This Time, it was Personal.

In the earlier stages of my career and my time as a business founder, I took a very serious decision to always isolate my personal life from the business and vice versa. While I always prioritized the business and gave it all my waking hours, sweat, blood and tears, I also managed to experience some personal slights. Thankfully, I was talented at putting the personal impact of things to the side and continue on autopilot with the way I was running the business, exploring different avenues within it and constantly chasing that new dream home I wanted to build or that commercial avenue I was going to reshape.

The past year, however, came at me with the force of a hurricane and it taught me quite a few interesting things about myself that I had either forgotten or completely lost sight of. The way that grief creeps up on you can seem quite daunting, it does not give you a heads up or a warning and suddenly you enter a very strange state of depression. It felt like an attack, being unable to cope with the sadness of heartbreak and the ugly thoughts that it tags along with it.

This sort of grief makes you, as a business owner and the person that everyone in the team is depending on, confused. I was extremely confused as to how I should deal with the tornado of emotions that I found myself submerged within. I began to notice the change in my level of creativity, developed an inability to feel motivated to create the work I love and also felt extremely overwhelmed by handling the personal psychologies and twists of mood that my own team and clients go through. In short, I liked to think that I show up to work everyday with a superhuman attitude, ready to manage all that is within my reach – and for once, that superhuman ability took a step back & left me to deal with its absence.

The biggest impact was shown in my customer servicing and my meetings with the suppliers, contractors and our other extended professional family. I started to feel like I was on polar opposites oft the spectrum. Whereas, I felt like I was breaking on the inside, swimming against a very powerful tide, I had to plaster a smile on my face, giggle in the right moments and stay firm with my tone of voice when necessary.

In those very removed-from-self moments, I would get these small epiphanies where I was seeing myself from the outside looking in. I would think to myself, how is it so normal for me to go about my business, talk about creative choices, chase after suppliers, sign invoices and visit sites when my own body and soul were slowly telling me to talk to myself, to deal with everything that I was going through.

To make matters more evident, as someone who values creativity beyond any other talent or medium, I began to recognize the impact this personal dilemma had taken on my creativity. I felt stunted. I was unimpressed by anything I came up with. I felt like the creativity inside of me was shrinking, held back by a belt of sadness that wouldn’t allow it to flourish.

I know this may all seem like a very therapeutic piece of writing through which I am only aiming to express outwardly, but I felt it was important for me to teach that which I learned. I learned that I am a human being with specific capacities. I was a person that needed time to deal with issues, a person who required peace of mind to heal, a human being before anything else, before being a business owner, before being an entrepreneur, before being anything less than a person that feels things powerfully.

So, take some time and make sure you distribute the responsibilities in your business, because if you fall, the company falls unless you have a strong team that serves as pillars to pull the business up as you try to pull your own self up.

-   Nina Parvaresh