Work Life Balance: Possible Or Necessary When Owning A Ketamine Clinic?

Is work life balance possible? Is it possible with starting up and running a ketamine infusion clinic? And more importantly, is it even necessary? We are two doctors that up until recently had traditional clinical jobs (ER per diem and part-time ophthalmology). We also have a dog and a small child! Plus we love our free time and have self-care as a priority. So how does it all work out?

When you love what you do, does having a balance between work and personal life matter? We argue that it isn’t!

Loving What You Do Makes Balance A Non-Issue

Steve Jobs once said, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Do we need work-life balance then? Is it really possible as a small business owner? If we love what we do then isn’t that fine? Our guide is our level of happiness and contentment. If we are arguing all the time, or ready to call it quits, we need something to change. For us, we love talking about new ideas for our clinic or coming up with our next “ketameme.” If we are happy, having fun, and enjoying the process of our work, then we know we are on the right track.

Because you only have one life, the divide between your work and personal life is actually artificial.

Work And Personal Life Are Actually One In The Same

We have come to terms that we can’t really separate work and personal life -- they intertwine. The separation we make between work and personal life is an artificial one. This is especially true when you have your own business. Even if you currently don’t own your own business, work life sneaks into your personal life, and vice versa. When you do own your business, your business is like having a child. Can you not talk about your child? We honestly talk about our business as much as we talk about our daughter! 

When you own your own business, there’s no “leaving the work at the office”. Therefore you have to make a conscious effort to create time for your personal life, aka set boundaries.

Owning Your Own Business Means You Must Set Your Own Boundaries

Now let's throw a wrench into this. Even though we mentioned earlier that work and life are one, there is a limit. At the same time, we recognize that we also have to keep certain aspects of our life in their respective places.  We cannot sacrifice the health and happiness of our daughter to scale our clinic. We love our ketamine infusion clinic like a second child (or rather third child since we count our dog as our son!). But we’re ready to let go of it if it interfered with our marriage, health, and contentment. 

Work and personal life are not separate, and yet they are…life is a paradox. So you have to look at your level of contentment.

Life Is A Paradox

Do we believe in work life balance? Yes and No. Do we believe work and personal life are actually intertwined and one? Yes. Do we believe that work and personal life should be separate? Yes. When we both left our conventional medical jobs, our first thought was how happy we were. We were finally going to have a clean delineation between work and personal life. We both were so involved with our patients and jobs that the work would inevitably come home with us. The hilarious fact is that now that we own our own business, we’ve never achieved that! Having work life balance or work life separation in itself shouldn’t be a goal, if it is then we’d be very unhappy. 

The journey of opening and operating a clinic is where the contentment resides. Learning new things, growing from the challenges, is where we find our contentment.

Need our help in starting your journey? Join our email list and be notified about the next free webinar and open registration for Ketamine StartUp.

Owning a ketamine clinic requires a lot of your time. Is work life balance even possible when you run this type of business? More importantly, is it even necessary? Read our blog to find out.

---