How to Be a Healthy Solopreneur

T his was written by Jen Waak, who will be contributing a monthly column on solopreneur health.

{ efficient: adj. achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense}

Efficiency is the Holy Grail to most solopreneurs. We don’t have enough hours in the day to do everything we want or need to do.

What if you found out you were unknowingly allowing efficiency to literally slip through your fingers every day?

You would do something about it, right?

The great news is that plugging those efficiency holes isn’t costly or time-consuming. It’s about making small changes to what you are already doing in order to: improve your productivity and creativity; give you more energy throughout the day; AND give you the energy to spend time on yourself, your friends and your family at the end of an already-too-long workday. You don’t need to spend any money and it takes only a few minutes a day to get back HOURS in your week. Not a bad ROI, if I do say so myself. (And, I do.)

I’m Jen Waak, a health and movement coach based in Seattle, Washington. Larry generously offered me a monthly column on The Solopreneur Life to chat with you about how you can make those easy changes in your life to make you a happier, healthier and more successful solopreneur. You can read more about who I am, but for now I want to talk to you about a concept I call the Energy Bank.

Managing Your Energy Bank
Every day we wake up with a relatively fixed balance in our Energy Bank. It can vary a bit based on how well we slept the night before and whether we are sick or not, but on a day-to-day basis it is relatively constant. The goal is to get to the end of our workday with as many credits in our account as possible (because then you get to spend those remaining credits on yourself, your friends, and your family—not vegging out in front of the TV because you are exhausted).

Where do those credits go?

Everything depletes the Energy Bank, it’s just a matter of how large the withdrawal is. You already know how to identify the large withdrawals—a tense meeting with a client, a fight with your spouse, the unexpected bad-news call from a contractor. Those are the ones that knock you off your game. But it’s the constant small withdrawals (much like those insidious ATM fees) that we are going after—and can make the difference between going into the evening in the red versus the black.

Finding the Hidden Withdrawals
This is where it gets fun! In the coming months we will go through and find your hidden withdrawals, and I’ll give you some tips for how to address each. Here is a quick sneak peek at just some of the topics we’ll be covering.

• Breathing. If you are Type A, have ever had any sort of major physical trauma, broken a rib or have a food sensitivity, there is an excellent chance that you don’t breathe correctly. I know, crazy, right? It manifests in all sorts of low-grade symptoms and can have huge implications in terms of energy (imagine if you aren’t getting the right amount of oxygen!).

• Pain . You probably already knew this one, but it’s worth repeating. If you are in pain, you aren’t going to be as productive as you would be otherwise. Nor do you have the same energy at the end of the day. Future columns will take a look at some of the most common problems desk jockeys have (hips, back, wrists, head), and I’ll give you some simple exercises to alleviate that pain.

• Poor movement patterns. This one sounds a bit weird, but stay with me here! The body is built to move, and has optimal movement patterns. If through lifestyle or injury you end up compensating with an altered pattern, you aren’t as efficient, right? Yes, your body will adapt to the compensation, but at a price. And, that price is pain and/or reduced energy levels. So, let’s fix the easy ones, O.K.?

• Vision. Did you know that there has been a 20 percent increase in nearsightedness in the past 30 years? When did computers and other electronics start taking over our culture? Our eyes are subject to the same compensations the rest of our body is (vision is largely controlled by a set of six muscles per eye). If you can’t see well, how efficient do you think you are going to be?

All of these little inefficiencies in what we unconsciously do can lead to a large aggregate withdrawal every day. Once we start chipping away at the inefficiencies, our daily balance rises, we feel better, we have more energy, we start working better, get more done and enjoy our time off more.

Health Assignment for This Month
I have a lot more to share over the coming months, but for this month I want you to pay attention to your “good days” and your “bad days.” Note what is different between them, and see if you can find commonalities that link the good days together and the bad days together. I bet that both you and your body already know an awful lot about how to increase your daily bank balance.

If you are ready to dig in to being a healthy solopreneur, jump over to my site for early-bird notification of my eight-week “Being a Healthy Solopreneur” teleclass, which begins this summer. You’ll be the first to know the course details and have the first opportunity to register (I limit the class to 10). I know some people want more guidance than I can provide in a monthly blog post, so my teleclass has Q&A time, worksheets, 1:1 coaching, and a limited class size to make sure everyone gets their questions answered. Not ready for that? Totally cool. Stay here and get lots of great content for free.

Jen Waak is a Seattle-based health and movement coach who believes that having a healthy, pain-free body is the critical first step towards being a happy, successful individual. She does small group and individual coaching in person and remotely with health-focused individuals who understand that being healthy is more than eating right and exercising. When she isn’t helping others achieve their physical goals, she can be found traveling the globe (summiting Kilimanjaro in September 2010 is next), hanging out with her dog and reading just about anything she can get her hands on. You can read more health and fitness tips from her at www.movefitfun.com.