Hey, I’m Nicole Neer, an Online Business Manager and owner of Bloom Administrative Services, a digital support agency providing done for you services to small business owners.
Today, I am starting my podcast with a look at what a Spooniepreneur actually is. The entrepreneur part is pretty self-explanatory. But a LOT of people don’t know what a Spoonie is. In this episode, I dive into what it looks like to be a Spoonie and where to connect with others!
Here’s what we discussed in today’s episode:
- What is the Spoon theory?
- How it looks to live with chronic illness
- Learn about the Spoonie community and how to be involved!
Connect with Nicole
Website: http://www.theresilientva.com
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/theresilientva
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/spooniepreneurcommunity
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wnicoleneer/
Links Mentioned
https://butyoudontlooksick.com
Transcript
00:02 Hey everybody and welcome to the Spooniepreneur podcast. I’m Nicole Neer, I’m an online business manager living with fibromyalgia and bipolar disorder. On this podcast, I’m going behind the scenes in my business and talking to other Spooniepreneurs to get real about what it looks like to be an entrepreneur living with chronic illness, to inspire you to start the business of your dreams no matter what life throws your way.
00:28 Hey everybody. I’m Nicole Neer. I’m an online business manager and owner of Bloom Administrative Services. We’re a digital support agency providing done for you services to small business owners and I want to start this podcast off with a look at what a Spooniepreneur actually is. The entrepreneur part is pretty self-explanatory, right? For this podcast and entrepreneur is anybody who has their own business. So this could be a done for you service provider, like a virtual assistant or a social media manager. It could be somebody who has a coaching business who creates online courses, who runs an Etsy shop or you know, a million other things. There are so many ways to have your own business, but a lot of people do not know what a Spoonie is. In fact, it’s the number one question that I get asked when I start sharing about my blog over at theresilientva.com or when people stumble upon my Instagram account.
01:28 Literally my DMS are full of people asking me, what is this Spoonie? So the Spoon Theory was created by Christine Miserandino over at, butyoudontlooksick.com and she’s absolutely amazing. If you haven’t been over there to see the resources that she has, you need to hit pause and go over there and look because she’s really got some amazing resources and the Spoon Theory, it’s really difficult for people if you don’t have a chronic illness to understand how much illness consumes every part of your life. When a healthy person gets sick, they’re sick for a few days or a few weeks and then their body recovers, right? You go on living life as usual as if you were never sick at all. But when you’re living with chronic illness, it’s about so much more than just the physical symptoms that we’re living with. There are so many emotions that come up.
02:24 You know, for a lot of us, there’s so much grief about the life that we feel like we should be living, but we can’t. There’s a lot of frustration both with our situation with the medical community, with members of our family or friends who just don’t understand how hard it is to live with chronic illness. And we’re constantly having to calculate how much energy we have in a day. So we know what we can do and what we can’t do. And it’s so difficult to explain all of this to somebody who is well. And so that’s really where the Spoon Theory comes in. So I want you to take a minute and imagine that you have 12 spoons in your hand right now and you can never drop one of those spoons. They’re literally all you’re going to get today. And each of those spoons represents the amount of energy it takes to do one task in a day. So we know what we can do and what we can’t do. And it’s so difficult to explain all of this to somebody who is well. And so that’s really where the spoon theory comes in. So I want you to take a minute and imagine that you have 12 spoons in your hand right now and you can never drop one of those spoons. They’re literally all you’re going to get today. And each of those spoons represents the amount of energy it takes to do one task.
03:18 Healthy people, they wake up in the morning and for the most part, you know there are possibilities are unlimited. You can get up, get a shower, make breakfast, good work, go to the gym, stop at the grocery store, make a dinner, do some household chores and get to hang out with your family. But this is not true if you’re a Spoonie, not by a stretch when you wake up in the morning. For a lot of us, just the act of getting out of bed and taking our meds takes one spoon. A shower takes one spoon. But if you’re a woman and you need to wash your hair or you need to shave your legs, that’s another spoon. Hair and makeup, depending on how much you do, could be one, maybe two spoons. So you’ve used at least three spoons and you haven’t even left the house yet.
04:12 And depending on your job, it could take five or six spoons, you know, it could take more. But you come home from work and you’ve already used eight or nine of those 12 spoons that you started off the day with and you still need to go to the grocery store. You need to make dinner, do the dishes, do a load of laundry, and take the dog for a walk. And if you’re a Spoonie, you just know that this is not going to happen. In fact, if you’re a Spoonie, you haven’t planned to do all of those things because you just know there’s no way all of that’s going to happen in a day. So you end up just grabbing some soup or something fast for dinner because it doesn’t require any cooking. You take the dog for a walk because that’s a non-negotiable. And then you crawl into bed and you have no energy for your family.
05:02 You have no energy to do all the things. Like how did you get that food that you made for dinner? Maybe somebody went to the grocery store for you, maybe you had your groceries delivered. There are a million ways that we use to save our spoons, but when you crawl into bed, you always want to make sure that you have an extra spoon in your pocket because, if you live with chronic illness, you are constantly living with uncertainty. Today could have been good, it could have been a good day, but tomorrow you could struggle just to get out of bed. What took you only one spoon yesterday could actually take three today. And you won’t know that until you’ve tried to do the thing that you did yesterday and you realize that it’s going to take you a lot more energy that you haven’t calculated and then your whole day gets screwed up, right?
05:52 Tomorrow could be the day that it falls apart and they have to take you to the hospital. And so if you do too much today, any use tomorrow spoons, you also know that it’s not just going to take you one day to recover from that. It’s going to take you days to recover from it. And so for many of us living with chronic illness, this Spoon Theory is a way of explaining how much energy we actually have. I know to do that. And they know exactly what I mean. I’m saying I just do not have the energy. There are no spoons left. And what’s interesting is that if you go to Instagram and you search the #spoonie you are going to find a vibrant community of people who are living with chronic illness.
06:45 And we’re sharing our journeys with each other. And what I love about this community is that we are real about what it looks like to live with chronic illness. There are no filters, we’re just being honest in a way that you don’t often see on social media, especially on Instagram. And we’re able to connect in a way that we never would have been able to before social media. So it’s definitely a lot easier now to be seen and heard when you have that community. I know for me, Instagram has given me these amazing resources and this amazing support. So if I I go into a doctor’s appointment and I just feel really frustrated and unseen, I can share that with the community and they say, Oh yes, been there, done that. You know, if I’m having a rough day and I’m stuck in bed, I can say I just really need some love right now and people are jumping in my DM saying, how are you doing?
07:39 How can I help? Sending me funny memes like really being there to support each other. And I know for a lot of my Spoonie friends, this community has been really powerful for them as well. One thing that happened, the more I got to know people in the chronic illness community is that, I got to realize that a lot of us are entrepreneurs, not necessarily by choice, but by necessity. So for a lot of us, there is just no way that we can use all of our spoons to get up, get ready to go to work, come home and do all the things that we need to do in our personal lives when we’re trying to balance it out with chronic illness and for a lot of us, we are also in that place where we have a lot of doctor’s appointments, a lot of therapy appointments.
08:25 We could be trying alternative medicine like acupuncture. We’ve got infusions to go to. There are some hospitalizations thrown in and that’s not to mention the amount of sick days that happen when you’re living with chronic illness. And so it makes it almost impossible to have that quote-unquote typical job that most people who are able-bodied are, you know, they take for granted. Even though a lot of us are Spooniepreneurs I still get so many questions from people in this Spoonie community about if it’s even possible to run a business with chronic illness. In fact, I got so many of those questions. That’s why I started my blog because people were like, I need to see what it actually looks like. I want the step by step. I want reassurance that I can still show up to serve my clients or I can keep up with my orders.
09:18 Even if I’m sitting here having to count my spoons. People want to build businesses that are flare proof because you don’t want to spend all this time and energy and money building a business that is going to fall apart the first time. You have to step away because your symptoms are flaring right. And because there are so many of us living this life, I really want you to see the ways that we make it work in different fields, in different types of businesses. I just want you to see that it’s possible and I want to pull back the curtain on what that really looks like and how messy that can be. Because I feel like in the entrepreneur space, everybody wants you to believe that it’s sunshine and rainbows. And one of the things that I love about the Spoonie community is that we’re real with each other.
10:05 So I think we should be real with each other about what business looks like with chronic illness too. But even if you don’t have a chronic illness, I want you to stick around because what we’re really doing is teaching you how to build a resilient business. So maybe you’re not sick, but you’re caring for an aging loved one, or maybe you have a child with special needs or young children at home. This podcast is really about building a business that works for you. I want to encourage you to create a business that doesn’t require you to hustle all the time, and that doesn’t feel like it’s constantly a struggle to stay afloat because you’re never going to truly be successful in business. If you build a business that crumbles the first time, things get hard because life happens. Whether you have chronic illness or something else, you have to build a business that is set up to withstand things in the long run.
10:58 And that’s what this podcast is about. So I’m going to take you behind the scenes in my business and I’m going to be sharing the stories of other members of the Spoonie community. If you are a Spooniepreneur or you’re looking to become one, I want you to come over and join our Facebook community at facebook.com/groups/spooniepreneurcommunity. I am creating this as a space for you. So I want you to come over and introduce yourself. Tell us about your journey and put your questions out there for the collective to answer. I don’t want this just to be about me. I want this to be a space where we can show up and support each other and mastermind. I just want this to be a place where we can show up and be seen and be heard in ways that we can’t in the traditional entrepreneurial space.
11:54 I also want you to make sure right now that you subscribe to the podcast because we have some amazing stories to share this season and I don’t want you to miss a thing. And of course, I want you to share this podcast. If you enjoy it with anybody who you think would benefit, I know that there are a lot of Spoonies out there and a lot of people have questions about building a business. So if you think that you know somebody who would benefit from this, please share it with them. So there are so many more episodes here. There are even more episodes you can listen to right now. So let’s get started. Bye for now.
12:32 Thank you so much for listening to the Spooniepreneur Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, recommend rate and review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts to find show notes and to get connected to our community of Spooniepreneurs go to http://www.theresilientva.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.