forced to quit my business, now what?

At the end of July 2022 I made an announcement that came as an abrupt shock to many in my network.

I announced that I was no longer taking clients and that I was with immediate effect closing my business.

As someone who’s entire identity had been wrapped up in her business activities for more than a decade, I’m going to

share why this happened, how I’m coping and what I’m doing now.

Watch now: FORCED TO QUIT MY BUSINESS

If you’ve ever faced an unexpected huge life change, you know how disruptive it can be, and how scary it can be to navigate.

You start to question who you are in this new reality.

You have to let go of certain attachments that have always just been there.

You have to reinvent yourself.

In this video I share the valuable insights I’ve learned over the past several weeks since being forced to close my business and tell you why scary, big change is sometimes the best thing to happen to us.

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This was a really huge deal for me because honestly, outside of my business, I didn’t have much else going on.

MY OWN PERSONAL REINVENTION

If you’re new here you won’t know that I used be a consultant, educator and creator of still and motion pictures for female entrepreneurs who are looking to build their personal brand confidence.

I developed courses and programmes, worked 1:1 with clients on their strategies and did photo and video shoots to make their strategies come to life.

But in late July, all that stopped – overnight.

This was a really huge deal for me because honestly, outside of my business, I didn’t have much else going on. I was a workaholic who’s identity was completely wrapped up in the work I did for clients and the content I created and sold online.

My work was my everything.

This was really one of the first big lessons of this experience. How toxic the hustle culture is and realisation of how much I’d bought into it. My identity had become intertwined with my business.

There’s commitment and then there’s destructive obsession

My obsession with everything related to my work and business came at the expense of my personal life, my relationships, even my health because I would much rather sit at my laptop and finish one more task than go outside and meditate or go for a run.

Everything else in my life was secondary to my business and that does not a healthy person make.

How do you know if your commitment to your business has become a destructive obsession?

If someone asks you what you enjoy when you’re not working and you struggle to give them an answer.

Or if weekends roll around and you’d rather work than go out to meet friends or explore.

Or if you and your significant other have the same arguments again and again about the long hours you put in and you’re ignoring the distance you feel between you.

By all means, be passionate and committed to your work, but don’t let it consume your identity and the rest of your life. After all, what are you working so hard to achieve? A life you love? Well, what if there isn’t a life to enjoy when you’ve reached your desired level of business success?

Closing my business overnight

So what caused me to have to close my business overnight – the very thing that defined me for more than a decade?

Although this had seemed like a hasty decision we had been leading up to it for several months. Earlier in the year my husband had been offered a job in the USA and for several months we had been navigating the Visa process. We were caught quite off guard when the Visa turnaround worked out much sooner than expected.

You can watch our packing up and selling up story on this video here.

So based on my current US Visa status I’m not permitted to work online, work with clients or earn an active income.

Hence me having to shut everything down overnight.

To be honest I had so much going on in terms of packing up our lives and dealing with immigration issues that I was quite thankful to not have client work to manage as well.

But it did take a lot of internal processing to imagine a future – even a temporary future _where I wasn’t doing what I’d always done.

A new identity

Everything happens for a reason & I soon realised that this was an opportunity for me to walk my talk. My years as personal a brand photographer had lead me to explore the 12 personality archetypes as a framework on which to build my client’s personal Brand strategies.

Essentially it was a map to help them define who they are and build their brand in alignment with that definition.

It was their map to reinvent themselves.

So here I was – equipped with the very tools I needed to reinvent myself except this was a personal reinvention, not a business one.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

As well as exploring my new environment I’ve been exploring my new identity – my personal identity that isn’t attached to a business or a brand.

And I’ve been doing that with the help of my dominant archetypes. If you want to learn what your dominant archetype is click this link to do the free quiz.

The biggest purpose we all share as humans in our one precious life is to discover who we truly are. The biggest challenge we face is the conditioning we endure that moulds us into something that others believe is acceptable before we’re capable of investigating, discovering and expressing who we were born to be.

So that’s how I’ve been dealing with this major life change, but what’s next?

For now I’m continuing my exploration of my new reality – both the external the internal and I’m continuing to express my creativity on YouTube. I’m sharing our adventures in the USA over on our vlog channel, Looking For Adventure and I plan to share the more introspective explorations on my Abigail K channel – delving deeper into personal exploration and Self Reinvention Portraits.

The start of our Essentialist, Minimalist Journey

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from all of this chaos, disruption and change is that everything is temporary.

What we’re attached to today can be taken from us tomorrow.

For some these kinds of changes can be devastating. For others – those of us who equip ourselves with the tools to navigate these changes – will experience them as the next big adventure that they are. A new chapter, one of many, in the book of your own life, each with its own beginning and end. Each a new opportunity to reinvent ourselves.

Each reinvention another step in our own evolution.

So welcome your next chapter – if it’s not the best thing to have happened to you… it’s leading you to the one that is.

Personal reinvention begins with awareness.

Discover your archetype and start exploring…

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