The drive: What challenges have you overcome?
As I have said before, starting up my own business has been a bit of a labour of love with some bumps along the road. I’m still learning every day, always striving to do better. But one of the challenges I have overcome was the delay in my branding. Some people told me I didn’t need to wait for that, but I really wanted to get it right and give it 100% the best chance of becoming something – putting my best forward if you like. So what I really mean is not that I had to overcome that, but I was patient and waited.
As I mentioned before, I really immersed myself within the paediatric sleep world, but in doing so, I also opened a whole can of worms regarding the advice being given to the public. I found a lot of contradicting advice, where I found myself questioning other sleep consultants’ practices and therefore questioning my own. Obviously there is always going to be a whole variety of approaches – and so there should be. We are not all the same. But I have had to push past that to stand firm for what I believe in, and not allow others’ practices and opinions to cloud my own.
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
I know I’m probably meant to say that the biggest pro of running my own business is being able to fit it around my own family. And yes, that is a huge advantage and big drive, but for me, one of the biggest positives is being my own ‘boss’. In every sense – doing something I love and being able to pick and choose when I work, how I work and who I work with. Not being governed by anyone else. Giving other parents the choice to parent in any way they want to (obviously as long as that’s safe for the child). Not working to anyone else’s expectations, deadlines or targets. Caring for children that are all individuals should be a very individual journey. And that for me is a huge pro of running my own business!
When I started writing this, I had way more cons than pros. Everything I see as a pro could also be seen as a con. The pressure – it’s all on me. Navigating the financial decisions. Self-doubt – I don’t doubt I know what I’m doing when it comes to sleep; I just worry I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to business. But I think that’s just because I’m human and maybe British haha!
For me though, the biggest con is having to run my own social media. If you take a look, you will know what I mean. I’m extremely bad at posting and I find ‘creating content’ painfully difficult. I know what I want to post, but I question everything I create. Does it look okay? Have I written the right thing? Does that image fit? When should I post it? What if someone disagrees – I don’t want negative comments on my posts? And because of this, I just don’t ever finish a post, let alone posting it! Sometimes it’s a time-management problem. I’d much rather do a client’s sleep plans than prioritise making content. One of the biggest reasons for signing up with The Natural Parent Magazine was for exactly this: sharing weekly Facebook posts – now that’s scary as hell to me, but it is the push I need to make it happen, even if sometimes it doesn’t and that’s okay. I’ll keep trying, pushing myself outside of my comfort zone.
Hopes and dreams: What next?
The dream is to have a successful business helping those families in need. To change the way that sleep is so negatively spoken about by parents, and not just parents, but even those that are not sure if they want to become parents because the fear of losing sleep and never getting it back again is too much!
I want to UN-NORMALISE LACK OF SLEEP! Just because you choose to have a baby does not mean that it’s a given that you won’t ever sleep again. I want parents to know that it is OKAY to want to sleep, and it does NOT mean you don’t love your baby or child any less because you value your own basic human needs.
I hope to help to build a village. The way we have evolved over the years to career women is utterly fantastic; however, we do now miss out on the education and knowledge that our elders once gave us. Before we had our own children, we would have probably helped to look after other babies in our family, learning the ‘ways of parenthood’. We had a bank of knowledge and experience to use for when our own little ones arrived, but now we don’t have that. A lot of parents-to-be have never even changed a nappy; some men have never even held a baby until they have their own. They are then thrown in at the deep end when they themselves become parents, which can be utterly overwhelming and a minefield. As modern parents of today, not everyone has a village and it’s okay to go out there and find it. It’s okay to seek help and support.
And lastly, I believe there is a very unrealistic expectation of how modern parents should be, particularly portrayed on social media by influencers, celebrities and generally by people always posting a certain narrative. As modern parents, we ‘generally’ both work, we may have other children, school runs, we need to take care of ourselves (shower etc), clean our house, do the food shop, run a house, manage finances and so much more! How are we meant to do all that when we are sleep deprived?
Visit the Cornish Sleep Consultant website to find out more, and connect with her on Facebook and Instagram.
