Episode #24: “My Business Became My Entire Identity”

Interview
Written By Studio Elias

Laura Jane Barnes is an entrepreneur, creator, musician, and social media savant who also happens to be a TikTok & IG viral sensation. (You’ve probably heard one of her songs!)

In this interview, Laura shares her biggest business mistake: the inability to separate her personal identity from her business.

I talk about my own personal loss and Laura recounts her journey from viral music creation on social media to redefining her business approach after a critical injury.

Together, we examine how tying your identity too closely to business successes can often be disastrous. 

 
 

Listen to the Episode

 
 

Show notes

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  • Eman Ismail: I've been struggling to script the intro for this episode for weeks, which is unheard of, and it was particularly shocking because this was definitely one of my most enjoyable interviews, so it should have been super easy for me to script this interview. Turns out, this intro was never meant to be scripted. This was always meant to be an intro that I record off the cuff.

    Trigger warning: death and cancer. If that's not something you want to hear about right now, this is probably a good time to switch off and come back another time. Today I found out that my Auntie Anna died of cancer.

    Now, Auntie Anna wasn't my blood relative. But she was the kind of auntie that you really have no memory of ever being introduced to. I was never introduced to her because she was always just there. She was always part of my life. The reason I want to talk about Auntie Anna in this episode is because, first of all, I want you to know who she is, who she was, and I want the world to know that she's gone.

    The second reason I'm talking about Auntie Anna on this episode is because there's really nothing else that I can think about. There's nothing else that I want to talk about other than her. The third reason is because this actually really very much relates to the episode that you're about to listen to—the conversation that I have with a business owner called Laura Jane about the importance of creating an identity outside of work. And if anything, Auntie Anna's death has just really brought this home for me.

    It's so easy for us as business owners, as people who love what we do—we love our businesses, we love our work, we're so passionate about it—so easy for us to just find ourselves doing nothing else, really. It's so easy for us to make our business our whole identity and our whole personality. And it can't be, because, as Auntie Anna's passing has demonstrated, life is short and we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

    And so if you take anything from this, it's that you should create some space for the things you love. And I don't mean the things you're obligated to do and the people you're obligated to take care of. I mean, you should find things that you love outside of work so that you can create space to be more than just your business.

    Now, me and Laura Jane get into this, and I think it's a really great conversation, but what I also want you to know about Laura Jane is that she's a TikTok and IG star who has two songs that went completely viral on social media, for which the associated hashtag was used over 700 million times. If you don't know her, you likely know her songs.

    [MUSIC - Laura Jane Barnes: We Don't Owe You Affordability]

    Eman Ismail: And that kind of viral fame, the kind where even celebrities follow you, can only lead to one thing—absolute chaos.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I had people sending me death threats in my DMs. I had people signing up for my newsletter with ihopeyougetcancer@something.com. They just made up a fake email address. I had people accusing me of capitalism, accusing me of classism, accusing me of racism. It became like a bit of a witch hunt. I was getting inundated with emails, DMs, comments. So many people that were just starting to get really personal with me as well and talk about the way I looked, or the way I sounded, or my teeth, or my hair, or whatever it was. And I was like, you know what? This isn't worth it for me.

    Eman Ismail: On today's show, I'm speaking to Laura Jane Barnes, founder of The Creative Business Association, about how putting so much of her identity and self-worth in her business and the success of her business led to her physically injuring herself and being forced to give up the business she loved so much.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Being in a relationship with somebody who was so adept at manipulation that they could snuff that independence out of me was like, "Oh, wow, okay, I have to do something. I need control over my identity, I need control over my time, my finances," 'cause I had no money, so I decided to start a business. I was working until like 3:00 AM. I would wait until my daughter was asleep. When she was born, I was working until 3:00 AM on very little sleep as a new mum.

    I was charging back then £1.50 an hour, which, in hindsight, is upsetting. But it was something. Back then that was my little glimmer of financial freedom. It's like, "I'm earning my own money."

    Eman Ismail: Welcome to Mistakes That Made Me, the podcast that asks extraordinary business owners to share their biggest business mistake so you know what not to do on your road to success. Mistakes That Made Me is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

    My name's Eman Ismail, and I'm an email strategist and copywriter for online business owners like you at emancopyco.com. I'm a podcast lover, a pizza binger, a proud mama of two, and I have this radical idea that if maybe us business owners were a little less guarded and a lot more open about the mistakes we've made, we could help each other grow a business that brings us more joy and less regret.

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    Laura Jane Barnes: Hi, so I'm Laura Jane. I am a tired parent of two children. I am a dog-obsessed Simpsons super fan. But on a less exciting and professional basis, I am a creative business strategist. So I am the founder of The Creative Business Association, which is my support and education-based community online. And the goal with everything that I do is to take artists and handmade business owners from being this kind of apologetic hobbyist to building a thriving, sustainable online brand, like, a brand. We do not want to be in hobbyist mode anymore.

    Over the last 13 years, I've founded three different handmade product businesses across a ton of different product types—fine art, crochet, stationery, apparel. So I've got a really wide scope of what it takes to build an engaged, exciting, excited, supportive customer base online, regardless of what you make or who your target audience is. I have also been the video content creator for Simply Crochet Magazine, which is the biggest crochet magazine in the UK. I did that for a number of years. And had a corporate stint as head of community and social for a size-inclusive retail brand before the self-employed world called me back.

    Eman Ismail: Amazing.

    Laura Jane Barnes: So yeah, that is me in a very wordy nutshell.

    Eman Ismail: Amazing. Well, the first time we met is you came into my DMs and asked me to do a presentation for your community. But you came to my DMs and I already knew who you were because you were Instagram famous. I feel like everyone—

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah, it was a wild ride, that patch of time.

    Eman Ismail: Indeed, let's talk about it. So you created multiple songs, but there's two in particular that went mega-viral on Instagram and on TikTok. And this is during the pandemic time. So these apps are going crazy. Video content is going through the roof. We're all spending a lot of time on these apps. And the associated hashtag for one of your songs, just to put this into perspective, was used 700 million times.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Million times. [laughs] Yeah.

    Eman Ismail: 700 million, I can't even like comprehend that number.

    So you've got to tell us the story of coming up with these songs that people were using on their sounds for their TikTok videos and Instagram videos. How did these songs come about?

    Laura Jane Barnes: So the first one was probably the biggest one. The first one was It Costs That Much.

    [MUSIC - Laura Jane Barnes: It Costs That Much]

    Laura Jane Barnes: And I came up with that in the shower.

    Eman Ismail: No way.

    Laura Jane Barnes: One day, which is hilarious to me now in hindsight. If I'd have known, can you imagine if me in the shower that day had been given this flash forward, by the way, this is how this is gonna go. Being in the creative business industry for—I mean, it's been 13 years now, it's been a long time, and through that time I've seen so many incredibly talented people that were just stuck in this kind of like starving artist mentality, this lack mindset, this scarcity mindset where they're like, "Right, I'm gonna undercharge because I don't think people are gonna pay me because I should be just doing my art for the love of it. Otherwise, people are gonna think I'm a sellout," and all this kind of stuff.

    And at the time, I was a crochet designer, and crochet is a really difficult thing because it's such a long-form craft. And so crochet designers generally are chronically undercharging. And I just kept seeing people over and over again undervaluing their time, undervaluing their skills, which obviously doesn't just impact them, but it impacts the creative business community as a whole because customers start to undervalue creative skills across the board.

    And so I thought, "How can I get this message out to people in a way that's going to be a bit silly so that it's easy to digest?" Because I felt like if I'd have gone on some kind of a rant about it, that it might not have been received in quite the same way.

    Eman Ismail: Agreed.

    Laura Jane Barnes: And I have a really bizarre, long music background, and I've had some amazing opportunities in the past with music. And, I was like, "I'm gonna do something silly. I haven't really used music on my platform yet. I haven't shown people what I can do. I'm just gonna make something silly." And I was in the shower and just came up with this daft little song. And my thought at the beginning was, "I'm going to share this with my small business friends 'cause they're going to find it funny."

    So I just recorded it on my phone. I just layered it. I think I recorded it on the phone app of GarageBand.

    Eman Ismail: Wow.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I just layered it on there. I put a couple of little harmonies in, and then I made a video with it.

    [MUSIC - Laura Jane Barnes: It Costs That Much]

    Laura Jane Barnes: And what started out as me thinking that I was just going to make some of my friends laugh just ended up being the most insanely huge thing.

    And do you know the worst part was, is that I uploaded it as a song onto TikTok, because back then it was really difficult to get your audio, your own audio onto TikTok. So I had to upload it as a blank video so that I could private it, and then use my own sound to make a video. So what happened was, I didn't have the original sound. So I didn't actually get the audience that came along with that level of visibility, which is just the most annoying thing ever.

    So it just grew, and grew, and grew. People still talk to me about it now. My nail tech, I got a new nail tech, and then she recognised me, and she was like, "Oh my god, I know that song." And I was like, "Oh, okay, this is really weird." [laughs]

    Eman Ismail: That's amazing. Okay, and again, I just need to add some more context to this, right? So these songs were being used by celebrities. You had celebrities following you from these songs. Okay, you gotta tell me, who was your favourite celeb who followed you or who used the sound?

    Laura Jane Barnes: Well, Jameela Jamil shared the video, and I love her. I just think she's fabulous. but I got followed by Aloe Blacc, which was hilarious because he has that song, I Need a Dollar, and I love that song. That song got stuck in my head. It was like 2011 and I really did need a dollar in 2011. So Aloe Blacc followed me and I was like, "Oh my goodness." And there's a couple of really fun actors and stuff. We're not talking like Brad Pitt here, but people that have—there was one of the actors from a show called Freaks and Geeks, which I love, who followed me and sent me a DM and he's like, "I really love your content. It's so daft."

    And what was really weird for me, not even just so much the fact that I knew that celebrities had heard me singing a daft song, but I had people reaching out to me that were in so many different industries who really resonated with what I was saying, surprisingly so. I had somebody who emailed me and she was like, "My husband's a scaffolder, and him and his colleagues will sing it as they're putting the scaffolding up." [laughs] And people that were saying like, "Oh, my husband sings your song round the house. He's a bricklayer," or whatever. And I'm like, "Wow."

    I knew it would reach maybe sort of like cake decorators or hairstylists. Hairstylists was a big one. Hairstylists and cake decorators, they were probably the two biggest industries that latched onto this song because they are just so chronically underpaid. It was just the scope of so many different types of people it reached and they just completely resonated with it. And I loved that. It was so unexpected though.

    Eman Ismail: Well that doesn't surprise me at all. I feel like it became the anthem for small business owners. It really did. And we all, I think, kind of came together under this one song, specifically It Costs That Much, because we truly understand this, we truly get it. But what's also interesting is that, yes, you went super viral. Yes, you had celebrities following you and all that kind of stuff, but there was also another side to all of this because, of course-

    Laura Jane Barnes: Absolutely.

    Eman Ismail: -with virality comes usually the not nice side of the internet. So you eventually ended up closing down your TikTok. So tell me how it got to that point, what was happening for it to even get to that point where you just felt like you just need to close it down?

    Laura Jane Barnes: It hit the wrong side of the platform. And I think one of the problems is that while it massively resonated with so many business owners, there were also a lot of people that were on the more consumer side of things who are used to us being in a world where there are so many things that are cheaper and quicker and more convenient now than creative business owners can deliver, than any type of self-employed person can deliver, because we're competing with companies like Amazon, Temu, companies that are run in a not particularly fair way and are setting a lot of really unrealistic standards for small business owners.

    And so there were a lot of people who were just, for some reason, so angry about what I was saying. And I didn't—I still, to this day, don't really understand why. I don't really understand why it stirred up such a level of vitriol in some people. I had people sending me death threats in my DMs. I had people signing up for my newsletter with ihopeyouygetcancer@something.com. They just made up a fake email address. And as somebody who has really extreme anxiety a lot of the time, and extreme health anxiety as well, this was just horrend—it was just so far beyond what I could have possibly expected.

    From something that to me was just a daft, silly little creative thing that I did, it became something just so mean-spirited, and I had people doing parody videos of the song where they were basically making out like artists were churning out crap and expecting people to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for it, which was never my message. I had people misunderstanding what I was trying to say. I had people accusing me of capitalism. Accusing me of classism, accusing me of racism. I was like, "How are you pulling these subtexts out of what I'm saying here? Where is this coming from?"

    I think it was just the surprising nature of just how angry everybody was. And being an anxious person already and starting to get people that were actually—it became like a bit of a witch hunt. I was getting inundated with emails, DMs, comments. So many people that were just starting to get really personal with me as well, and talk about the way I looked, or the way I sounded, or my teeth, or my hair, or whatever it was.

    And I was like, you know what? This isn't worth it for me. This isn't really giving back to my business, so it's not even like it was worth it from a financial perspective to just stick it out because as a handmaker, going viral is not all it's cut out to be because you've only got so much time to make things with your hands. If I'd had, I don't know, a digital product or something and I was reaching these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, it may have been one of those things where it's like, okay, I'm just gonna switch off from it or I'm gonna hand over the control of my social media to somebody else so I don't have to see it.

    But as somebody who works completely by themselves, and has done for 13 years, I was like, I had to be in the thick of that, I had to be receiving all of this negative, horrible energy from total strangers and people that were assuming things about me when they did not know me as a person. They didn't know anything outside of the context of that song. And so, I was just like, do you know what? I'm just gonna delete my account.

    Eman Ismail: Wow.

    Laura Jane Barnes: It was a self-care move for me, that one, because on Instagram, it was way more of a supportive environment, whereas TikTok, it was just a whole other beast. And I was like, I'm just gonna delete it. I had just tens of thousands of followers on there, and I'm like, this is not worth it for me, for me to be making myself ill reading all of this. Because as much as I knew what they were saying didn't actually represent me in real life, it still gets to you, it still digs its claws in, and I was like, I have to just cut this off. I have to cut the head off of this.

    And for a while, I thought about just closing it temporarily, and eventually, I ended up just closing it completely. And actually, I have zero regrets about that decision. None at all.

    Eman Ismail: That's amazing. Good for you for doing what you needed to, to take care of your mental health. Because I think people—well, those people, they don't realise, or maybe they just don't care that there's a human being on the other side of this horrible stuff that they're saying to you. It's absolutely despicable. And I'm glad you didn't feel the pressure or the need to just deal with it.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I tried for a little while. [laughs] Tried for a little while, but yeah, I had my limits for sure. Yeah.

    Eman Ismail: Well, you said something in there where you said, it wasn't worth it. It wasn't like it was helping you get sales and helping your business. I think that's a really interesting misconception that we all have. For those of us who have not gone viral and that don't have tens of thousands of followers, you kind of think all your problems are going to be solved by going viral or by having tens and thousands of followers.

    So tell me about that. What did it do for your business, if anything?

    Laura Jane Barnes: The one amazingly positive element that came out of it was that I had started to build a community of other small business owners that were just really lovely. On Instagram—obviously, my TikTok was buried in the backyard, that was taken out the back and shot. [laughs] But my Instagram, once people started to realise that that was me and they started—I mean, I still didn't have the original audio because somebody had pulled it across from TikTok before I'd posted it on Instagram. So there are probably a lot of people who have no idea who I am but know the song really well.

    But I started to build this really wonderful community of creative business owners who were super supportive, super creative, super fun to get to know. And I made a lot of friends through the situation. But what didn't really happen is that my business was positively impacted. It's like you said, there's such a misconception that going viral is the goal with social media. It has to be the goal because that's going to solve our problems. All of a sudden, we're going to get all of these orders.

    And for some people, that has happened, but it hasn't been sustainable. Once that buzz wears off, it dips back down to where it was before. And I think that that's almost more damaging than having a slow, organic, normal growth pattern because you get inundated with this level of success that you think is going to stick around, and it doesn't. And actually, a lot of what happens when you go viral is that you get followed by a lot of bot accounts. And so your engagement levels are gonna naturally dip down, which means that you experience this terrible crash of engagement once that wears off. And I've seen it happen over and over and over again.

    I've seen it happen to clients as well, where they've had something go viral, they think that this is it, they're going to stay up here now, but it causes this crash, not just in engagement, but it also causes this crash in self-confidence because you are constantly striving for that again. You're like, "How can I top that?" or, "How can I get there again?" or, "I'm never going to top that." And it makes you feel just so terrible, especially when the experience itself wasn't particularly nice. It's not the easiest thing.

    But because I was a handmaker, because everything I made took a lot of time, there was a definite ceiling on how much it could positively impact my business. Obviously, now I'm service-based, almost exclusively service-based, so it's slightly different. But back then, it was like, I have as much time as I have, and I only have two hands, so it doesn't matter how many people try and buy stuff from me, I'm not gonna have the time to make it. And eventually, that buzz is gonna wear off. And I'm all of a sudden going to have all these followers that just followed me for that one daft song and aren't actually interested in what I'm selling.

    And again, this is another thing that so many people struggle with. They're just so focused on the growth and building their business and making their follower count bigger or their view count bigger, but they're not thinking about how that's actually going to convert for their business. And I'm trying to change that narrative little by little, but it's very difficult, I think, because so many people get that drummed into them. You need more followers, more reach, more views, and if it's not converting, it is useless, and it is just giving you more work.

    Eman Ismail: Well, this is really interesting because when I first came across your account, when we first got to know each other, I realised that you were the artist behind those songs because it was pinned on your profile, like "You might know me because of these songs," and I was like, "Oh my gosh, yeah, I do know you because these songs." But now when you look at your account, it's probably a year, a year and a half later, maybe. It's not there. There's nowhere that it states like "I'm the maker of these songs. You might know me from this." And I think that's a really interesting shift.

    And so, how do you go from like, "I have all these followers, but they're not my audience," to, "Okay, I need to attract my audience and start making them convert."?

    Laura Jane Barnes: It's been a very slow process, and I think because I was still running a product-based business when that song kicked off, in some respects, my story's a little bit different, because it's almost like I built an audience of people who actually were great for where I was going, and I think a lot of it's because during the time that I was running product-based businesses, I realised that actually the stuff that got me really pumped and excited was the marketing and also talking to other people about their businesses.

    I used to get people reaching out to me all the time, asking for advice, asking for like, "How could I maybe promote this?" Or like, "Do you have any advice on how I can make more sales with this?" And I wasn't positioning myself as any sort of mentor back then. But people were seeing the results that I was getting. And so I loved that. And it just ignited this flame in me. Like, I love helping people with this. I love helping them leapfrog all of the stress and the guesswork and the experimentation and the long, long nights that I had to go through [laughs] because I didn't have anything like that when I started a business.

    So, in some respects, I was very fortunate to be actually building an audience of people who would—not that I knew this at the time, but down the line would become my ideal customer, which was small business owners who want to build a business that's sustainable and thriving and that they aren't burning themselves out over, whereas what I do see a lot of the time is people who have got a product-based business, they have something go viral and it's usually for just some random reason that's not related to their products, and they think, "Yes, this is it," but then they've built an audience of people who have no interest in buying anything from them at all.

    So it is such a slow process to shift that messaging. And I've had to do that with clients in the past. It's like, right, how are we going to make it abundantly clear who you're speaking to? And right now I'm in the process of trying to shift my messaging and niche down even more so that I'm working with small business owners that are in that first year or are thinking of starting. Rather than people that have been in it for eight, nine years, and they're jaded, and working with me as their last ditch attempt, I want to work with the me of 10 years ago—driven, creative, but no idea what they're doing. [laughs]

    Eman Ismail: Yes.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I'm trying to gradually, slowly pivot my messaging to make it really clear that I'm talking to that person. And I know that I'm going to push other people away with that, but, you know, it's just how it has to happen, I think, so, yeah, it's a mess, all of that stuff, really.

    Eman Ismail: Well, I mean, one of the reasons that these songs were so popular I think is because you captured the conversation, the debate that's been happening for so long. Did you see the TikTok—Oh, okay, maybe you don't have TikTok, but did you see the debate between that person who went into the shop and bought that mini mug? And then— okay, so it was a whole thing. Actually, funnily enough, they were both TikTok creators, but I don't know if they knew that of each other.

    Anyway, so this one girl, she walks into a shop and she picks up a mug, and she's like, "Oh, this is really cute. It's handmade." So she goes to buy it. The person who made it, it's her shop, rings it up, and this mug is $125, and then so she was blown away. And I think she felt too embarrassed to put it back so she buys it, then she goes in her car and records this TikTok, and she's like, "Oh my god, I picked up this mug," and it was really cute and it was a tiny mug with two handles she was like, "You know, I'm not even really going to use the mug, but I thought it was going to be like—" I don't know how much, "and it was $125 and I felt like I couldn't put it back." So she makes that TikTok.

    Then the creator, the person who made the mug, the shop owner created a video back, and it just became this whole thing. It became mug gate because on the one side—

    Laura Jane Barnes: I love that it got a name and everything.

    Eman Ismail: A whole name. We've got one side of TikTok that's like, "$125 for a mug is absolutely ridiculous." And it was a mini mug as well. Listen, I have no opinions, I'm just describing, it was a mini mug. And so half of TikTok was like, "This is ridiculous." And then the other half were creators who were like, "This is how much it costs to make handmade stuff. It takes us hours to make this. We deserve to be paid." And so it was the entire conversation that you had summed up in your song. It's still going on. It will never end.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah, it really won't. I did get a lot of people saying that they'd raised their prices dramatically after getting really confident with the song because I saw people getting like 15 million views on their videos and they built an audience really, really quick just from using the song. I had so many people like, "Oh my God, my business is doing really well at the moment now, and I'm making more sales because I've put my prices up and people are seeing the worth in what I'm doing." And that was really, really nice because I think the problem—

    This is where a lot of handmakers and artists fall down when they try to be affordable is that the perception of the value of that product is gonna be dramatically lower if you are charging nothing for it, if you are massively undercharging. People are gonna assume that the quality is gonna match the price.

    Eman Ismail: Exactly.

    Laura Jane Barnes: And they're actually doing themselves a disservice and probably making less sales just by virtue of the fact that people who are looking for a higher quality product are going to look at that and go, "For that price, it can't be very good. It's going to fall apart."

    Eman Ismail: Exactly. That's so true. And also the other side of this is that, there are always going to be people who don't want to pay what you have decided to price your products or services.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah, and that's totally okay.

    Eman Ismail: Yeah, and you've got to be okay with it. You've got to be okay with that. And at the same time as a consumer though, I need to know that sometimes I'm not gonna have the money to buy that really nice thing that I want and I need to be okay with that. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the price. It's just that—

    Laura Jane Barnes: I would love a Ford Mustang. My dream car is a Ford Mustang GT500 1976, ideally, but refurbished with air conditioning because we're not animals. I can't afford one, and I've made peace with that now, but I'm not calling up Ford and being like, "Hey, could you make this cheaper? 'Cause I think it's unreasonable that I can't afford it, please. Is that okay?"

    And the other song, one of the lines that really resonated with people, the other one was We Don't Owe You Affordability. And the line that resonated the most with people was "It's out of your budget. It's not overpriced." And I have to tell myself that sometimes. There are incredibly talented service providers that I would love to work with, but I'm like, I just do not have the budget to work with this person right now. I wanna work with the best people, but I don't have the budget to do that. But I'm not gonna say to them, "You're charging too much. You're too expensive," because no, they aren't. They're charging their worth. I just can't afford them right now.

    Eman Ismail: Exactly.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I think it's such an important distinguishing factor that so many people that got so angry about those songs just weren't thinking about. And the other thing is that when somebody is selling—So with the mug, for example, and I follow a lot of amazingly talented potters and ceramicists, and they charge what most people would deem a lot of money for a mug or a pot or something.

    But the thing is, by charging that much money and being inaccessible to some people, they aren't taking away something that people need. They aren't taking away food, water, heating. You can still buy mugs. You can buy a mug for £2 if you want. But if you want the value that comes with something being handmade, being made by an artist, being crafted with years and years of skills, you're gonna be be paying for that. But you can still get a mug, it's fine, we're not taking anything from you, you know?

    Eman Ismail: So true. So true. I think you are a champion of people being paid fairly and paid their worth and also just people having the confidence to charge what they want to, and I think that's amazing. And I could talk to you all day about mug gate and about your songs [laughs], but we should get started on talking about what you're here for.

    Are you ready, Laura?

    Laura Jane Barnes: I am, ready as I'll ever be.

    Eman Ismail: Stick around. Don't go anywhere. We'll get right back to this episode after this quick break.

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    Eman Ismail: What is the mistake that made you?

    Laura Jane Barnes: So the mistake that made me was putting so much of my identity and my self-worth in my business and the success of my business that I ended up irreparably injuring myself, physically injuring myself, and I actually then had to give up the craft that brought me that success in the first place.

    Eman Ismail: Okay, that's a lot. So let's go back a little bit. So take me back to the beginning. What led up to this point? What was happening?

    Laura Jane Barnes: So, back in 2011, I was pregnant with my daughter, who is somehow now nearly a teenager, which terrifies me beyond belief, and I was in a relationship at the time that was really emotionally and financially manipulative. I was with somebody who was drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, who I later found out was cheating on me. But because of the fact that my parents were living in Qatar at the time, my grandparents were living in Bahrain, I was very much on my own in London. And I was like, "I need something that is mine."

    And you will know as somebody with a young child just how much of your identity that you have to temporarily let go of when you've got young children. And before this point, I'd been somebody that was like fiercely independent. I was a fiercely independent child and teenager. I lived all over the place. And I think that's a lot to do with why I was so independent because I had to start over, over and over and over again.

    Eman Ismail: Wow. Wait, are you an only child?

    Laura Jane Barnes: I'm not. I have a brother, but he was also—my brother is one of those guys who also just likes to do his own thing in his own space, so we were basically just like two cohabiting only children. [laughs]

    Eman Ismail: No, I love it. Whenever I hear anyone say, "I'm fiercely independent," I'm like, "Are you an only child too?" I'm trying to find my people.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Because you are, aren't you?

    Eman Ismail: Yeah. So I'm like, "Are you an only child too?" I'm trying to connect with people on the only child level.

    Laura Jane Barnes: It felt like it sometimes. It did feel like it sometimes. But I went to seven different schools, I lived in 21 different homes in six different countries in my lifetime. And so I was super independent. But being with somebody, being in a relationship with somebody who was so adept at manipulation that they could snuff that independence out of me was like, "Oh, wow, okay, I have to do something."

    Once the fog had cleared a little bit and I started to get a bit of clarity about what was actually happening—because when you are in a situation like that, it's really difficult to see what's going on. And so when I started to get that clarity, I was like, "Okay, I need control somewhere. I need control over my identity, I need control over my time, my finances," 'cause I had no money. And I was like, "Okay. I have to have something." I didn't even have full control over how I was going to parent my daughter because I was sharing her with her dad.

    So I decided to start a business and my first ever business was I did fine art portraits of people's babies and children. It was all commission-based stuff, and I loved it. The main issue with it is that because—regardless of the fact that I was super driven and I was like, "Yeah, I'm gonna make this work," I had no idea what I was doing. Making art and selling art are two completely different skill sets.

    And so, I was like, okay. I was working until 3:00 AM. I would wait until my daughter was asleep. When she was born, I was working until 3:00 AM on very little sleep as a new mum. I was charging back then £1.50 an hour. Once I actually worked out how long these portraits took and all of the material costs and everything, it worked out to be about £1.50 an hour, which, in hindsight, is upsetting. Certainly because of what I'm known for now, it was really upsetting, but it was something. Back then, that to me was my little glimmer of financial freedom. It's like, "I'm earning my own money."

    And it's so difficult for mums, especially, and certainly mums of very young children, pre-school or pre-nursery-age children to earn a living, to get a job. It's like, I have to make something for myself. I have to find something. And I then was gifted a crochet book. My ex-partner and I separated, which was just obviously a big change for me. My parents had moved back to the UK and so I was like, "Can I come home?" Bless them. They got hardly any time back in the UK before I was like, "Please, can I come home with Matilda, please? Can I?"

    Eman Ismail: Love it. And can I just say that when Laura mentioned leaving her ex-partner, she literally clasped her hands together and looked up to the heavens, like, thank God.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah. Thank God indeed.

    Eman Ismail: You had a bit more support.

    Laura Jane Barnes: My parents were back. Yes, it was just so nice. I was gifted this crochet book, and I tried crocheting when I was pregnant, and oh my goodness, it was a disaster. I was so bad at it. I was like, "I'm going to try this again," because it was all these cute little plushies of zombies and little Frankensteins and stuff. I was like, "I'm going to try this." And then I just completely fell in love. It became like my therapy. It was this monotonous movement, and I was like, "Oh, I love this."

    And then over the next five or six years, I built this business with it where I was selling out a collection within 20 minutes. I was getting new pre-orders every single day. I was just loving life 'cause I was like, I've actually built myself a sustainable income here. I'm earning good money. This was not just like, as my dad would have called it, pin money. [laughs] This was not pin money. This was a sustainable—this was a career. And I really loved it, and I loved the marketing side of things, I loved being on social media, I just loved everything about it.

    The problem is that my identity at the time was so wrapped up in my business and so wrapped up in the success of it that I was just working every hour I could to the point where I was actually sacrificing quality time with my children to pour into this business all the time. Because of where my kind of business journey had started, and it being so much about me regaining that independence, it was really hard for me to let it go. It was really hard for me to ease back off.

    And you'll know, as somebody who runs their own business, especially from home, how difficult it is to find where that disconnect is. Where does work end and home start? And for a long time, my balance was not correct. It was not good at all.

    Eman Ismail: I mean, I'm thinking—okay, first of all, I want to say, I'm so sorry that you experienced what you experienced with your ex-partner. It sounds horrendous. And the next thing I want to say is, I'm imagining you crocheting stuff, like your kids are around but you're just trying to get just a little bit more done. And what's really hard about that is that you're actually using your own two hands. So you can't be making dinner while you're also crocheting. You know, it's something that needs its full attention as you're working on it. You know, I can't even imagine.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah, I was working long hours. Really, really long hours. But the worst thing about it was that because I wasn't resting—and this is where the mistake comes in. Because I wasn't resting, I wasn't really treating my body with the kindness that it needed, doing such a monotonous kind of like repetitive motion, that I ended up injuring my elbow.

    And I thought it was just temporary. It got quite swollen, and it was really painful, and it was spreading up into my shoulder, and my neck, and across my chest. I was like, "Oh wow, okay. I need to rest," because every time I picked up my hook, it was extreme pain within minutes of starting. And I'm like, "Okay, I don't know what to do here because this is my livelihood. This is what's paying my bills." And I was a single mum at the time. So I was like, "Okay, this is not good news. This is really not good news." And so I just kept pushing through, I kept pushing through, and it just got worse and worse and worse to the point where I actually just could not do it anymore.

    And coincidentally during that time, a corporate position came up, which was this Head of Community and Social role, and I thought, "Okay, this is ideal because this is the part that I really love. I've got a lot of experience in building communities online." I ran quite a lot of other separate communities for small business owners and stuff. I was like, okay, I obviously need to rest. I cannot physically do my craft anymore. So what do I do? I have to go back into the corporate world. And I thought, maybe if I do that for a couple of years, it'll heal up and it'll be fine.

    And it did not matter how much I rested, how much physio I did, how much I iced it, applied heat, stretched things out, supported myself, it just never got better. And to this day, I cannot crochet without a lot of pain. It comes back straight away. It is terrible.

    Eman Ismail: Okay. So just to clarify this pain, this is a repetitive strain injury, also known as an RSI. And I know about these because I have my experience with one. And so basically, the issue with a repetitive strain injury is that whatever caused the pain, it will continue because you're constantly using those same muscles, those same movements that are aggravating the pain. And so it was crocheting that started your pain, and so every time you crochet and you use those same movements, you use those same muscles, the same tendons, the pain will flare up. And so there's really nothing you can do. There's really nothing you can do.

    Laura Jane Barnes: No. I also found out—I found out about a year and a half after this initially developed that a lot of the pain that I've been dealing with throughout my entire life was because I actually have an inflammatory joint condition. So it's not even like it was gonna go away. It's not even like resting it for five years was gonna make any difference because my body is just not built for repetitive motions, I don't think.

    Eman Ismail: Difficult.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah, really, really difficult.

    Eman Ismail: And this is the thing I was going to say, that the solution according to docs is always rest. You need to rest. And I know that this affects a lot of professionals in particular industries, really industries where you have to use your hands or you have to use certain body parts over and over again in the same way. My hairdresser, for example, has a repetitive strain injury in her hands. So she struggles sometimes to do my hair because she can't. And so she actually had to—I mean, she loves doing hair and she had to cut back on it and she started teaching hair instead of doing it because of her repetitive strain injury.

    And my experience with this is actually when I was doing my A levels and, I was doing my exams and I was an A* student so I was revising 12 hours a day and I am writing and writing and writing and writing. It was just non-stop for months and months and months. Got to the point where I was in so much pain, I had to go to the doctors, and they told me you have tendinitis. Funnily enough, I've had tendinitis in my hands and also one of my feet randomly.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I love how bodies just like to throw in a curve ball sometimes. [laughs]

    Eman Ismail: Yeah. Why not? I was on crutches with the tendinitis in my foot. I woke up one morning, tried to get out of bed and just fell to the floor. And I was like, "Okay, well that's not—

    Laura Jane Barnes: Not a good start to the day, to be honest.

    Eman Ismail: No. Spent the entire day in the hospital. My foot turned purple and the doctor looked at my foot and he's like, "Hmm, is your foot usually that colour?" I'm like, "Well, considering I'm Black, no, my foot is not usually purple."

    Laura Jane Barnes: Not normally.

    Eman Ismail: And so we had to sort that little issue out. But then going back to my hands, and this was an issue because the doctors were like, "You just need to rest." They gave me a thing for my hand, like a wrappy thingy around my hand. I don't know whether it's called bandage, whatever. It wasn't a bandage though. It was like a grip, like a support grip thing. And it wouldn't get better because obviously I needed my hand to write for my exams.

    And I get a little bit sad when I remember this story because I had the most amazing, amazing, tutor. And she died by suicide a couple of years ago. And so whenever I think of this—

    Laura Jane Barnes: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

    Eman Ismail: I know, I know. Thank you. Whenever I think of the story, I get a little bit sad because I think of her, but one time she just absolutely ripped into me. And it was all from a place of love, but she was just like, "You need to stop! You're gonna damage yourself permanently. Do you want to have an injured hand for the rest of your life? You know what you're doing, Eman. You know this stuff. Stop revising. Give yourself a break." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And so I actually listened to her and then I did fine on the exam.

    And then afterwards I was like, "Yeah, probably should have listened to her sooner and rested." But like you said, it's so difficult because, well, first of all, you need your hands. So if you've got an injury, it hurts when you're doing everything. I can completely understand why you pushed through, why you didn't want to stop. Let's talk about that. You pushed through, you kept going. Then this job came up, so you decided to go for the job. You were in that job for a little while. It didn't work out.

    Laura Jane Barnes: It did not. No, it was a lot. It was one of those situations where it's like flexible hours in the description turned into just every hour and just getting WhatsApp messages at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night and it was just—I was running a team of 15 people that were basically the social media responders for their socials. I was also expected to create a piece of content every single day, including weekends, for every single platform.

    Eman Ismail: Oh, wow.

    Laura Jane Barnes: This was across. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and then they added Pinterest. It was a lot. And the worst part about that was that I was also being micromanaged to just the nth degree. I couldn't stretch my wings doing what I was incredibly good at doing, and that frustrated me. So I was doing that and I was also managing this team of 15 people, and they were on 24/7. So I was expected to be on call for emergencies basically 24/7. And for a retail brand, it was just completely excessive.

    And I was like, do you know what? I'm not gonna do this anymore. And I was on good money too. I was a head of department. My supervisor was the CEO. So it was a good job with good pay. I was like, do you know what? I'm not doing this to myself again. I am not jumping out of the cauldron and into the fire here. I'm not gonna continue with a job that's going to impact me so heavily. And again, it was still taking away my time, but it wasn't even taking away all of my time in a way that I enjoyed. It was just a totally different vibe. It was not for me.

    So the self-employed life was calling me like a siren song across the water, it's like, "Come back to us, please come back. You'll be poorer over here, but you'll be so much happier." [laughs]

    Eman Ismail: Okay, look, I laughed when you said, "They expected me to be on call 24/7 for emergencies." Look, if you're not a doctor, if you're not a firefighter, there are no emergencies that you're handling. There is nothing that cannot wait until Monday morning. This is ridiculous.

    Laura Jane Barnes: An emergency was usually—well, it was not framed as an emergency, but it was like, "This needs to be handled now."

    Eman Ismail: Like, urgent.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah. It was usually like somebody had made a negative comment about a product or somebody had made a negative comment about the fact that they'd ordered something five weeks ago and it still hadn't arrived. And because the company didn't want people to see that stuff, they needed someone to be like, right, this needs to be deleted, or this needs to be hidden, or this needs to be fixed.

    Eman Ismail: Very interesting. Okay so-

    Laura Jane Barnes: It was.

    Eman Ismail: -I know we've gone forward just a little bit, but I wanna go back to that moment where you decided like, Okay, I'm gonna have to give this up and do something else. Because again, you pushed through it for a good while. So what was that realisation like? How did that impact you?

    Laura Jane Barnes: It was really hard, and I think, again, it comes down to that identity piece and that independence, where it was like, I had wrapped so much of myself up in being able to do this job, and being able to build this business, that I was like, "If I let this go, what have I got?" And actually what I had was a lot.

    When I actually made that decision, I was already in a really, really healthy, happy new relationship. We are now married. So it had a happy ending. My kids are beautiful, fun, just silly, wonderful human beings. I've got a great relationship with my family, great friends. I have a lot going on, actually. I have a lot that I can be really grateful for and really thankful for that I don't need to rely on proving myself in this business because I'm just so fulfilled in other places. But it did take a while for that to sink in.

    For the first while, it was just like, I have to give up the thing that I love, the thing that was my therapy, it was my rock, it was how I presented myself was like, "Oh, I run this really cool, fun business and it's successful." And to let that go was really, really hard. Really hard.

    Eman Ismail: It was a, I guess this is who I am, not this is what I do.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Exactly. Yeah, it really was. It was so unhealthy. And I think some of that comes from this need for independence and this need to feel like I'm contributing because in my previous relationship, I was made to feel like I was not contributing. And what could I do about that as a mum of a tiny little baby? So I felt like I was needing to prove myself.

    And I also grew up around my dad, who works so incredibly hard. He was visiting last week, and he was working the whole time because he's got such a sense of duty, and this incredible work ethic. And I grew up looking up to this man, like, he is my idol. He's so amazing, and he's so incredibly sharp and talented and smart. I was like, "I want to be him when I grow up." Saying this as a 36-year-old woman, I still want to be him when I grow up. But I think he was such an idol to me. My mum was an idol in the creative sense 'cause she's just so, so creative and talented. But my dad was just this sharp business mind and I was like, "I want to be that person. I want to be like him."

    And I think a lot of it came from that too. So there was also that part of me that was like, "Am I going to disappoint?" I didn't, and he's made it incredibly clear that nothing I've done has ever disappointed him. And I'm still like, "I'm disappointing everybody." So it's like exactly as you said, it was, this is who I am, not what I do. It was so much that. It was really just not a healthy balance at all, and my body decided to protest eventually.

    Eman Ismail: Yeah. Your body was like, "I'm out. See ya."

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah, checking out, like, I've tried to warn you, you didn't listen, so, now I'm taking it out of your hands, literally. [laughs]

    Eman Ismail: Gosh. Okay, so let's talk about the next part of this. How did this mistake make you?

    Laura Jane Barnes: I like to see the injury in some twisted way as being God redirecting my path. This was the almighty saying, right, this is for you. This is the thing that's for you. Take the stuff from that original business that you loved so much, which was nurturing and building other people up and investing your time and your energy in their businesses, and make that your thing.

    Because it's so much more rewarding to see other people succeeding and to help them to avoid all that horrible burnout. The horrible 3:00 AM sitting there crying at my desk because I'm still working, because I haven't set boundaries and I'm not charging enough and I'm overworked. To have any kind of impact on people in that way is just the most fulfilling thing.

    And so I do like to think this was just course correction from the big guy upstairs. He was like, "Right, this is for you. This is the thing that's for you." And so it made me because as awful as it was at the time, eventually, it led to where I am right now. It got me to think, "How can I illness-proof my business, how can I injury-proof my business, and how can I build something that's flexible and works around me?" Not that I work for it and I wrap my entire identity up in it, but how can I make it fit around my life instead of making my life fit around my job, which is what I was doing before.

    And so now I'm in a position where I'm dealing with these incredibly talented artists and handmakers and I'm helping them to skip the painful bit. I'm giving them the tools to start as they mean to go on. So they get out of this lack mindset, this hobbyist space, this apologetic like, "I'm charging this, but I'm sorry. I'm sorry about it," to being like, "These are my products, they are cool as hell, please buy them off me, my brand is amazing."

    And I think that's it. It's helping people to stand out and show up online, which is, as we all know, more difficult than it has ever been. To be able to do that for people now is just amazing. And so much more rewarding than anything I was doing with my own product-based businesses, so much more rewarding. So I got there in the end. [laughs]

    Eman Ismail: I love that for you. I'm interested to know how—well, first of all, have you? [laughs] I feel like you're probably still working on this, but how have you separated your identity from your business now? How have you managed to do that? 'Cause I think a lot of us still struggle with that.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I think the honest answer is that I do at times still struggle with it. And I think being the face of what I do makes that almost more difficult than it would be if it was sort of more product-driven. Because people need to know me and like me and trust me in order to want to work with me in any kind of mentorship capacity or educational capacity, I kind of have to be a big part of it.

    But the thing for me now is having really, really clear-cut boundaries with my time. Because then while I'm in my business and I'm creating content or I'm having a one-to-one session or I'm delivering a service, I'm in it. It's me. I'm absorbing it all. I'm part of it. But then once it's dinner time, I'm not doing anything else. I'm putting my phone down. I have to have these really clear boundaries for my time so that I can almost like shed the work suit and just be like, okay, I'm mum now.

    And I'm not perfect with this. I still have days where I'm leading up to launching a new program or I'm leading up to a workshop that I'm running for somebody else and I do get sucked in and I have to reel myself back. So it's still not perfect, but it's so much better than it was. So it's boundaries for me. Absolutely. Setting really clear boundaries for my time and actually being in a headspace where I'm so confident now in my abilities that I don't take people's criticism as personally as I did.

    Threads has been a bit of an eye-opener for that, especially because, oh boy, are people on the defensive over there. Oh my goodness.

    Eman Ismail: Listen, it was being sold as this new place where everyone is just so kind and nice and it's so different to all the other platforms, but—we follow each other there so we've definitely been in each other's Threads comments, and I know exactly what you mean. I think you know what I mean, is that there are some people on Threads who are just looking for a fight always, constantly, but I guess that's the same with-

    Laura Jane Barnes: It is testing me

    Eman Ismail: -every platform.

    Laura Jane Barnes: But it's also been an opportunity for me to work out my resilience muscles a little bit because people will make a decision about the sort of person that I am. I think people have decided, some people on Threads have decided that I'm a sort of like rose gold and calligraphy font girl boss who's selling them a master resell rights course and I don't actually know what I'm talking about, or I don't have experience, or I don't have receipts of what I'm capable of doing, or they think that I've just learned social media from a book and now I'm just telling them what I read.

    So people, they take these micro pieces of information and they build an entire personality for me on there and then they make comments based on that personality. And I think because of how everything went with It Costs That Much, it's almost like back then I learned these skills of just being like, they're not talking about me. They're talking about whoever they've invented in their brain that they've attributed my profile picture to, but they aren't talking about me, so I'm not going to take it personally. And that's been a shift for sure, and a really valuable one too.

    Eman Ismail: Wow. They're not talking about me. They're talking about this character or personality that they've created. That's so powerful.

    One of the things I wanted to say was when you were talking about how you have created this break between your identity and your business through creating boundaries, for me, it's been having hobbies again. Because I think the difficult thing for us business owners, especially creatives, is that often we monetise the thing we love, like the thing that we love becomes our business.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Oh, yeah, 100%.

    Eman Ismail: So then we're left with nothing that we love to do outside of our business. And often, by the time we're done with our work, we just don't have the energy or strength to pick up anything else.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I think we touched on this actually when I interviewed you.

    Eman Ismail: Really?

    Laura Jane Barnes: We touched on this exact thing.

    Eman Ismail: I can't remember.

    Laura Jane Barnes: I remember you saying that you were going to start going to the gym again.

    Eman Ismail: Yes.

    Laura Jane Barnes: And I think you mentioned something about reading, and I was talking about playing more video games again, 'cause I used to be a huge, huge video game addict when I was at uni. And yeah, I totally agree. That's been definitely a thing for me is like my hobby for the last 13 years has been my business. Because I'm so in love with what I do and so passionate about it, I enjoy it as a hobby too, but I've had to force myself to start playing video games again, start reading fiction books again because I was deep in the business book space for a while, just fiction books. I started making puppets.

    Eman Ismail: I love that.

    Laura Jane Barnes: But I have actually monetised that because I'm using it as a case study, so technically, that doesn't count.

    Eman Ismail: Oops, I did it again.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Oops. [laughs] Yeah, I really did, but like just this sort of frivolous stuff. And I think it's also difficult because it's struggling with doing something that's not productive or not traditionally productive. And as entrepreneurial-minded people, it's really difficult to spend time doing stuff that's not traditionally productive.

    Eman Ismail: Exactly because the thing is yeah, you're thinking, "Oh, I could be doing this or I could be doing that." I'm really interested, before we move on to the next part, in knowing how the viral success played into this because that must have been a real test for you in terms of this idea of your business being your identity. You're trying to separate those two things, and then all of a sudden your Instagram account, your TikTok account just completely goes insane. And the thing that I feel like most people dream of happening to them happened to you. And then how did you kind of manage that? And did you tie your success to your identity or your even failure around that viral success?

    Laura Jane Barnes: Oh, yes. It felt like a personal attack on all fronts because music was something that was so personal to me as well. It was such a big part of my identity as a teenager. I was in a band throughout my teenage years. My band opened for Bryan Adams once-

    Eman Ismail: Oh, wow.

    Laura Jane Barnes: -which was just the most surreal experience. We were in a stadium. It was for the Reach Out to Asia gig that he did after the tsunamis. And it's really surreal. And so my music was also quite a big part of who I was. It was quite a big part of my identity. And when I had people tearing that apart and tearing the way I looked apart, tearing my voice apart, my work, everything, it was like war, you know? It was like I was getting all of these people attacking every piece of me that I was proud of or had any kind of confidence in. And I didn't grow up with a lot of confidence.

    So it felt like a failure, for sure. It felt like, "Wow, okay, maybe what I'm saying—" It was almost like I was being gaslit into doubting my own opinions as well. Like, "Am I saying anything that's really that bad? Why is everybody so angry? They must be angry for a reason. I must've hit a nerve somewhere, or I must've said something that wasn't fair." And I found myself just massively overanalysing everything I did, everything I said. And I felt like I was under scrutiny for quite a long time afterwards.

    And I think the worst part with all of that is I was getting all of this engagement. A lot of it was negative, but it built up this massive audience for me on TikTok that I just lost. So it wasn't even like I came out of the other side with this huge audience that I could then maybe leverage in some way to help my business. So I didn't have that, and I didn't really promote it in the same way over on Instagram. And actually, the vast majority of my following has been built up in the last 12 months. And that song came out in like, 2021.

    So I think people sometimes who do know what happened as well might look at my account and be like, "Oh, she's got like 60 whatever thousand followers. It must be just because she went viral." Nuh-uh, friend. I got to about 20,000. The rest has all been just really hard work. Because most people now don't actually know it was me because I don't publicly talk about it very often.

    Eman Ismail: Oh, you don't?

    Laura Jane Barnes: And it's not because I'm ashamed of it. I just don't want to be the It Costs That Much girl forever. I want to be known for my expertise. But it's also something that's just so interesting to talk about because it was just such a huge thing at the time. It was such a impactful thing in many ways. And I think it was a big wake-up call for me in terms of just how much of my identity was wrapped up in my business, like how heavily it impacted me on a mental health level.

    That was kind of a big moment for me where I was like, "I need to figure this out because I'm taking this too personally." It felt like people were at me with pickaxes, chipping away pieces of me. I was like, "This is too much of a reaction to this. I need to take back some control. I need to start building an identity outside of this business." So I think as much as it was really hard, it did start the process of me healing from that a little bit, I think.

    Eman Ismail: Yes, I love that. That was a great answer. And something I forgot to say just when we were talking about the hobbies stuff and the importance of having hobbies and creating an identity outside your business, I actually once heard Rachel Rodgers say entrepreneurs need hobbies. And she said we need hobbies to take up our brain space because actually what we start doing when we don't have hobbies is we start tinkering around in our business, pulling things apart, messing around with things because we don't have anything else to do. She's like, "Go get a hobby." [laughs]

    Laura Jane Barnes: Yeah. You can massively start overthinking every little tiny—I've done it so many times. And then once the clarity has set in or my hormones have rebalanced themselves, I go, "Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have—maybe it's not that bad."

    Eman Ismail: I am totally with you. The hormones thing got me. There's a week every month when I should not be making business decisions.

    Laura Jane Barnes: Oh, 100%. I feel like someone should take my phone away from me for the entire between ovulation and period bit. Just somebody else take my phone. Don't let me consume content either because it's going to make me feel terrible about myself. Take it away.

    Eman Ismail: Yeah, seriously. I just spent the past week crying. TikTok has just had me in absolute tears and the algorithm knows exactly what to put in front of me as well. So it's just like, yeah, it's been a lot. It's been a lot. But Laura, this has been absolutely amazing. I want to know, what do you want other people to learn from your experience?

    Laura Jane Barnes: Oh, just balance, friends. Just balance is so incredibly important. And I know that at the beginning, when you first start a business, finding balance is so difficult, or if you're somebody who has other things to work around, like if you have children or you're caring for elderly relatives or you've got a 9 to 5 that you're working around, I know that it's difficult, but where possible, the balance needs to be a priority.

    It just has to be, because it's so damaging and you will end up in a position where you could have an incredible talent or an incredible skill set or an incredible business idea that can end up just being flushed down the toilet because you are not giving yourself space to just be a person outside of it, to just be a sister, a partner, a mum, a friend outside of you as the business. So balance is so much more important. I know people say it a lot, but actually embodying that is I think one of the most important things that you can do as a business owner, for sure.

    Eman Ismail: Absolutely. And I think your story really brings to light of what could happen when you don't have that balance, what can happen. And I think for me, one of the lessons I took from this is the importance of taking care of yourself both physically and mentally, because you've really walked us through both sides of that so beautifully. It really is important to get that balance of taking care of both your mental health and your physical health. Yeah, thank you so much for being here and for sharing-

    Laura Jane Barnes: Thank you for having me.

    Eman Ismail: -everything you have. Where can people find you if they want to stay connected with you, Laura?

    Laura Jane Barnes: The best place to find me is on Instagram. I'm on Instagram as @heyitslaurajane, and I am also trying to revive my LinkedIn account because I need to start building connections with people who understand what's going on in my brain. So Instagram or LinkedIn, I'm also, I think, /heyitslaurajane on LinkedIn as well.

    Eman Ismail: Perfect. I'll include those links in the show notes so everyone can find you very easily. Thank you so much, Laura.

    Laura Jane Barnes: No, thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

    Eman Ismail: I relate so strongly to Laura's experience because I think after I became a mother, I leaned so hard into motherhood, which I love. I have no regrets. But it took me a while to realise and to kind of neutralise a little bit and figure out that motherhood isn't my only identity and it cannot be my only identity. So I started a business. And for a while, my two identities became motherhood and business owner.

    And then I realised again, these two things can't be the only things. I am so much more than just these two things. These two things are a huge part of me, but they're not the only thing that I am. For obvious reasons, I have death on the brain right now. And I think it's important to remember that when we're gone, people aren't going to ask, what did they do for work? What was their occupation? Even how much money did they make? What people are going to ask or think about is what did they stand for? What impact did they leave behind and who did they touch and why?

    We often think about an identity as being just one thing, but actually, it's a myriad of things, and it's all those things added together that makes up our identity. You don't have to be one thing, you don't even have to be two things, you can be lots of things. If you take anything away from this episode, I want it to be Laura's amazing lessons and the memory of my Auntie Anna and remembering that life is short and you deserve to be so much more than just your business.

    Ever wondered what goes into creating this podcast? What my production process looks like? How I came up with the concept for this show? How I choose which guests to invite and how exactly I research them? Well, I'm sharing everything inside my bonus episode, Behind the Scenes: Making the Podcast. For this special episode, the show's podcast producer, Zuri Berry, takes the reins and interviews me so you can find out all the juicy details and behind-the-scenes stories.

    I reveal, for the first time ever, how I landed the HubSpot partnership and what that agreement involves, as well as the key to sending a podcast pitch that'll get my attention, the interview methods that helped me nail my podcast interviews, and the resources and strategies I've used to help make this show a success.

    If you want instant access to this bonus episode, click the link in the show notes or head over to emancopyco.com/bts, that's behind the scenes, emancopyco.com/bts. Put in your email address, and that's it. It's yours.

Studio Elias https://www.studioelias.com
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