Let me ask you something: why did you build your business?

Did you build it to be your own boss? Did you do it to manage your own time and feel more freedom in how you live your life? Did you build your business to create your own wealth, to have more impact on what you earn each year? Did you build your business to map out your own blueprint for success, to chase dreams that others call impractical, to live a life that feels more purposeful?

​I’m sure that you said yes to at least one of these things, if not more. This is the draw to entrepreneurship.

​Now I want you to ask yourself, how often do you actually feel any of the things I listed above?

Do you feel like you are the boss? Or do you feel like the business is running you?​

Do you manage your own time and feel freedom in your life? Or do you find yourself falling into the old adage, “you can work whenever you want as a business owner, as long as it’s all the time”?

Are you creating your own wealth and paying yourself accordingly? Or are you paying yourself last and finding not enough left at the end of the month for you?

Are you meeting your definition of success? Do you have time to chase your dreams? Do you feel purpose daily? Or are you so busy trying to do it all that you feel success, dreams, and purpose are luxuries you don’t get to have right now?

Most of us built our businesses to feel differently. To experience what it’s like to have more freedom, more wealth, more success, more purpose, but we unintentionally end up trapped by our own default settings.

We end up in the default of the daily grind, trying to hustle, work more, do it all, and push through rather than working from a place of intention and boundaries. We end up feeling like we have to do things the corporate way, like a “real company” would, when in reality, we are wasting our time because that amount of procedure and process would actually hinder a smaller team. Or maybe we end up feeling the opposite, because we don’t want to feel corporate. We refuse to do things the way corporate teams we’ve been on would have, even when it would significantly improve our sense of freedom to redefine workflows and hold better boundaries.

I recently realized I was resisting setting up particular systems in my business because they felt too corporate, too much like the life I intentionally left behind. But in reality, I’m never going to be able to hand off my systems as they stand to an employee. They don’t have the knowledge that I have to be successful without more documentation, process, and procedure. Furthermore, systemizing and automating a few things would really decrease my daily tasks and increase my capacity.

So what should we do?

Structure and Flow. This is where we need the balance. This is where we need to look at our defaults and set our intentions. If you look at your business, where do you feel too much flow, so much so that it’s like a leaky barrel rolling down Niagara Falls?

​A few months ago, this was in my schedule. I was sending people my calendar invite to book meetings with 5 days of availability on it, Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm, matching my default corporate availability. What made this even worse was that they got to decide whether the meeting was in person or virtual, so they were also deciding how often I was running across town for meetings. As a result, my calendar invites were dictating my life, driving me insane, and ruining my productivity.

​After a few months of running around like my hair was on fire, trying to take all of these meetings and a few incidents where I thought a meeting was virtual only to find out I had someone waiting at the office across town, I decided I needed more intention, structure, and better boundaries.

​I decided I didn’t want to wake up every day and wonder if I needed to run to the office or if I was going to be able to do deep work from home. I didn’t want to feel that sinking feeling I had when I wasn’t in the right place at the right time or feel like I had to run all the way to the office for one meeting. I want my life to feel a sense of ease and peace.

So I changed my defaults. Now my calendar only invites people to book on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the two weekdays I am always at the office, so if they want to be in person, great, I’m already here, and if they choose virtual, great, that works too. I can take a virtual call from the office. It has also made it easier for people to ask to drop by the office, sure you can, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9am-5pm. I also hold this boundary. I am highly selective about whether I want to take a meeting on any other day of the week, and I usually will only do it if I need to go meet them somewhere or if I find it fun.

This is just one example, but this small change in deciding how I want my business to feel and then setting a structure that allows for that has massively improved my daily experience, my capacity for deep work, and allowed me to be more present when I’m meeting with people. I now feel in control of my calendar rather than my calendar being in control of me.

​On the flip side, where are you holding too tightly because you have always done it this way, where do you have too much structure in a way that the processes are more arduous than they need to be, or where could your manual processes be automated to give you more time in flow?

For me, and I’m sure many small business owners, there are a lot of processes that I currently do manually from memory in an incredibly inefficient manner. I know what they are and how I do them, but I don’t have them all in a document that I can share easily with others. Even worse, many of them I know can be automated, but I haven’t taken the time to figure out how. But I recently brought on a Virtual Assistant, so I am working on updating these systems and processes and finding the most efficient way, because there is nothing I dislike more than boring backend admin work. That’s not why I started my business.

As James Redfield once said. “Where attention goes, energy flows.” Are you paying enough attention to how your business makes you feel? Are you paying enough attention to the areas of your business where you have built from default instead of intention? What’s one small way you could adjust your defaults and your boundaries to better serve the future you are trying to build?​

I hope this perspective helps you reframe your work in a helpful way, allows you to reconsider your defaults, reminds you that it’s okay to set boundaries, and helps you align your intentions with your goals. So that you can truly feel all the incredible benefits of owning a business that made you start it in the first place.

This is a contributed blog post written by Hannah Corbett, Burnout & Presence Guide and founder of Presence&Co in Reading, MA. Hannah is on a mission to help you quit the Default Life of scrolling and burnout so you can finally feel wildly alive. Whether you’re looking for a modern third place, a digital detox, or a community that values deep connection over a screen, she’s here to guide the way and help you build a life that actually feels good.

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