of your activities in your business that will actually turn the wheel, turn the dial, I can't remember. But thinking of it in terms of 95% of stuff on your to do list is probably not as urgent as we think it is. And so it's really tuning into the 5%. And I think when we're working on limited time as well, it's so important that we are always aware of what our priorities are. And that's where I think people need to have a strategy.

Erin Thomas Wong

And if they don't have a strategy and they don't understand how to create that or what that means, then they need to reach out and get support. Because once you've got that every single day, you need to check in with what are the things that are actually going to help me grow my business? What are my priorities? And that includes looking after your clients and customers, obviously, but also marketing yourself, selling all those things. These are the 5%. So filing your finance stuff is not a 5% activity. It's got to be done at some point, but it might not be the priority. Spending 3 hours on canva falling down a rabbit hole of designing graphics. It can be fun and you get frustrated with it, but it's not a 5% activity. So it's being quite strict with yourself, I think. But if we can do that, if we can keep checking in and those priorities evolve as well and that's absolutely fine and that's why we need to keep checking in. But if we can do that, that's how we're going to be able to grow our business, unlimited time, because we're going to be focusing on the right things rather than wasting time and wasting time doing things for other people that we said yes to when we didn't really have the time to do it.

Meg Brunson

I loved when you were talking about the kids because I'm like, my kids are not on my timeline, they are not on my timeline, but it's also kind of knowing that right and trying to plan around that to make it work. And I love also that you brought up for people who have periods like the menstrual cycle and things like that. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago in an interview I had with Jordan Gill and a while back I'll post the link in the show notes for this episode. But I had Dorit Palvanov. I think I spent her name correctly. Might have gotten a little off. But Dorit came on and talked about specifically how women's menstrual cycles work and how to leverage that for productivity. So that was something that I honestly had never even thought about before. And I love that it's come up a couple of times recently in some interviews. So thank you so much for bringing that up again because I think that's worth it to look into. And I love batching content when it comes to my marketing or blogs, podcasts, things like that. So leveraging that to figure out what works are going to be best for batching content, what weeks are going to be best for doing other tasks, and things like that.

Meg Brunson

And I love those additional little tools and strategies that aren't so obvious to me, at least.

Erin Thomas Wong

Yeah, and I think that the state that we show up in when we're ready to work, that is absolutely crucial. And I know from my experience as well that during the school run in the morning and dealing with packed lunches and forgotten PE kits and all those things, you can get back after that and just feel completely drained. And if you try and just go straight into work at that point and sit down and do stuff, you're not going to be your most effective. You might not be making the best decisions. So thinking about what you can do to change your state before you start work, put on loud music or put on calm music, go for a walk, move your body, all these different things. And it's a case of trying out what's going to work best for you and it might change on the day as well. But thinking about, you know what, I'm going to give myself ten minutes here or 20 minutes or half an hour to get myself in a better state. And you will be so much more effective and you will be able to bash through that to do list.

Erin Thomas Wong

Whereas if you try and push against that when you're just not in the right place to do things, it will take hours.

Meg Brunson

Yes, and you're right. You just have to try different things on. Like, am I a walker? Sometimes it seems silly, but sometimes playing a game of, like, solitaire on my phone is just enough to calm me down and then get me focused. It's calming and it focuses your attention. And then I can put the phone down and hop back in into work mode, but taking those breaks and have.

Erin Thomas Wong

You heard of snow globe analogy?

Meg Brunson

No.

Erin Thomas Wong

So if you think of a snow globe and you know, you shake it up and all the snow is everywhere and that's just like our brains. We have so many thoughts going on in our brains. And with a snow globe, all you need to do is put it down and the snow settles and then the water becomes clear again and we can think clearly. And I think that's such a powerful visual to have when you're feeling like that, because sometimes we just need to decompress and we just need to get everything settled. And whatever works for you for doing that, next time you feel like your head is all work, just think it's like a snow globe. I just need to put the snow globe down.

Meg Brunson

Yeah. And I think this is like a recurring message for me, but it also comes back to that self care that rest is essential. Like, you don't have to be productive for 8 hours of the day or whatever. 8 hours seems to be the standard that our culture has put on us, but that's not true. Rest is important and it's acceptable. You're allowed to rest. You're allowed to take a break.

Erin Thomas Wong

Great book suggestion for that. Do Less by Kate Northwest. Have you read that one?

Meg Brunson

No.

Erin Thomas Wong

I read it and I was like, this is everything that I've been thinking. It's really fantastic. And it is all about this culture of, like, we don't need to be productive all the time.

Meg Brunson

I love that feeling when you find a book that finally says what you've been thinking all along.

Erin Thomas Wong

I actually sent her a fan girl message. I've never done that before, ever. But I was like, I love it so much.

Meg Brunson

That's awesome. Well, I'm sure she appreciated that. So you also have a checklist to help us all, right. Seven steps to a more life friendly business, which we all need. I love that it's only seven. Tell me a little bit about the checklist and where we can get our hands on that.

Erin Thomas Wong

Sure. So I'll give you the link to share on the show notes. It's on my website, which is LifeFriendlyBusiness.com. And the idea is that I'm going through seven core principles of a life friendly business. And you can check off where you are with each of those right now. And it will hopefully explain why maybe you're not feeling like your business is as life friendly as you'd like it to be. And then help you think about some changes that you could make to kind of take back the power. Really. And start doing things on your own terms.

Meg Brunson

Beautiful. It sounds like a perfect next step to this episode. And where on the Internet can people connect with you?

Erin Thomas Wong

So I've got my podcast, the life friendly business podcast, but also my website, LifeFriendlyBusiness.com. And, yeah, please do reach out, and it would be lovely to hear if you've heard me on here, let me know, because it's always nice to know, isn't it, when people find you where.

Meg Brunson

They found you and all that fun stuff. Awesome. Well, you'll be able to find that podcast, Life Friendly Business Podcast, wherever you're listening to this podcast. So we're wrapping up right now. Go ahead and check it out. Thank you so much, Erin, for being here today. It's been an absolute pleasure to chat with you. I feel like we're very aligned in what we do, and I love having these conversations. So thank you so much for being here.

Erin Thomas Wong

Thank you so much, Meg. Awesome.