Women & Agriculture: a life in harmony

Sing Along Social is the brainchild of founder, Aoife McElwain, who has been entertaining audiences in Ireland and abroad to sing along with her crew – The Craic Mechanics – since 2015. It’s such a simple yet extremely therapeutic concept in nature, as people relinquish any inhibitions and anxieties and just have a lot of craic.

Aoife, a Co Monaghan native, is an entrepreneur and woman of many talents who has had a highly successful freelance career in many fields. She describes herself as an events planner, DJ and writer and lives in Connemara, just outside of Clifden. She is the author of Slow at Work, published in 2017, a guide to “how to work less, achieve more and regain your balance in an always-on world.” She most recently qualified in career coaching and helps clients, as she says, “specialising in confidence, creativity and craic”.

Being a multifaceted business woman who has literally written the book on finding balance, I wanted to chat to her to see how she manages in her own life, and if she has tips for us to navigate it in our lives.

Slow at work

Living an entrepreneurial life can have its benefits but challenges, too, as you are working for yourself and always have lots of commitments to various strands of your business. Aoife has found that the key for her to having some balance is having somewhere to ground herself.

“I travel a lot for work and I feel the need to have a place to rest that is very quiet because my work with Sing Along Social is very high energy and adrenaline. So I realised I need to live somewhere that can give me really easy access to the things that help me feel grounded and rested. That for me is the sea, nature and animals. These things are very key to me re-finding balance,” Aoife says.

Living in Connemara has given Aoife a completely different lifestyle and enabled her to find joy in new hobbies and passions, which mostly involve working with animals.

“I was lucky enough to find a lovely place to live in Clifden that I’m renting and I started volunteering quite actively with animals in a few different ways here. There is a local Connemara Pony Stables where I volunteer. I help groom the ponies, tidy their stables in the winter, exercise them, etc. Then there’s another amazing organisation I volunteer with here called Connemara Therapeutic Riding. They are especially for kids with intellectual and physical, additional needs.

“Also, my girlfriend’s aunt has a sheep farm here, so just helping her out as well – when we can. I suppose all of those things combined, and really settling here in the West, it’s becoming clear that I would love to buy some land here and have a subsistence farm, and growing things for ourselves. We would love to have animals, but it’s just about the practicality of what that means for your lifestyle.”

“When I wrote my book, Slow at Work, I interviewed people from all different walks of life, industries, and types of jobs. It was really fascinating to me that everybody thinks that their industry and job is the worst in terms of burnout, insane expectations, and overwhelm.

“But actually, what I found is – and it’s difficult to find actual statistics that are totally subjective – but farmers can be particularly susceptible to burnout. Arguably the farmers who are the most under pressure and at risk from burnout are those that have animals, because it is 24/7. You can’t leave your farm for more than a couple of days unless you really have someone that you trust to look after them.

“I’m very interested in this too because I’ve been trying to actively move away from burnout and move towards balance, and where I’m moving towards is having a farm with animals. So, yeah, I think I need to be really careful about that.

“Sometimes having naivety, or knowing a little less is a really great way to start a business because you don’t know enough to talk yourself out of it. But I think with farming and animals, it’s so important to know exactly what you’re getting into because you’re responsible for the animal welfare as well as caring for the land, and these are two things I take very seriously,” she adds.

Finding balance

The pursuit of balance in our lives is often clouded by our ambitions of success with work and personal life, but there are also external societal factors that we don’t even realise are there.

Aoife was quick to point out that we’ve all fallen foul to trying to live our best lives by comparing ourselves, whether that’s through social media, TV and magazines. This will only breed negativity and what we actually need to do is to understand what makes us happy and strive for this.

“I think the best way for us to find balance and our best life is to get to know ourselves and to get to know what works for us. If we have the privilege and the resources and the opportunity to create our own lives, it’s such a beautiful thing to do and to work on.

“The sooner we can get to know ourselves and understand what we like and what makes us happy, we’ll have a better chance of finding balance. A really good example of that is sea swimming. For some people that is the absolute ultimate cure for burnout, for getting back into balance, but for others it’s actually physically intolerable and anxiety inducing.

“My point is that we can feel a lot of pressure even around well-being, that you feel you should be doing yoga or sea swimming, but it’s really about finding balance. We talk a lot about living our best life and, the thing is actually that my best life looks very different from somebody else.”

Listening to ourselves

However, the key to avoiding burnout is to identify your ‘red flags’ says Aoife.

“Ironically, I am currently feeling burnt out after a full and fun summer, and I’ve had to battle with my inner critic and feelings of imposter syndrome to take part in this interview,” Aoife admits.

“I would love for people, myself included, not to feel ashamed when they’re struggling with burnout. It’s something we can work really hard at to avoid, and sometimes we simply cannot prevent it because life can throw up challenges that we really are not prepared for.

“Instead of piling feelings of shame on top of burnout, it’s so essential for us to listen to our bodies and take things off our plate. To allow ourselves space to recover so that we can get back out onto the playing field of life as soon as possible.”

“Something that I think is really helpful to know is that all of our strengths when we overuse them can become weaknesses. A strength that I have is getting so excited about my passions that I typically turn them into a job. I’ve done that with food, Sing Along Social, learning how to DJ and also, in my wish to understand how to get work life balance, to be less burnt out and have less overwhelm, I decided to write a book about it! Let me tell you, I was extremely burnt out at the end of the book.

“So, what I’ve been trying to do in the last couple of years is actually finding hobbies that I don’t need to be good at. That I don’t need an audience for and there are no expectations to monetise it.

“So, that’s my point, to have a strength become a weakness. My hobbies are definitely something that I’m now using as a way to find some balance away from the pressure of having to turn a passion into a living.”

Follow her on Instagram @singalongsocial @aoifemcelwain. Aoife’s crew, The Craic Mechanics will be providing entertainment for the Women & Agriculture Conference in in the Lyrath Estate, Kilkenny on 25 October.

Be a good friend to yourself today.

Eat the food that you know makes you feel well and energised instead of lethargic and heavy.

Be kind if, and when, you make mistakes, big or small.

Experiment with saying ‘No’ to the wrong things, so you can say ‘Yes’ to the right things.

Hug your pets.

Take a break from work or caring for others by making space for your passions or hobbies, even if it’s just a 15-minute session.

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