The day you decide to launch a business and tackle the journey of becoming an entrepreneur can be filled with lots of excitement. Many individuals who venture down this path do so because they no longer want to have to answer to a boss and they want to see their ideas come to fruition. Yet most who are overwhelmed with enthusiasm don’t recognize all of the challenges and responsibility that come with this choice.

Launching and running a business is a lot of work. Because you will need to overcome many obstacles and adversity, the path you are on is going to force you to grow and become a better version of yourself. This is why it can be very beneficial to hire a life coach.

A life coach is someone who can help you stay focused, remain organized, and can support you when many tough decisions come your way. Here are four more reasons for having a coach on your side:

1. Create A Balanced Life

All too often, when people jump down the rabbit hole of becoming an entrepreneur they find that their life gets out of balance. When this happens, it is quite easy to become unhappy and depressed.

While working twelve hour days can be common, it’s important to keep your life in balance so that you don’t feel bitter or resentful towards your dream. A life coach is someone who can help keep you honest when they see that you may be out of balance.

2. Less Stress & Anxiety

Having someone who can support you when things get hard is essential so that you don’t feel stressed out all the time. Your coach is going to provide you time every week where you can pause and reflect on what is happening right now in your life.

During this time, not only can you vent so that it does not stay bottled up inside, your coach will be able to help you put it into perspective so that you can get back to the task at hand and feel better about it helping to relieve any stress or anxiety it may have brought on.

3. Overcome Fears

Running your own business is going to challenge you so much that it will literally bring up every fear you have about yourself. When this happens, it can be very helpful to have someone to work with your through them so that they don’t get the best of you.

4. Be More Productive

Becoming successful as an entrepreneur is all about making the most of your time. From when you get up until you go to sleep you are going to need to squeeze out high productivity from each minute.

Working with a life coach will help you organize your time in a way to ensure that you are being as productive as humanly possible.

“Music education opens doors that help children pass from school into the world around them a world of work, culture, intellectual activity, and human involvement. The future of our nation depends on providing our children with a complete education that includes music.”  –Gerald Ford

Across the world, children are reaping the benefits of the enriched education that music can provide. A musical education has been linked to breakthroughs in language development, higher IQs, growth in neural activities and in creative development. Children who grow up in introspective, musical environments benefit from a greater sense of self. Children learn to honor the process of learning and to bring an artful consciousness in all that they do, see and become.

For entrepreneur, Candace Chen, gaining a musical education was instrumental (no pun intended) to her success. Candace and her family left Taiwan when she was only three years old. Raised on a close to minimum wage salary, Candace’s single mother pushed her to work hard in school and supported her in her pursuit of learning how to play musical instruments. A classically trained musician, Chen played as a Pianist for 13 years, a violinist for 10 years, later becoming a self-taught guitar and ukulele player as well. She later went on to teach violin and piano to help offset the cost of college. This upbringing ultimately led to Chen’s MIT acceptance, where she obtained a degree in Mechanical Engineering, a milestone she considers to be her greatest achievement. Candace’s musical upbringing also laid the foundation for becoming a well rounded individual, capable of taking on a variety of diverse tasks throughout her career. As a solo (technical) founder, Candace now wears many hats in her company, handling design, copywriting, video editing, Facebook advertising and patent writing. She is also able to work well with limited resources available, using her bedroom 3D printer to prototype and test her designs.

In her successful, one-woman powered venture, Chen honors everyone around the world who has benefited from a musical education, as well as those who continue to hold a soft spot for music in their heart. Creating a travel-friendly ukulele instrument, Chen makes it easy for music lovers and adventurous travelers to bring the joys of music wherever they go. Her product, the Ava ukulele boasts an impressive model of unique features, in a market that has seen very little change. The instrument is portable and may be easily stowed away. Ava retains a bold sound, to be shared proudly with others. It may also be practiced quietly, in Silent Mode. Simple plug in your earphones and your solo jam session will remain barely audible to those around you.

The Ava ukulele came into being when Chen was setting off for a vacation in Costa Rica. Excited for a relaxing vacation, playing ukulele on the beach, she was devastated to find that her beloved instrument had been destroyed in her travels. For Candace Chen, whose life had largely revolved around music, this instrument was more than an object,  it was a friend. Empathizing with other musicians who have experienced the same heartbreak, Candace decided to create a compact ukulele that would not only withstand travel, but become an agent for social interactions and joy shared among others. “I want Ava to inspire people to get out there, travel, and share music with others,” says Chen.

For any entrepreneurial spirit out there hoping to follow your lives’ compass to the heart of inspiration, listening to Candace Chen’s story can help you get there.  Based on her personal experience, Candace offers the following advice to entrepreneurs in diverse industries:

Take advantage of the growing freelance economy (like Upwork and Fiverr)! I’ve found freelancers for electrical engineering, PR, marketing, user studies, creative copy, graphic design, patents, and video production on a per-project basis which keeps on-going expenses (like salary) low. This is crucial in the early stages when you’re bootstrapping or trying to manage your burn rate before that next investment round. 

Create prototypes to help answer questions and stress-test assumptions, not for sake of creating a prototype. A prototype at each stage (MVP, proof-of-concept, critical module, beta) are all different types of prototypes that help answer a different question. 

If you have an app idea, your first step is not to hire a developer. Rather, create an MVP mockup (there are drag-and-drop programs that let you do this with no coding experience), and test with your target users to figure out if this is something they’d want. Saves a ton of time and money.

You should be de-risking and refining at each step along the way (product-market fit, features, high-risk engineering modules), not at the very end where you present a final polished product and find out nobody wants it!

A sober living home called the Sanctuary opened at the beginning of the month in the city of Minot, North Dakota, to support women who live in the area and who are recovering from substance use disorders.

The facility focuses on promoting non-chemical coping skills, volunteer efforts, profitable employment, education, and action and bases its program on the 12-step model to recovery which involves structured environments, workshops, as well as spiritual teachings.

There is a total of 11 trained individuals who are involved with managing the sober living home, which can accommodate a total of 14 women for provisional periods in a four-bedroom house. The representatives of the center stated that, in addition to a double room, the large size of the bedrooms allow them to be shared by up to six women.

The staff members explained that they believe that the fact that the women have to share the premises prevents them from becoming isolated.

The Sanctuary features numerous other congregational rooms for the assisting women who have gone through detoxification for a drug or an alcohol addiction but haven’t returned to their homes or routines yet.

The first residents have moved to the center and the staff members are currently in the process of reviewing other applications that have been submitted by potential residents.

Applications from anyone who meets their requirements and is truly committed to achieving recovery will be accepted.

The women are required to go to 14 meetings every week across recovery programs — some of them that are held at the house and some are not, such as the meetings with peer support groups like Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous.

The residents of the Sanctuary also have to participate in random and unscheduled drug tests, and due to the zero-tolerance drug use policy, anyone whose tests results come out positive gets evicted.