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You're tuned into Reviving the Stylist, a business podcast for hairstylists looking to build a dream career that creates financial freedom and flexibility. I'm your host, Kristen Lumiere and as a stylist I've had my share of successes. Building a successful six plus figure business working only three days a week while being able to prioritize my family, travel and buy my dream home. I know it doesn't sound easy, but if you put in the work, I guarantee you'll see results. No matter what your goals are. I'm super stoked that you're here so I can help you crush them. Let's start today's episode.
Kristen Lumiere 0:03
You're tuned into Reviving the Stylist, a business podcast for hair stylists looking to build a dream career that creates financial freedom and flexibility. I'm your host, Kristen Lumiere. And as a stylist, I've had my share of successes. Building a successful six plus figure business working only three days a week, while being able to prioritize my family, travel and buy my dream home. I know it doesn't sound easy. But if you put in the work, I guarantee you'll see results. No matter what your goals are, I'm super stoked that you're here, so I can help you crush them. Let's start today's episode.
Kristen Lumiere 0:41
As a working mom, there's a whole lot of pressure on us to be a certain way. And I used to feel guilty for being really ambitious in my career. Maybe that's because of the societal norms that I dealt with as a millennial growing up. But the good part about that, though, is I had an incredibly strong mother as a role model. And she was able to show me that you could be a strong mom, and you could still be ambitious in your career and do those things that you've always wanted to do. And I know that my mom wasn't able to spend as much time with me as she wanted. And even as I wanted when I was a little girl. And that's, you know, me being a little girl and wanting nothing but to spend time with my mom who loved me. But she made up for it 10 times, for me at least, like she's a great mom, and I love her. But she made up for that time that she sacrificed to be the provider 10 times in my adult eyes right now, by showing me how to be a strong woman who didn't kowtow to societal norms, and pressures. And I don't know if she actually remembers this, but we had a conversation before I had kids. And she just was very, very passionate about me not sacrificing my time for my career with my children. And I think that she felt so strongly about that, because she was pushed into her role as provider for my family. There was a time we were very, very poor, and we had bills, and they didn't have enough in their accounts to pay those bills. And I was really young at this time, so I don't really remember it much. All I know is you know what she tells me and you know what my brother remembers. But back then, I was so little. So I didn't remember much other than there was a time and a day that I remember really specifically, and she told me about this day, a little bit further into my high school life, I guess you could say, there was little to nothing in my parents bank accounts. And she grabbed some food that day and put it all into a picnic basket and took our little family down to a nearby park that we lived by. And we had a picnic without a care in the world. I couldn't tell anything was going on. I didn't know that the bank accounts were empty, that she was trying to figure out how the mortgage was even going to be paid. I didn't know anything. And I think at that time, that was that day that she decided to accept her role as the provider. And if you were a VIP at her weekend in 2021, which her weekend is my really big event that I hold at Lumiere house, once a year in October. It's a three day educational event where we have guest artists and we have speakers. And it's really incredible because it's small, it's only about 30 to 40 people are invited to this. And it's just an incredible experience. But she was a speaker at her weekend. And she talks about all the hardships, she's overcome her abuse, and all of the things that she had when she was younger in life and how she became the nine figure business owner she is today. And this isn't an episode all about my mom. But this is just a little bit of backstory and how I have kind of moved into a role of being the provider for my family, and also how to balance that because work in life are two separate things. And for hairstylist, it is really difficult for us to actually separate work between like our personal life. And it's hard because we're so passionate about our careers and about our clientele, they kind of bleed together. We're like our clientele is kind of our friends. And I know the majority of us kind of feel that way. Now there are some hair stylists who don't view clients as friends. They view them as very black and white clients and that's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But for me, I kind of had more of a connection with my clients and they definitely felt more like friends and family. But when you start to blur the lines of work and In life, and they start to become one single thing. Burnout is lurking around the corner, and you are in big trouble. Because if you don't actually give yourself separation between the two, you don't have that much needed break from your work life. So you can actually enjoy your balance within both of those areas. And what that actually does is you sacrifice the relationships with the people that you love the most. And I'm going to answer the really big question. If work life balance is an actual thing, the answer, it can go either way, it just depends on how you prefer those two balances to be. And I'll tell you what I do. For me, it's more about balancing the imbalances between work and life, there's a time when my work needs to be at the forefront of my mind and extended periods of time after that, too. But then there's times when my work can slip away, and I can push my family and my life outside of work to the front. Once again, the scales are always tilted, and tipping. So there's never really a full balance. And for me, I don't ever really want work in life to be a 5050 balance. If anything, I want my work to be 30% And then the other 70% I want my life to be. But then there are times where my week, I have to dedicate 70% of that week to work. So that way the next week, I can go back to 30%. And it just all kind of depends on what is happening at that time within my business within my company. Typically the easiest positions to balance work life would be as an employee. So if you would be a commissioned stylist if you're listening, that is going to be the easiest position to balance because there aren't extra business owner responsibilities within that position. Typically, your job is to be a great marketer, to build your clientele to be great customer service, make your clients happy to have an excellent customer experience. And that is going to help you propel in your career, where the most difficult would be a salon owner, which would be so closely followed by independent stylists, salon owners being only first because they typically have multiple stylists that they employ, which gets complicated to say the very, very least, for me in my business, I make sure that I am constantly balancing the imbalances between my work and life. There are times when I need to work seven days a week, there are times when I only work two. And there are times where I take an entire month off to spend with my family. I don't even think about work. But there are times where sometimes I only work two hours a day. But then there's times where I wake up at 4am. And I don't finish until 7pm. And it all just depends on what the goal is and in my business what is needed. And it's a little different than working behind the chair. As a hairstylist, when I had a full clientele, I'd work only three days a week and dedicate the rest of the time that I had to my family education and administrative tasks that needed my attention. And when I switched fully to online booking that was like when things really clicked, I could actually ease out of that admin type tasks that I had. And I could dedicate more time to my family life. And there are a lot of ways that you can actually approach a work life balance, I suggest doing it a little bit more of a non traditional way. And instead of trying to split up your time, write down your non negotiables like what are things in your life that you need to do every single day that has absolutely nothing to do with work? What does that look like? And here are a few examples of my personal non negotiables number one would be riding horses four to five days out of the week. I have three horses and I love love love that time that I have with them. It's kind of my time to relax. I don't have to think about really anything else other than just me and the animal that I am connecting with at that time. Number two, make dinner for my family every single night and sometimes that looks like a from scratch chicken pot pie or something that is you know, full course like just really in and then other times it's putting frozen pizza in the oven because I'm way too tired to go ham and cook for two or three hours. So that just kind of depends but that's a non negotiable for me like I will be present and I will be cooking for my family. Even if cooking looks like making easy dish like spaghetti or sticking in some chicken nuggets in the oven and having chicken nuggets with my kids. I am going to do whatever It is to check that off of my list every single night. Number three, bedtime routine with my kids. That includes me, bathing them, snuggling them, storytime, singing and prayer. That is such a special time in my day where I can see my kids, I can just have that special time with them. And I don't have to worry about much else that comes after other than just making sure that they're both not screaming at each other before they go to bed. Because they both share a room right now. And they love to yell at each other, my son will seriously be like ma Adelines not going to sleep or adeleye needs to pee. It's seriously like one of those things that I will either pull my hair out, or I'm just busting out laughing. And I just can't help that that time is so incredibly special. Number four would be spending an hour or two of quality time with my husband every night after we put our kids to bed. And that is typically where he actually will be watching like a show. Maybe he's watching like succession. That's a show that he's like super obsessed with right now. And I will be reading a book on Kindle. And that's kind of something that we just spend some time existing next to each other, with no complications of words just kind of existing with each other and being able to spend that time together. Now, of course, there's times where we watch shows together or watch a movie. And that's just a really special time with me. And there are times where sometimes we don't get to have that special quality time. And I will tell you that after a long day, that time is one of my most looks forward to just time where I can sit down, I don't have to think about anything or work the next day I can veg and I can just enjoy the time with my husband. For me, those are four of my absolute non negotiables. And nothing at work is important enough to keep me from them. Now I want you to think about what yours are, I want you to take a few minutes. And think about your non negotiables. When you come up with them, I want you to take a screenshot of this lesson, add it to your Instagram story and tell me what those are, make sure you tag me so that way I can see them. And of course share them too. Now that may be it for today's episode. But I'm gonna see you again next Tuesday with another so don't worry about it. I'm gonna be back really soon. But before I go, I want you to remember that your career you love is great. Like if you love your career, that's incredible. That's what I want to support you into a career that you love. But the life you should love it more the life aspects. Career is incredible. But for me, it's not like my life. And I think that's the difference between me as a millennial versus, you know, my mom, and I absolutely love her, but her career is definitely like another child of hers. And for me, I definitely feel like my career is another piece of my life. But it's not as important to me as the aspect of my personal growth and my personal freedoms and the things that I love in my personal life. That is what I like to differentiate between work life balance. For me, it's not a 5050 Share. It's an imbalance constantly, sometimes a scale tip more in the work side, and sometimes it tips more in the life side. My goal is I'm always kind of imbalanced more over to life to where I can still balance everything on my scales. So I hope you enjoyed this lesson. And I will see you next week.
Kristen Lumiere 13:55
Bye for now. Thank you so much for joining me today on Reviving the Stylist. If something really resonated with you during this episode, take a screenshot share it to your Instagram story and let me know what you love most don't forget to also send it to a friend so that way they can reap the incredible things from this episode too and leave me a rating and review. I'd also absolutely just love to connect with you outside of the show too. So you can find me on Instagram at Kristen Lumiere that's L u m ay er E or my website, Kristen lumiere.com. And before I go, I just want to leave you with one reminder. It isn't about living to work. It's about working to live and that is my goal for you, friend, because you deserve it. I'll see you on the next one.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai