How I Balance Building my Business and Life
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[00:00:00] When I go around and I meet other occupational therapists, they're always like, How do you balance it all? I mean, I see you working. I see you have your, your business. Um, how do you manage everything? How do you balance everything? I'm going to answer that question for you. My name is Wong. I'm an occupational therapist and certified hand therapist.
And over 11 years ago, I started my therapy clinic. And over five years ago, I started teaching online through Hand Therapy Secrets, helping Other therapists develop their clinical skills and their business skills. And so I get that question a lot because I am all over the place. I am in my clinic. I have patients that I still see, though oftentimes not too many patients.
Um, majority of the time my, my staff take care of the patients. And then I also travel around and I teach, which actually really love doing. I love traveling around and teaching. And then I have my online programs and I create a lot of content, just like videos like this to share. Um, so a lot of people were like, oh my God, how do you balance it all?
And my secret sauce, my secret [00:01:00] sauce is that I don't, I don't balance it. I don't balance it for you. I balance it for myself, right? So, um, I think that you have to think about what balance means to you, right? Balance means to me. that I work a lot. I actually enjoy working. So if I have this pie, this is,
this is Huang's pie. I love using my whiteboard. One day I'm gonna make a lot of money and I'm gonna have one of those like fancy boards, um, like you see on TV. But for right now, I quite enjoy my whiteboard, but Huang's pie. So my balance is like, you have to have a certain amount of time for sleep, right?
So sleep. So I, I average [00:02:00] around, you know, let's say actually, oh my gosh, six hours. You know, that's sleep. I don't need eight hours. Actually. No, sorry. It's not like that. It's like this. Yeah. Because remember this is 24, right? So this is 24 hours. This is going to be 12 and this is 24, right? It's just a diagram.
This is just a simple diagram. It doesn't have to be exact, but I essentially, I sleep for about six hours. I really don't need more than that. I actually kind of wake up around seven hours. So if you're somebody who needs more sleep, then that's balanced for you. I, I personally don't need that much sleep.
Um, but I just create a plan. Like, so I work a certain amount of time and when you're in business for yourself, You don't have only [00:03:00] five days and then you have the weekend, right? You can potentially work all the time. So as an entrepreneur,
you have to think of your time as seven days, right? But here's a great thing about the balance that you strike. Is even though you can work seven days or you can decide I'm going to work six days to get my business going. Um, Once you get it going, you can pause whenever you want. See somebody who works for someone else, they work Monday through Friday, they pick up a shift here and there, you will constantly work, but then when you want a certain amount of time off.
You have this the time off it doesn't have to be on the weekend It can be on a monday and a tuesday. It can be on a tuesday and a wednesday. It can be however you want In 2024, I took a whole month like [00:04:00] out of my clinic Right. I took a whole month out of my clinic. I went I went on a conference. I went and taught for two days It's not that I didn't work, but it didn't work that much But I was able to do it somewhere else and isn't that the dream or the goal is?
Not that you can work from anywhere, but that, um, you're not, you know, like you have a certain amount of freedom of choice, right? So I talk about that often. I talk about doing certain things so that you can have more choices in your career. You have more choices in your life. And so balance to me is about choices.
To me, that's balance. If I have to sacrifice and give up a certain amount of balance to work so it can have more choices, to me, that's balance. Don't look at my balance and then compare it to your balance. Find your own balance. I am very happy working a lot more than most [00:05:00] people, right? I start my day at 7, um, and I can work from 7 to 7 and I'm good.
I'm good. Like, I don't, I don't feel out of balance for that. Um, I've also gotten accustomed to working like that, right? Um, When I started at my clinic, I worked all the time, Saturday to Saturday, Monday to Monday, you know, I worked all the time and then I would work during the day and then I would work at night.
But that is a thing, that is a sacrifice to get you going. Once you get going, you build something, you create something, you don't have to work like that anymore. Like I don't work like that anymore. But when I first started, I did have to work like that. When I started Hand Therapy Seekers and started creating the programs and stuff like that.
During COVID, I worked for three months straight, like every single day. Where was I fucking going? I wasn't going nowhere. We were all locked down. I would come into my clinic [00:06:00] and I would just work and work, creating programs, thinking through stuff, um, you know, making plans, writing the emails, you know, creating the content.
Was it a lot of work? Yes, it was, but the fruits of the labor pay off. So, you know, when, when people talk about balance, uh, you know, like it's a bunch of bull, like, I don't think that there's a balance. You just have to find your balance. I'm perfectly happy working a lot. I don't see it as working because I enjoy my work.
I enjoy sitting here making content like this last Saturday. I mean, um, I was so focused, I bashed out so many videos and if you've heard me talk before, I've talked about how you can, you know, kind of, Do more in less time and it's in my other video I talked about it more excessively inside the ot business corner program So that you can maximize your time be more efficient But one of the ways I do is [00:07:00] batching and so on Saturday I came in I'll have to share these patches with you guys soon, I Put on my focus patch.
I didn't realize how good that shit was. I worked from 9 to 3 You batched out so much content. I wrote so many emails to to getting the other people that I needed to do the work. I got that shit out. Like I could not believe how much like I got through. It was incredible. Was I always like that? No, I wasn't.
When I first started, because you are Unaware or unknowing about what to do unclear about what to do. You waste a lot of freaking time The minute you get clear on what you're supposed to do, you can shoot through it and it's like rocket science. It's like you're like to the moon, right? And so think about if you are struggling with something in your business, it's most likely because you're unclear about what you want to do, where you want to [00:08:00] go, how you need to make it happen.
Um, You might not get anywhere in your business because you're unclear in terms of your goals, right? So then it feels like you're wasting a lot of time look at what times you're wasting and that might be why you feel out of balance and looking for this balance because If you're very clear on what you need to do and the decisions that need to be made You won't be out of balance, right?
You won't be out of balance. So I enjoy my work I am at the phase in my business where I I try to majority of the time do the things that I enjoy. So 80 percent of my time, right? 80 percent of my time is spent. It's spent doing the things that I enjoy doing. Even when I have to treat patients, I enjoy treating patients.
I just can't treat patients all the time. If I treated patients all the time, I couldn't grow my business. I couldn't come on and create things here at hand, hand therapy secrets and try to teach other therapists. You know, [00:09:00] but I treat so that I can take these ideas that I have And patterns that I see and I can implement it in in treating And then teaching other therapists to treat their patients.
And so to me, there's a certain amount of Patients that I need to take care of in order to be able to teach that to other therapists um, i'm a big believer in um, the people who know teach, right? I don't believe in the, um, oh, just I'm sick and tired of treating and that's why I'm teaching now because I don't want to fucking do that.
Um, because when you're out of treating patients, you'll lose the insight that is required to teach appropriately. I'm going off tangent, going off tangent right now, but how I keep the balance in my life is, um, Is 80 percent of the time I'm doing the things that I enjoy doing right? I try to do only the things that [00:10:00] I I really enjoy doing and then the other stuff, you know, yeah, it's part of being a business owner You have to you can't help it.
Um, but that's how I keep my balance. Uh is doing the things that I enjoy so 80 percent enjoyment Right Of tasks 80 percent tasks enjoyment, right? That's number one into having balance. Number two is clarity Clarity of what I'm doing, where I'm going,
right? And that gives me balance. The other thing is people. There's people in my lives that give me balance. Like, for example, my family, right? Um, my media family, meaning my husband and kids, they help balance me out. So when I overwork or overdo stuff, um, because I probably have that, you know, Sort of addictive personality.
uh, they balance me. They're like, Hey, you know, come on, come on home, . [00:11:00] You gotta do, you gotta cook dinner, . So, you know, there are certain things I'm willing to give up. Um, I'm willing to give up cleaning . I don't clean, um, I don't do laundry, right? My husband does all the laundry. I do all the cooking. So it's really funny.
But I turn a blind eye. Like I, I joke around about this, but I turn a blind eye to. So all laundry like, like what? Huh? Where? There's a sack of it. I don't see it. Well, my husband turns a blind eye to freaking food, right? I'm like, i'm cooked. I cooked all this food. Y'all people don't see it. It's in the fridge.
Oh, yeah Oh, no, they're all like we don't have any food in here I'm like, I just spent 600 at Costco. There's food in the refrigerator. If that shit is not cooked, they don't, these people don't see it. Right. So, um, yes, we could go out all the time, but, uh, for health reasons and, and habits and stuff like that, I prefer to cook.
So it's something that I [00:12:00] keep, right. It's a task that I keep. Um, it's a thing. And I actually, I enjoy cooking. I enjoy cooking because it's, you know, I'm good at it. Like my food is good and I enjoy making the food that I want to eat. So, um, so yeah, but the people in my life, um, keep me. Keep me balanced and the people who are not who don't keep me balanced.
I just don't really try to associate with you know Yeah, my parents might drive me crazy a little bit, but you know, they're very helpful people. So, um, so I I you know I have to manage that because it's not always you know, it's not always like hunky dory and like la la land here But yeah, I just, you know, I know a lot of people, I have a lot of friends, but I don't hang out with everybody.
Um, I also don't hang out with everybody all the time. And it's because I have to save my time to do the things that are going to grow my business. And so is there a certain sacrifice to it? Sure. Um, but is it the sacrifice I'm willing to do and [00:13:00] will it make me happy? It does, right? So that's how I keep my balance.
So if you're kind of struggling with balance in your career and you're building your business. Take a look at like these three things. Um, but also take a look at like where you are in your business, right? If you're at the beginning part of your business, like you're fucking working, there's no balance, right?
There's no balance. The first two years of my life, I had no balance. I was working all the freaking time. So you have to do that in certain, um, pockets or phrase, not phrases, pockets or phases of this journey that you're on so that you can get it going. And then after a little while, you're able to balance it out a little bit further.
And then when I started Hand Therapy Secrets, there was a time, there was a, you know, a phase where I was working all the time, there was no balance. I wasn't talking to anybody, I wasn't hanging out with people. You know, I wasn't doing a lot of stuff, but here's the thing. Double check on your clarity, double check on, you know, [00:14:00] are you clear with what you want to do?
Are you clear with, um, what direction you're headed with your business? Are you, do you need help making some of these decisions? Do you need help learning some of these things? Because that was one of the things that I did to help make sure that I kept my life in balance. If you are, uh, you know, Like so tight with the the idea of spending money to get help or spending money to get coach You know that might slow you down a little bit because you're you're so tightly wound around that But the longer you unclear The more out of balance you can be if you're clear One of the things I've noticed it if I'm really clear about what I want to do Then I feel so balanced and I I'm like, it doesn't matter how many hours of work I have to do I enjoy it and then when I'm off I also enjoy my time off I You know, I shut my computer down by a certain time.
Uh, some nights I work a lot and some nights I'm like, you know, catch me at the bar at three, right? [00:15:00] So, that's my, that's my balance. Find out what your balance is, but I guarantee you, If you don't enjoy something and you're not clear on what it is and there's people in your lives that are fucking you up, that's where you don't have balance and you gotta figure out what those things are.
If you need my help, my link's below and my OT business program is there if you're interested. If you like business videos like this, subscribe and get on my list. I'll send you more tips.
