I’m so glad to see the back of 2019!

Some of it was great. Our business did really well, we launched a courses website, we had a lot of awesome people join our family, and we were able to donate to 26 amazing causes, ranging from tree planting in the Amazon to helicopter rescue services.

But, a lot of it was very challenging. We wasted several months dealing with someone trying to attack our business and customers, and that meant we weren’t able to create as many new things as we wanted. We spent most of the year dealing with a variety of cat illnesses (so far this year there’s already been one more), which became a very expensive and long-term endurance battle. Worst of all, we lost our beautiful Halo unexpectedly in a car incident.

I can’t even type about how devastated I am still, several months on, because he was my little white shadow and was always there for me. He had such a weird personality and loved to sit on a cooling mat in front of the fan in the summer. I’m actually crying writing this so I’m stopping there.

Anyway, I was very happy to see the back of 2019. Five days in and 2020 is proving…weird.

After much back and forth with a new customer, we advised her to look for a new host that was more suitable and she started threatening us with all kinds of things, from secret spies to reverse engineering our business. When she said she was planning to get Kate Middleton to sue us, and messaging us abuse every night, we blocked her. So strange.

I’ve been getting so much done every day now for work, and I’m really loving being back into it for so many hours. Towards the end of last year I tried doing a plant-based diet, which then became a vegetarian diet, which then stopped because it was making me so ill. I’m not a massive fan of meat so I was motivated to give it up, but after a while I realised it was triggering very severe depression. I did some research and found out there’s some evidence to suggest a link between not eating meat and depression, so for the moment I’m back to eating as I was before. As soon as I started eating meat again, I bounced back within a few days. I know that’s controversial and plenty of people love the vegan/vegetarian life, but I can’t compromise on my health right now. I’m planning to read up on what kinds of supplements or what kinds of things I can add to my diet to see if I can stop it happening.

As much as I love work, I know I need to remember to look after myself more. I’ve subscribed to Les Mills, we went to the gym yesterday, and I’m doing more in the way of skincare and drinking water. The self-care thing is at the stage for me now where it is beginning to feel like a habit rather than a to-do, which is great.

Work-wise, I’m delegating much more of the day to day this year. January is all about getting as much as possible prepped for the rest of the year, which requires a lot of getting my head down because it’s really busy with sales chats, emails, our community, and so on. We’ve hired someone to do a few hours of business admin and some of our repeat tasks every week, and it’s freed up so much time and energy it’s amazing. From a tech perspective, pretty much everything that can be is automated in our business (outside of tech support), but some things just can’t be automated but are repetitive and predictable. Like sending anniversary emails to our customers celebrating an anniversary with us each month, which should be automatable but isn’t, due to the systems we have in play.

So January will be a lot of hard work while I try to get as many blog posts scheduled and monthly resources in place as I can. This will take off a lot of pressure and give me more space to work on new things, like courses and improving the affiliate program. And hopefully we can get some of the things launched that we wanted to launch last year! I’m super impatient, so I always see us as being “behind” even though we’re not!

Overall I’m feeling really positive about this year. I’m hoping we’ll be able to take some time off at some point and go on at least one holiday, once we find the right person to hire for support full time. Last year feels like it was an unexpected shitshow, but we carried on through and just kept swimming.