The Independent Stylist Podcast

Add your best advice for guaranteed hairstylist burnout below 👇

The more I think about how brainwashed I was by hustle culture early in my career, the more annoyed I get.

Take one more client.
Work through lunch.
Answer everyone right away.
Do everything yourself.
Be grateful you’re booked.
Push through.

For a long time, that was treated like success in the beauty industry.

But being a successful hairstylist should not require abandoning yourself.

Because eventually it catches up with you.

Your body hurts.
Your brain is full.
Everything about running your salon business lives in your head.
And the career you once loved starts feeling heavier than it should.

Especially when you’re also parenting, caregiving, dealing with perimenopause, managing a salon suite, creating content, doing your own bookkeeping, marketing yourself, answering clients and trying to figure out what your beauty business actually needs next.

Sometimes you do not need to work harder.

You need better systems, better support, clearer priorities and a business that was built around the life you actually have now.

I think hairstylists are finally starting to question a lot of the things we used to call “work ethic.”

And I am very here for it.

What’s one piece of hairstylist business advice we were taught that you now realize was a recipe for burnout?

If you're a hairstylist, over 35 and just really ready to enter your burn out era, but haven't yet, this should help get you there.

Plot twist - I couldn't do it and had to re-schedule.

It feels so weird to record these little meltdowns - like in that it feels fake to be recording yourself while you're actually very much not ok - and I don't even know if it's something I'll be able to keep doing, or if it's even a good idea to do this 🤷‍♀️ BUT,

This specific meltdown just happened, and I'm already fine while I'm typing this caption in real time.

My name is Jen and I'm a retired hairstylist turned business consultant who's created 2 multi six figure businesses AND ALSO got sat the f**k down by deep burnout after navigating them as someone which fully undiagnosed AuDHD.

I'm on the other side now and I can see how totally important understanding things like perimenopause and neurodivergence as an entrepreneur- for me a solorpeneur - and how it hits so incredibly weird and wonderful to feel like I finally have the missing pieces that I've been searching for my entire life for a puzzle that I could never quite solve.

If this sounds like you, stick around so we can unpack this together! We ride at dawn! Actually let's ride at 3 AM because we'll be up anyway who are we kidding and then also it'll still be cool and it'll be quiet there won't be any traffic etc.

PSA: if you're adhd, I promise you, bestie, that other people don't see the patterns in behavior that you do.

I know that that seems wild because what is so glaringly sickeningly obvious to us isn't always that way to other people until you explain it and that can be frustrating on so many levels but I'm just here to let you know that I get it .

Does this sound like you?

Here we go again....

It's kind of like knowing how the show is going to end, but it's the same actors over and over and the channel is...your life.

My AuDHD fueled pattern recognition when it comes to analyzing business data is definitely something I'm not mad at, though.

If you're a midlife entrepreneur who created your dream business and now it feels heavy and you're wondering why....since YOU designed it...you're in the right place. Follow me for more Jennifer Kenny