Episode 127: Boundaries, Self-Care, and Business with Hope Taylor

If you’ve ever hustled in a season of business that led to burnout, today’s episode is for you. Hope Taylor joins us to share her own experiences in burnout, how she’s set up boundaries in her business, and prioritizes her own self-care and mental health every single day. Plus she’s sharing a little behind-the-scenes of her wedding planning process!

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Wedding Planning as a Wedding Professional

Before we dive into the main topic of the day, let’s first kick off the conversation by celebrating and cheering for Hope and her new husband, Hayden! Their wedding was absolutely beautiful!

When you’re a wedding professional, there tends to be a ton of pressure that comes with planning your own wedding—including expectations that so many people have for what your day will entail. Even if you’re not in the field, big life events like this are so hard and stressful.

For Hope, she felt the stress that came along with it. Being a wedding professional, she went into the wedding knowing that she wanted to make it all about her and Hayden—this meant keeping the guest list small, focusing on the details that mattered to them, and making the planning process fun.

She found herself planning as if she was “working,” since it is what she does for work. Hayden came up with “Wedding Wednesdays” where they would sit down together and plan their wedding. This helped compartmentalize what she needed to do and manage her mental health during this busy and stressful season.

Boundaries, Self-Care, and Business

Hope is all too familiar with the importance of self-care and boundaries when it comes to business. Like many entrepreneurs, she’s experienced her own seasons of burnout—ultimately putting her in the hospital.

Years ago, Hope started setting up boundaries that would prioritize her mental health. A few of those boundaries included:

• Turn off all notifications on her phone.
• Set clear boundaries for her work hours (done by 5PM).
• Build a solid morning routine that refills her cup.
• Giving each day of the week it’s own assigned task.

Recognizing Burnout and How to Avoid It

These boundaries that Hope set up didn’t come naturally. She vividly remembers a time in 2015 when she was experiencing burnout, she was watching Gossip Girl with her mom and saying, “Something has to give. I have to change something.”

She had been in a phase where she was thriving from the outside—running a 6 figure business, drowning in editing, wanting to break into education, yet didn’t have time to do it. She was physically burning herself out.

She decided to cut an entire service from her business for a full year in order to create time for her to shift into education.

If you’re in a place where you’re feeling overwhelmed and approaching burnout, this one change has ultimately made huge shifts in Hope’s mental health: getting up 30 minutes earlier than she needs to in order to do things for herself.

Different Types of Burnout

Hope personally has a few different types of burnout she experiences. The first type, which she refers to as level one, is a daily burnout, when she’s pushed herself too hard in a day and needs to refill her own cup. To do that, here are a couple of things she suggests to avoid that type of burnout:

• Change your scenery.
• Don’t push through it—because you’ll do bad work.

Level two of burnout is in b