When your family is always telling you to “just get a job”

My family is made up of entrepreneurs, going back to my mom’s father,“Doc” Eisenberg. One thing I’ve always had in my family is emotional support for running a business.

However, many people don’t have that. You might be the first or only person in your family to try to be self-employed. You might find that the nervousness you have around being in business is multiplied many times by those around you.

Maybe a family member is always telling you, “for your own good,” that it’s too risky to be self-employed, that you need to get a job, that you’ll never make it.

Miserable! You’ve probably got that thought in your head enough as it is, and to have it reinforced by a family member means that the positives you see may get overwhelmed by the fear.

If it were a casual acquaintance, you could just avoid them, but for people who are close to you, you don’t want to throw the relationship away.

What do you do?

First off, I want you to realize how incredibly important this question is. It’s worth putting time and care into answering it, because the constant needling from people you care about can be really damaging, especially if you are newer in business and your confidence as a business-owner is much more fragile.

Even just acknowledging how impactful this is can help you prioritize dealing with it, rather than just “stuffing it” and dealing with the unconscious consequences.

The second thing to do? Acknowledge the truth of their statements.

What I’ve learned as a healer is that our fears have some kernel of truth to them. That kernel is hardly ever what is presented in the outward statement of the fear, but there is something there that must be acknowledged.

That kernel of truth is stronger than anything else- you can’t destroy the truth, because there is something essential about truth.

So, what often happens instead, especially when those close to us echo fears we’re already feeling, is that we shut it all down and try to turn away from it. Because we’re still harboring those thoughts inside us, including that kernel of truth, every time someone mentions them it creates a dissonance of pain inside us, often more stimulating than we can easily take.

If instead you acknowledge the kernel of truth inside, then you can breathe and relax a little bit, just knowing the truth. Yes, being self-employed IS risky. There is a possibility that it won’t work, or that it will be financial stressful.

What would happen if you acknowledged that with whoever was expressing their fear to you?

“Wow, I get it! I want to tell you two things: First, that I also feel nervous sometimes about my decision to be self-employed. I get how unstable it can be sometimes. The second thing is that I have made a clear decision, despite that, to move forward. I am doing my best to learn and grow. And the worst that happens is that it doesn’t work and in a few years I go and get a job.”

“Until that time, please stop telling me to go get a job. I will let you know if I reach that point, but before that, it’s not helpful and I don’t want to hear it.”

Of course, you’d use your own words. My guess is that it won’t work perfectly, that they’ll still tell you. But by acknowledging their fear and your clear decision, as well as acknowledging that you haven’t written off getting a job at some point in the future if it doesn’t work, then they may well tell you a lot less.

The next step

Find support! Find a community, or peers, or colleagues to process with, where you can acknowledge fears and get positive feedback.

Also make that statement true: learn! Don’t try to grow a business purely by intuition. Intuition and Divine guidance is absolutely critical to a happy, healthy life… and at the same time, the guidance has to work on something. A well-trained surgeon operating using guidance and intuition sounds wonderful! An untrained person who has never even entered medical school performing an operation purely on intuition sounds deadly.

Bottom line

Like most families, you may not have the healthiest patterns with your own relatives and people close to you. They are going to echo the fears that you have already, and compound then with even more fears and anxieties of their own because they only see the negatives, not the positives that you can see.

However, acknowledge the kernel of truth in the fear, be clear with them, find other support, and learn. When you walk through these, I’m going to guess that your family-anxiety burden is going to lighten in a real way.How about you? How is your relationship with your family around being in business or self-employed? How do you handle it?

With love,

Mark Silvers, M.Div.
Heart of Business Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.

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With love,
Mark