2 Things That Transformed My Business (6 Years Burnout-Free)

What’s different? 

Someone asked me what I’m doing differently in my business this time that made the difference so that I can work without burnout now. And the answer is pretty much everything, and not a lot at the same time.

Hi, I’m Heather of Autism Chrysalis, and I want to share the answer to this question and also let you know that I’m putting on a course starting soon—May 2nd—on how to do this: How to structure a business that is neurodivergent-friendly and sustainable, so that you can keep working for as long as you choose to without burnout.

Okay, so I’ve run five businesses over the last 20 years, and I’ve learned more each time about making it more sustainable, but this one was a significant improvement. Not just an incremental, less terrible version. 

This time I’ve worked for myself for six years without even getting close to burnout, and there were two really critical things that changed everything for me.

Thing #1: Making things work for me

The first is that I prioritized figuring out how to make it work in a way that works for me, over following standard advice.

When I first started this business, I thought of that as prioritizing my health, both my physical health and my mental health. But over time, I realized that what I was really doing was figuring out how I worked, and what created positive outcomes for my body, my mind, and the life that I liked.

It doesn’t matter what other people say should work for you, or whether it works for other people. Whether to-do lists work for them or they don’t. Which project tracking tools work for them. What marketing strategies work for them. What statistics to track on your YouTube channel. 

What matters is what works for you. 

What matters to me now is that I do things in a way that I care about, in a way that is healthy for me and healthy for my clients, and that doesn’t have to look like what a lot of mainstream business advice says it should look like.

And at the same time, it’s not really *that* far off. It’s not like I’m doing something completely foreign to humanity or modern business. It’s more that I’ve let go of a lot of the guilt and the blame and the shoulds and the shame and the comparisons–that I should use subconscious triggers to close more sales. Or that I should create a false sense of urgency or scarcity to drive faster (and incidentally less well-thought out) decisions. Or that I should be charging more money (I have had that conversation with so many business advisors, and yes, I am charging less than other coaches with my experience and training and the results that I get for my clients, and they think that I’m devaluing myself, but I’m not, it’s a strategic decision).

Like, all of that–I don’t need to do that, and I still get plenty of clients who are very happy with my style.

How I make things work

Another example is: I don’t have to present myself in a particular way. I don’t have to dress like a therapist. I don’t have to wear makeup. I thought I did at the beginning, and I tried, and it was just like I wanted to claw my face off all the time.

I want to wear clothes that I’m comfortable in. And I want my environment to be comfortable for me, because I’m spending a lot of time here. It doesn’t have to look like a magazine, and interestingly, it actually does look quite pretty, and I get a lot of compliments about my painted trees. But it doesn’t have to. I’m not doing it because of some image–it’s just what I like. And I like pretty things. I like comfortable spaces. I like earth tones. I like spaces that make me sigh in relief. I like soft knits.

Another example, I don’t see clients before 10am, because I am not a morning person. I gave up years ago trying to force myself into standard business hours–eight to five or whatever. Screw that. Who cares, right?

You can’t schedule with me before 10am my time, because I will be up about an hour before that at the earliest. My body naturally wakes up around eight, and then it takes me about an hour to wake up enough to willingly get out of bed. Around nine, nine-thirty-ish, I’m actually awake enough—my body has done its hour-long wake-up process—and I’m happy to get out of bed and do things. I don’t set an alarm clock either. I haven’t set one in years, except maybe one time I needed to take someone to the airport, but beyond that, I won’t set an alarm clock, and I don’t need to anymore. 

Because my body is naturally ready to get up about that time. And then I don’t have to drag myself out of bed. And I’ve arranged my life to make that possible, not something that I’m trying to force myself to do that is against my nature.

Okay, so a lot of this is about getting rid of the internalized “I should do it this way,” or “I should be better at this,” or “I should be farther along,” or “I need to do this thing in order to have some particular outcome that I don’t even really care about, just because some people in my life, or general cultural messaging, says that I should want this.” 

So an important part of the way out of responding to those shoulds, and that messaging, is getting really clear on what you do actually want, what is actually important to you, and then make a beeline for that and chuck the rest. I know it’s not as easy as just doing that, but that’s basically the idea. And I’m going to get into how to do that in excessive detail in my course on self-employment without burnout.

Thing #2: Teaching my nervous system

Here’s another critical thing that I did differently in this business.

And the first couple of years were very much like that. That was very intentionally my purpose. It wasn’t really about making money, although that was important, of course. But it was really about creating the systems, creating the foundation, being okay with working a little bit and not diving into working full time.

The first couple of years were really, really part time.

The first year, I was probably working 10 hours a week max, and I literally capped it at three hours of client time a week. That was an intentional cap. I set up my scheduling limits on my scheduling calendar to do that because I needed it, and I refused to go over that.

The second year I was working maybe 20 hours a week, and only half of that was client-facing. Because the point wasn’t to get more clients. The point was to prove to myself that I could do this in a different way. That I could work and not burn out for the first time in my life.

Because I knew that if I was ever going to be able to work continuously, that it would take that. I gave myself the grace to take some time for the first year or two to not actually make a whole lot of money or not work very much, because my project was a long-term project. I knew that if I was ever going to be able to continue working, it would take doing this. It would take teaching my nervous system that I could do this in a different way.

And that was more important to me long-term than making the money short-term.

The money helped. Money was important. But I was already living on so little that I knew I could keep doing that. Even if it sucked, even if it was really, really hard (and it was). But I could keep doing that because I had been doing that.

And if it took a little bit longer of living like that in order to teach myself that I could work differently, that would pay off for the rest of my life. And it was worth it to me.

Building up trust

So I slowly built up that capacity. It took a while, but I built up the capacity, I built up the trust in myself, and I got better at learning how to pay attention to myself and how to respond to my needs.

How to notice my body signals when I was deep in a project, when I was tunnel-visioned and hyperfocused on something. And how to actually pay attention to: “Oh, I’m getting kind of tired.” Or often it was more like, “I’m noticing I’m rubbing my eyes a lot. Maybe my eyes hurt. Oh, maybe I’m tired. Maybe I should stop.”

Doing that over and over slowly built trust that it would be okay and that I could do that. And the anxiety reduced.

About my course

This is what I’m going to be teaching how to do in my self-employment course, AuDHD Alchemy–how to teach your nervous system that it’s safe to work, and how to structure things that actually work for your brain, your nervous system, your body, your health needs, your values, and the life that you want to have. The things that you actually care about, whether or not they overlap in any way with normative ideals.

For more info on that course, go to autismchrysalis.com/alchemy, and there’s a post here describing it. And either way, I hope that some part of this answer was useful to you.

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.