Lifetalk: Balancing Work/Life as a Woman in Fashion

Nicole Dice
Jun 23, 2018
3 min read

Living day to day as a woman in business and fashion can be challenging. As women we play a lot of roles; cook, mother, employee, manager. It gets complicated when adding in the stress of crazy full time fashion hours. I have learned a few tricks along my way to help balance work and life and to help keep me motivated and inspired. Inspiration is really the key here. To create you need to feel full of inspiration and passion. Surrounding yourself with positive people, images, and music are key in keeping your mental health good and your soul ready to create. I like to keep people around me who are positive and support my dreams and ambitions. This isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to those in your life you don’t get to choose, like family. Not everyone in your life will be supportive and understanding of your work or of your vision. On another note many people will feel the need to try and constantly give you their advice, opinions, and tips. While many of them mean well, it can blur your vision and be very discouraging. Keeping on tract and true to yourself and your vision is so important when building a brand. If you do not believe in it and back it then who will? The trick here is to try and limit your time with toxic people and only give time to those who deserve it. If you think about your time as cash, and only give it to people and activities that are worth it, it becomes a lot easier to start cutting out toxic habits and people from your life. This leaves you with a lot more time for work, inspiration, and of course down time. Below I have separated some advice into a few main aspects.

Create inspired spaces:

The areas you spend your life in are also very important. I know it’s hard to make changes to spaces that you don’t own or if you have a tight budget. However little changes can be made to make your work and home environments a lot more pleasant and inspiring. For example a vase of flowers, your favourite band poster, or a new coat of paint.

Cut out toxic people:

I think the most important aspect of all this is really choosing who and what you spend your time on. Some people will suck up all your free time and energy. These types of people are never satisfied with taking just a little, and more often then not they will not extend the same patience and currency you have shown them back to you. These relationships are very one sided and are draining for the person who’s always giving and accommodating. Sometimes it’s better to keep certain people at an arms length for your mental health and for the sake of productivity and inspiration.

Don’t try to be a hero:

Being a business owner might seem like an amazing opportunity and it is, but there are a lot of personal sacrifices that are involved when running a successful business. Firstly all your spare time is now dedicated to the smaller tasks of day to day business. You start to become a marketing expert, accountant, and business owner all in one. My suggestion to help limit this is to give away tasks and delegate when you can. It’s hard to trust others with your business but it’s very needed in order to expand and grow.