How to stop stressing when running your own business

How to stop stressing when running your own business

17 Oct, 2023

I was only 27 when I boldly decided that I could actually do what my boss was doing, and started my own advertising agency. However, after ten years I burned out and had to quit my successful business. The endless stream of assignments coming my way had morphed the initial excitement of running my own business into a daily slog. Or so I thought.

Sanity

But within a month of self-imposed unemployment in which I’d expected to recover and regain sanity again, I noticed I was being sucked back into that raging vortex of stressing, fretting and worrying. As I couldn’t worry about work anymore, my mind smoothly transferred to worrying about my career failures, my lack of talent, and my undoubtedly bleak future. But suddenly I had an aha moment: I realised that running my agency hadn’t been the real problem at all, but that it was my thoughts that kept causing all those negative feelings. I signed up for a mindfulness course to unlearn my damaging thinking habits and replace them with healthy patterns. Since then I run a variety of small businesses, but have never again experienced work-related depression or burnout.

Hamster wheel

When starting up, a continuous stream of projects is exactly what you dream of. But once the initial gentle flow turns into a roaring river it’s easy to be swept off your feet. “It’s a catch-22 situation,” one business owner told me. “I keep taking on jobs while enduring sleepless nights wondering how I’m going to pull it all off within the deadlines. I’d like to work on fewer jobs and have less stress, but then I won’t have the money to survive those periods when work is slow.” No matter how much business sense this approach seems to make, if you keep hopping onto that hamster wheel, someday you’ll run yourself into the ground.

Work load

While it’s good to consider the long term, too much leaning into the future will seriously undermine your sense of achievement and fulfilment today. If you work long hours yet struggle to meet your obligations and deadlines, you need to have a good hard look at yourself and start making more sensible choices. Working harder isn’t going to fix the problem of too heavy a work load. It will only create more problems, such as sleeplessness, addiction, and emotional withdrawal.

Values

You can spend your days rushing around and trying to complete a never-ending string of jobs, but then you’re missing the point of living a good life. A good life isn’t about working through a pile of jobs, but about doing fulfilling work, nourishing your soul, and building meaningful relations with the people around you. When you see yourself longing for the weekend and dreading Monday, it’s time to switch to a more mindful approach.

With mindfulness you take a step back to define your authentic values and think of the person you’d like to be: calm, sensible, in control at all times. You will unlearn to instinctively react (saying ‘yes’ to just about any request while thinking ‘no’) and learn to intelligently respond to whatever life throws at you, with a keen understanding of the difference between urgent and important jobs. Ploughing through heaps of tasks each day is not really living. With mindfulness you can recalibrate and make conscious choices that will allow you to enjoy life to the fullest again.

n Marisa Garau is a mindfulness expert who has lived in Mangawhai since 2007. Find more practical tips on how to de-stress your life at her website or flick her an email if you’d like to have a personal chat: marisa@growingmindfulness.com