Introduction
The all too familiar feeling of every aspect of her life sucking the life out of her had once again enveloped her. She sat at her desk trying to summon the energy and concentration to work on her start-up, but she just couldn't. She was working a demanding day job, while spending most of her free time devoted to launching her business. She admired the sunny day outside her window as she longed for some fun. The beautiful day was tempting her, but she could feel anxiety welling up inside her as she feared any time taken for fun would delay the launch of her business. She hadn’t been spending enough time with friends or family either, so how could she even think about taking time out for herself? When feelings of guilt and selfishness started to set in, she knew she had a problem. Desperate, she googled, “How do I put myself first?” Then she laughed to herself and thought, “It’s a sad state of affairs when an MBA and entrepreneur turns to google for help.”
Background
Kristina was always going from zero to sixty, and she had learned that success comes with a cost. For her the costs included lost time with family and friends, lack of a love life, and the cost of Jenny Craig. She had worked endless hours at a human rights nonprofit, but it hadn’t taken her long before realizing that despite her long-time dreams of becoming a human rights lawyer, she had no interest in the day to day work of a lawyer. She still wanted to help others, but she’d have to find a different way.
It was time for experimentation. She took on all different kinds of responsibilities at work, trying out different things, identifying her strengths and weaknesses, and learning what she enjoyed and didn’t enjoy doing. She also took a step back to look at where a gap in achieving social justice existed. There were so many nonprofits doing amazing work, but she saw that they couldn’t do it all.
Business had a role to play in bettering society, too. So she then examined her strengths and how she might use them to address this gap. It wasn’t long before she was starting the MBA program at The George Washington University. And then all that work and no play caught up to her.
In the middle of her first year of B-school, Kristina experienced her first burn-out. Her career advisor and peer mentors all strongly suggested she take a typical summer internship, but international study coursed through her veins. She couldn’t explain it, but she had to study abroad. Strangely, studying abroad seemed to help with recovering from burnout. The capstone of her summer was the International Human Rights Programme and the University of Oxford.
Professional
Less than three years later, she once again felt like she was burning the candle from both ends. She was working a demanding full time job while spending her commute time, evenings, and weekends launching her dream business. She had implemented a time management technique called block scheduling (see Appendix A), which was extremely helpful, but she still always felt such a time crunch.
She would love to quit her day job, but it wasn’t financially feasible yet. She wondered how much longer she could continue working a regular job and work to launch her company. Almost a year ago, she had decided that she would quit her job Memorial Day weekend, but now that was only two and a half months away, and she was just starting to work with clients. She smiled as she thought of her inspirational clients, women entrepreneurs who were changing business and the world. All of them had incorporated social causes close to their hearts into their business models, but that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to do more. She thought back to a recent conversation she had had with Maria.
They were talking about identifying the unique values Maria would use to lead her business as well as Maria’s charitable goals. Kristina had asked Maria out of curiosity, “You’re already doing so much through your company to help women start their own businesses, why do you also want to donate a portion of your profits to a charity that supports women’s entrepreneurship?” Maria replied, “When I was in the corporate world, the company chose the nonprofits. Now it’s my choice. I want to choose, and I want to have a big impact.”
Kristina saw one client after another desire “big impact”. They were intentionally coupling their companies’ impact with their philanthropic impact, to help as many people as possible. But they didn’t know the worlds of social change and nonprofits like she did, so they looked to her for expertise and solutions.
Their dreams of changing the world were what caused her to jump out of bed each morning. She also had her own dreams for achieving “big impact”, and she didn’t want to let her clients or herself down. But she knew she couldn’t keep up the pace she was working for much longer. She was stuck between a rock and a hard place, so she started thinking of options.
She was bootstrapping her business, and she didn’t yet have enough to hire even a part time assistant, so she wondered if she could hire an intern. She wouldn’t be able to pay the intern, but she could mentor the intern, and she could introduce the intern to her network of entrepreneurs. However, Kristina had incorporated her company as a Benefit LLC (see Appendix E), as she wanted to uphold her company to the strictest of ethical standards and have a social impact. She was troubled by the idea of not paying an intern.
She was also waiting to hear if she would receive a significant bonus at her job. Her latest performance review had gone extremely well, and her boss had recommended that she receive a bonus. But bonuses for her department hadn’t been approved yet. She considered the option of quitting once, and if, she did receive a bonus.
If she did receive the bonus, another option would be to use some of that money to pay an intern or assistant. She could also invest some of the money into marketing and product development, while saving the rest for a rainy day.
Personal
Kristina lay down on her bed, exhausted from constantly working. Her schedule included times for healthy meal prep, eating, and exercise, but she always rushed doing just the very basics to take care of herself. She realized that she counted the minutes spent on meal prep, eating and exercise, distressed that they took time away from her business and job. She felt such a massive conflict between being driven and wanting to put points back in the bank and feeling bad for that.
She knew she needed to start learning right then and there how to put herself first, how to truly take care of herself, or she would never be able to move forward. But the feelings of guilt and selfishness overwhelmed her, and she burst into tears.