Taking a Break to Create Intentionally

We all have so many parts to ourselves. There’s the external role that we play, Mother, friend, daughter, business woman. Then there’s the internal side I’ve always been someone that’s really creative. And I’ve always been a divergent thinker.

I’ve always believed in people, apart from the circumstances or problems that might surround them. I have a really strong belief that everyone is valuable. I have a very strong faith or spiritual connection to God. And that’s pretty fundamental to who I am as a person and the way I move through the world. I’ve always seen opportunities, and potential, whether that’s renovating houses, or, business ideas!

I think of divergent thinking as thinking out of the box, or thinking a bit differently. Looking for alternative solutions for an existing problems.

“Divergent thinking is finding creative ways to get results” – Susan Jones

When I look back over my career, there’s two things that constantly pop up. I’m always teaching in some form. And then I’m always creating businesses around that. That’s a pattern through my life, learning something, teaching it, and then creating a business out of it.

So the first journey I went on was in music. I trained as a composer and music educator at the Conservatorium at the University of Melbourne. I also studied theatre. I realized that everything I learned about how you present yourself as an actor on stage, I needed to know as a musician. I took what I learned about

theatre performance, and created a workshop I delivered in high schools for the Victorian Certificate of Education. This Music Performance training gave students confidence to perform on stage, to really do their best, not to just play the notes, but to really communicate with the audience through the music. At the time the internet was just starting to take off. If it had been 10 years later, I would have created an online course. And I would have scaled it, but we weren’t quite at that stage yet.

I soon realized I was only paid when I was there training. And I wanted to be able to leverage my knowledge. So I started looking at different kinds of businesses. Because I couldn’t grow the workshops the way I wanted to grow it. My husband and I ended up buying a business, which was an absolute disaster. We thought we’d done great due diligence but when there’s fraud involved it can be hard to uncover. We had been sold a scam and ended going through the Supreme Court to try to try and get our money back.

That experience led me to the Master of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. I really needed to learn how to evaluate business opportunities so that that experience could never happen to us again, or anyone else. The MEI was an amazing opportunity to learn those things.

And so here’s where the teaching and the businesses come around again. I started, looking at friends that were starting businesses. And knowing what I’d learned from the MEI about opportunity evaluation and business creation, I could see that if they tweaked their business, it would be more successful. Also businesses were failing, because they hadn’t really evaluated the opportunity well in the beginning. So in 2009 I started a blog, Ready Set Startup. And through that, as I was blogging, people started contacting me saying, “I’ve got this idea, can you help me?” I didn’t start with the thought of being a business coach. But from my blog my business morphed into coaching.

There were a couple of things that really drove me with Ready Set Startup. At the time there was a lot of help and information available for established business but not a lot of information about startups on the internet. So I saw a gap there, which was why I was writing why people were coming to me wanting help. I ended up with 36,000 followers on social media, because they wanted to know about startups. So there was an opportunity in that there was an information gap.

Then as I journeyed into the startup space, it became really apparent to me that women and minorities were effectively excluded from the industry.

“Only 2% of all VC funding goes to women led businesses, which makes me so angry.”

Susan Jones

Only 2% of all VC funding goes to women led businesses, which makes me so angry, because I knew women have ideas that we need as a society that need to be funded and built.

And women see opportunities and gap in the market differently than men because we have a different experience. I had friends in the MEI who were not white Caucasian males who had amazing ideas, and they had to go to Asia to get funding. People wouldn’t fund them here. These became really successful businesses that grew and eventually sold. So I could see that real inequity, and I wanted to do something about it.

But at the same time, in my personal life, it was a really challenging time. . I had young two young kids, I have a chronic health condition which needs management. Then my husband got chronic fatigue syndrome, and he couldn’t work for eight years. My son also got chronic fatigue. So as a family we just had a lot we were dealing with. And there I was trying to look after my family, look after the women that were in the startup world, and be a breadwinner. I was also lecturing in entrepreneurship on the side. And

they were all good things, but it was a lot. I was trying to take on something that was a systemic problem in the startup world.

And I realise now, I needed to build a better team around myself. But because I think of everything that was happening personally, I just didn’t have enough bandwidth to see that and to really think about what I needed to make a big difference at the time.

I have discovered I work much better in partnerships and in a team and I was doing work I loved in Ready Set Startup, working with clients strategy - seeing where the obstacles are, the holes in a business, and helping founders grow. I love that work.

But I was working alone and needed a business partner It’s taken me a while to get some perspective, but what was happening personally in our family was taking up so much bandwidth that the business got what was left over. If I’d had that partner I would have been able to grow it much more than I did.

So that’s one lesson I’m taking into the future is that personally, I just work better and I’m more motivated if I’ve got someone working with me than working on my own. Another problem with startups, is they don’t have a lot of money. But they need information and help. So the coaching model doesn’t really work in that space. I never really wanted to be a coach, but ended up adopting that as a way of helping people.

So in terms of the business itself, there were big problems. And I think the biggest one was actually the startup industry itself and the culture which still hasn’t changed. I’d see programs come in to help women founders, and they would always be small. They never were rolled out on a large scale. There are some great organizations that are trying to make a difference. But still, you’ve only really helping a tiny part of the market. And actually, not everyone should have funding.

That experience, including lecturing, gave me the opportunity to talk to hundreds, if not 1000s of founders, with hundreds of different businesses, different business models, different industries. I would listen to hundreds of different business ideas, assess them and help students see where the holes in them were. So it gave me a really good understanding of strategic frameworks. From that I developed an online diagnostic tool called Score Your StartUp, which Hundreds of founders used to get personalised feedback about their startup

The number one question people will come to

me with would be, ‘How do I get funding to grow my business?’ However, most businesses start and grow with outside funding. And so I developed a model that I call the Revenue Driven Startup.

“I developed a model that I call the Revenue Driven Startup. It focuses on getting revenue in the door and building your business from that revenue.”

Susan Jones

By the start of 2020 I was exhausted. I had been so busy putting out fires that I didn’t make the time to do the strategic thinking on my own business that I put into everyone else’s. I was completely exhausted. My daughter started high school. My son had started university. And I just collapsed and I got to the stage of needing to care about me and us. In February 2020, I took time out.

“I have thought about this a bit, what would I do differently now, because, let’s face it, difficult stuff happens in life.”

Susan Jones

I should have valued my own time more. I should have got more support to help with the family. And it would have been useful to put boundaries around my working time. To have really strong boundaries around what my business needed, what my family needed, but also what I needed. Because between the two, I left myself with the dregs. All my energy went either on the family or on the business.

I didn’t invest in what I needed to thrive. My energy was going into looking after other people. And I really value looking after other people. But I think one of the messages that I really have learned and want to communicate to other women is that we really have to look after ourselves and who we are and not lose ourselves in the roles that we take on in life.

When the pandemic hit, everyone was saying this is so hard, and the kids are at home and we’re trying to work from home. Well that was we’ve been doing for the last 10 years, and that was what our life was like. And it was really hard.

It would have been helpful to have older women around me, who had walked my journey and could say the kind of things I’m saying to myself now. Who could tell me, you’re not a bad mother if you look after yourself. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, if you take time for your business.

By mid-2022 I didn’t have it in me emotionally to put myself out there anymore. I decided I wanted to take three months off to reset my nervous system and think about what was next. I had been painting in watercolour since January 2020 and discovered I really loved portrait painting but I haven’t really had any formal training. So I took this time off to continue my art journey.

The process of portrait painting is challenging especially getting a good likeness. If the eyes are slightly too big or too small or too far apart or any other features not quite right, a slight millimetre error, then the portrait won’t look like the subject. I really wanted to get better at portraits and decided to set myself a big challenge and to do 100 days of portrait practice.

I knew if I didn’t do something different I wouldn’t be in a good place. I really needed to look after myself, take time to reset my nervous system and to give myself some space. So, I ended up enrolling in the program and that became my work for those three months. I would get up in the morning I would paint for four or five hours a day. I would usually submit an assignment at night and the next morning I’d have feedback. I’d be ready to do the next one. It gave me something constructive to do each day, it gave me a reason to get up every morning, it gave me something where I could see I was making progress, and moving forward in developing skills, and that was very tangible.

“I think you just have to realise that some seasons in life are really hard.”

There’s something about painting that’s quiet and meditative so it gave me time and after a while I started thinking about what was next.

People say art is therapy and it certainly was and still is therapy for me. It was really nice to take a career break and to engage with my creative side. If I had just kept on trying to push myself I would not be in a good place whereas now I’m in a really good place and I’m very clear on what’s next. It wasn’t about setting goals and going through processes, it was actually just about giving my whole being space to relax and not worry about business. I think there’s two things to taking a break. One is being true with yourself and giving yourself what you need you and then I think the second one’s creativity and passion.

Taking a Break

I’ve talked to a lot of women especially early late 40s early 50s who have been very busy caring or and working or looking after other people and they have suddenly got to a point in their life where they realize they need to look after themselves. Life throws up stresses. We’re not machines. I think taking a break is a really good thing and if you need to take it you should take it. Somehow everything will work out, even financially. Because nothing is going to work out if you’re a wreck and you’re not coping. Women can sometimes ignore what we need ourselves and ideally we get to that point. Maybe everyone needs three months off in their life. I think as women we need to give ourselves what we need as well as give everyone else what they need. I know for me I’ve put things off like my creativity, other things seem to be a higher priority and so I think it’s easy for passion and creativity to get they’re moved to the To Do List.

I actually structure my life quite differently now. So at the moment I divide my day up into sections. From 7:00am to 9:00am is looking after me. From 9:00 to 10:30 is painting time. Then after that I have a lot of time working on acquiring businesses. I’m finding actually making sure I have regular time slots for the things that are important has made me feel much more grounded and balanced and a lot more productive. It works better for me, than trying to stuff 8 hours a day on business. I’m now more strategic, planning things that move me forward. For me being able to move between different activities is good. I think if there’s something that you want to do just like take a bit of time regularly to do it for yourself preferably every day. Some phases of life mean it’s really hard to do that but I think we need to honour ourselves enough to give ourselves that time. Just start.

Creative Intentionally

If I look at the first thing I painted and what

I’m painting now, the difference is ridiculous and now people complement me on my talent. I have an affinity for painting but I don’t think its talent. It’s that I consistently spent some time painting most days for 2 1/2 years.

I’ve been intentional about what do I like about it and what do I want to improve on next time. I wish I had realised this earlier in life. That it’s not about the goal it’s about consistently doing things that move you towards the goal. Instead of stressing out about the goal, it’s what do I need to continually do that will move me forward. I think we need to make time, we need to value our needs, and it doesn’t matter if it’s just a little bit. All those little bits add up and it’s so important I think for us as women.

On the other side of my break, my focus is looking at businesses to invest in and buy while also continuing to paint. I’m still really interested in portrait painting and I would like to get to the point where I can take on commissions. I may never make lot of money painting but it is good for my soul.

I had got to a space at the start of 2020 where I had lost myself I didn’t know who I was as a mother or wife or a coach or whatever. Since then it’s been a journey about reclaiming me and making space for who I am and what I need. I would encourage women not to lose sight of that.