Overcoming Stress, Anxiety, & Depression in Entrepreneurship
No one is immune to the stressors and anxieties of entrepreneurship and daily life. We all get our turn with negative situations. Here's how to overcome them.
No one is immune to the stressors and anxieties of entrepreneurship and daily life. We all get our turn with negative situations like haters, negative environments, mishaps, death, disability, financial challenges, closed doors, or experiential deficits.
But we can control how adept we are at adapting to or managing stress. We can create both a competitive advantage in the marketplace and increased peace for ourselves by becoming proficient in managing stressors associated with our businesses and lives.
Here are some tips for building your stress management muscles:
Be Mindful About Where You’re Focusing Your Attention
Your attention is like the sun. Wherever it's focused, things tend to grow.
Most studies conclude that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts daily. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% were negative, and 95% were the same repetitive thoughts as the day before.
Gasp!
How do you offset this unfortunate reality?
Write down affirmations and keep them within arms reach at all times. When the self-defeating thoughts begin, press pause, and read them aloud to yourself.
Write and review your goals daily. Reset your day or evening by focusing on your destination rather than things that have happened already.
You are your memories. Create new ones. Speak your affirmations and goals out loud regularly and imagine yourself showing up as your best self regularly.
Have a learning itinerary. Entertain yourself with a good book or podcast that educates and equips you with new skills and knowledge sets. A bored or idle mind becomes the devil’s playground.
Seek Mentorship from People with Track Records of Achievement
Here are some key reasons why mentorship from successful individuals is important:
1. Guidance and Wisdom from mentors with a proven track record is invaluable because they have likely faced various challenges you will encounter and overcome them.
2. Networking Opportunities introduced by mentors can accelerate your success because you gain access to a broader network of professionals, which can open doors to new opportunities, partnerships, and collaborations.
3. Skill Development and more importantly identifying the right skills is imperative. Mentors can provide personalized guidance and help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, offer constructive feedback, and suggest specific areas for improvement. Trial and error is necessary sometimes, but expensive.
4. Motivation and Inspiration are resources that must be replenished regularly. A mentor's success story can serve as inspiration during challenging times, fueling your determination to overcome obstacles and pursue your goals with greater enthusiasm.
Avoid the Shiny Object Syndrome
Feeling fed up or ambivalent about your business, you may be attracted to a “shiny object” in the form of a new day job. Maybe your old employer would love to have you back, or a current client has floated the idea of having you join their team full-time.
Is this what you really want? Or are these job offers just “shiny objects” you are drawn to while you are feeling down?
Instead, take some time to reflect on these shiny object avoidance questions:
How will this entrepreneurial endeavor improve my lifestyle? What will achieving my entrepreneurial goals enable me to do for my and my family’s life?
How will entrepreneurship influence my relationships and who I spend time with? Who are 3 positive people I can commit my time to, in order to find entrepreneurial success?
How will entrepreneurship shape my values? What virtues and values will I strengthen in myself by being an entrepreneur?
What kind of person will I become to be successful in my entrepreneurial endeavors?
If you cannot answer these questions, you’ll be susceptible to the shiny object syndrome. You may find yourself collecting new day jobs that distract you from your entrepreneurial endeavors every handful of months or years. These baubles will prevent you from building an asset in your entrepreneurial enterprise that will compensate you in the future whether you roll out of bed or not.
Remember your work, works harder on you, than you on it.
The world around us wasn’t built by the exceptional. It was built by everyday people who were willing to do exceptional things. Go build something.
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