Stress Management in Entrepreneurial Ventures

Venturing into entrepreneurship, especially for the first time, can be a bit overwhelming. The

experiences are new, the challenges are multiple, and being at the top can be lonely. Business owners are likely to encounter pressured situations on numerous occasions. Consequently, coping strategies are necessary.  We’ve compiled a list of some of the most reliable and effective strategies to keep every entrepreneur afloat and on top.

Recognizing the Source

With the inevitability of stress lurking around the corners of entrepreneurship, it is important to be able to recognize the cause of your heightened emotions. If you can locate the source, you have a greater chance at a successful resolution. For example, if you find that you are regularly stressed around deadlines, assess the situation to determine whether or not it is a time-management issue. If it is, create a schedule that accommodates checkpoints at least two weeks prior to your deadline. In doing so, you reduce the pressure to complete everything in a short time frame and you have the flexibility to make changes or re-evaluate your decisions within reasonable time. In totality, knowing the source of your stress leads to the alleviation of it.

Change your Environment

Sometimes your work environment can be stuffy. You become accustomed to the space that you think, create, and close deals in day after day. This repetition can result in a feeling of entrapment, stagnation, and overall fatigue. Business owners advise on changing the scenery to keep your mind fresh and elevate your productivity. Whether it’s renting a space for a month or taking one or two days out of the month to work in a coffee shop or a quite conservatory, a new environment stimulates your brain and maintains your sanity.

Get a Team

Business owners are overprotective of their projects and rightfully so. Unfortunately, that over-protectiveness, in some instances, breeds a ‘one-man show’. Consequently, your business, in its entirety, becomes your responsibility. You are in charge of accounting, sales, marketing and advertising, and productivity. While this methodology works for some people  (many start-ups begin this way), after a while it becomes stressful. Add someone to your team to lighten the load. Even a single person makes a difference. Further, it is beneficial to have someone to bounce your ideas off of and company to decompress work tension. You can still maintain the integrity of your business with a team.  Hire individuals who share your passion so you can worry less about their performance and concentrate more on being a successful business.

Healthy Work and Lifestyle Balance

Working is great, but so is not working. Take regular breaks when your body gives you warning signals. Engage in external activities that allow you to recharge your batteries. Many entrepreneurs play sports in their down time to stimulate their brains and heart rate in a healthy and beneficial way. Spend some time outside to breathe in some fresh air. Become intertwined your family and attend as many family-related events as possible. The most successful entrepreneurs understand this balance and actively work to achieve and maintain it.

This list is not exhaustive and is an essential starting up for reducing the entrepreneurial stress of starting a business. In closing, don’t just work hard, work right. 

Managing Your Business’ Workload During The Holidays

The winter holidays offer a chance for employees and managers at your business to spend quality time with their families, decompress, and recharge their batteries. But for many businesses, December is the busiest time of year, and few can afford to shut down entirely for longer than a week. If you want to allow everyone at your company to enjoy a little time off, you’ll need a strategy to manage issues that may arise while you’re short-staffed.

Plan ahead.

If you can firm up details about the availability of your staff and co-workers well ahead of the

holiday season, you’ll be able to design your schedule with greater precision. This will help you avoid the stress of trying to fill in gaps at critical times, and allow you and your staff to set your holiday itineraries. This is especially important if you, or any of your employees or co-workers, hopes to travel.

Rotate on-call responsibility.

Work out a plan to share phone- and e-mail-answering duties, and allow for some flexibility. Draw straws or flip a coin for those occasions that are unlikely to entice many enthusiastic volunteers (like the morning of December 25, or the morning of January 1). Set up shifts, and make sure everyone is aware of when h/er shift begins and ends. To save time and energy on tasks that run across multiple shifts, the person who initiated the work should send an e-mail to the other staff describing the assignment, and what remains to be done. If you shut down your business for a few days, create answering machine messages and automated e-mails to let clients and customers know when they can expect you to return to work.

Share the load.

If there are assignments that need to get finished during the holiday season, try to divide the tasks so that no one feels overburdened. You can do this for both work-related and domestic chores—like decorating the house, cooking, and organizing for holiday parties and social events. Share and delegate!

Design an effective online contact/order form.

An online contact form, with fields that allow clients and customers to describe what they need in detail, can be a great asset during the holidays; it allows you to automate orders so that no one must respond in real time. While designing your form, keep economy of customer/client effort in mind. In other words, the form fields should provide space for essential information, with an optional field for notes. Overly wordy or complicated contact/order forms tend to dissuade prospective form-fillers, who may just prefer to wait—or take their business elsewhere.

Complete generic or non-time-sensitive tasks in advance.

Your holiday consists of precious moments, not surplus time. If your work involves weekly blog or social media posts, for example, prepare a few in advance so you can simply click “Publish” when you need to. Dedicate your spare time to completing assignments before you take a holiday, and you’ll free up additional time for family, friends, and valuable relaxation during that holiday.

Live in the moment and enjoy yourself.

If you’ve set aside a few hours for family and fun activities, don’t taint them by worrying about work. Leave your job behind and enjoy the holiday experience.

Turning a Bad Day Into an OK Day At Work

We’ve all had those days when nothing we attempt seems to work out, there are unforeseen

challenges or delays, items we’ve requested don’t arrive on time, a presentation or business meeting doesn’t go as well as expected, etc.

If you feel yourself sliding toward an emotional low, try a few of the following strategies to help get yourself and your work day back on track.

Adjust your attitude.

You hold yourself to a high standard, and it’s natural for you to feel miffed if your performance ever falls short of your own expectations. We all experience disappointments; however, one of the defining qualities of a consummate professional is the ability to regain focus, composure, and a constructive frame of mind after a letdown.

•  Put your troubles in context. For some people, it helps to consider how enormous the universe is, and how comparatively minuscule one’s own problems are. You can apply a similar tactic to time: will the circumstances you’re experiencing right now matter in five, 10, or 15 years? Will they significantly affect your career, or your legacy?

•  Monitor your thoughts, and avoid the tendency to globalize, catastrophize, or succumb to unrealistically negative self-assessments. For example, instead of a phrase like “I’m such an idiot,” a more realistic appraisal would be: “I made an error on this occasion, but I’m actually quite intelligent and good at what I do; if I weren’t, the many successes I’ve enjoyed thus far wouldn’t have been possible.” By the way, if you’re going to criticize your own failings, why not take into account your many successes and redeeming qualities too?

•  Stay in the here and now. The most important task in the world right now is the one that’s right in front of you. Past events are beyond your control.

•  Take a moment to think. Sometimes just by asking yourself the question “What can I do to turn this situation around?”, you’ll come up with one or more ideas that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to you. This offers you an opportunity to regain a measure of mental control, instead of feeling like a hapless passenger on a bus that’s headed for a ditch. You may also experience a placebo of sorts: if you genuinely believe a particular change in thinking or behaviour will help you, then there’s a good chance it will.

Activate your body.

An elevated degree of stress can disrupt basic functions of your body, including your heart rate, digestion, muscle tension, blood flow, and respiration. A focus on breathing (which is relatively easy to consciously control) can help you release some of the pent-up anxiety or frustration you may feel. Start with about five deep, measured breaths, in through your nose, out through your mouth.

A bit of light exercise, like a walk around the block or up a few flights of stairs, can help restore circulation to your brain and extremities, and release tension and stress.

You can also try striking a power pose, by standing tall with your feet at shoulder-width, placing your hands on your hips, and imagining that you are a superhero. Hold this position for around two minutes. Sure, it sounds a little silly, but you may be pleasantly surprised by the renewed feeling of strength and potency this brings you.

Practice gratitude daily.

Take some time to think about all the people who have made a positive contribution to your life. Express your gratitude openly to those around you whom you care about and respect.

Not only will the regular practice of gratitude help you to restore a positive frame of mind and recover from setbacks more quickly; your friends, companions, and colleagues may also be more favourably disposed to lending you a hand in times of need if they believe you genuinely appreciate their assistance. Gratitude is a positive feedback loop!

How To Stay Motivated Between Projects

We’ve all experienced the bittersweet feeling that attends the conclusion of a major project.

On one hand, you’re elated and relieved to finally have a proverbial monkey off your back, and proud of your achievement. On the other hand, you may ask yourself “Now, what?”—or, “How should I get started with this next thing?” Your first strides in a long race seem like a distant memory at the instant you cross the finish line, and sometimes, the thought of taking on another complex, multi-faceted assignment can be overwhelming. You may find it difficult to focus or apply yourself, and that your progress is slow and laborious.

What can you do to stay motivated, avoid burnout, and muster your creative and productive energies for the next big undertaking?

Prioritize yourself.

When you become particularly engrossed in a project, you may find it difficult to tear yourself away from it. But from day to day, constant work can take a toll on your nutrition and physical fitness—since you may be short on time for food preparation and exercise. But the paradox of overwork is, by devoting all your attention to your professional duties and neglecting self-care, you may eventually lose stamina, experience burnout more quickly, and become more susceptible to illness.

Pencil regular breaks and downtime into your busy schedule, and adhere to it. Allow yourself time for exercise and a healthy diet. Imagine that you are sacrificing a little bit of productivity now in order to gain significant productivity later.

In between big assignments, you may want to allow yourself a more substantial unwinding period, and get away from your workspace for a while. Within reason, of course.

Give yourself things to look forward to, unrelated to your work.

Activities away from work—like hiking, soccer, mini golf, or skiing, barbecues at the beach, dinner outings, trips to the movies, and hanging out with friends—are both pleasurable in themselves, and means of escape from the daily grind. Even if you love your job, hobbies and extracurricular pursuits can offer relief from the various pressures and challenges you face every business day, and a reward of sorts for your efforts. And while you’re involved in something completely unconnected to your work, an ingenious idea may occur to you...

At the end of the work day...stop working.

As a society, we are inundated with electronic gadgets that compete for our attention. Our expectations of each other seem to have changed too—whereas decades ago, people were assumed to be “unreachable” at particular times (like while driving, or out and about), today it is common to assume that no one is ever out of contact—and therefore, why should a work-related call, e-mail, or text message have to wait until the morning or the end of the weekend? One consequence has been a tendency for work time to bleed into leisure time.

It’s important to establish ground rules, to the extent you can. Make clear to your colleagues and associates that when you clock out for the day, you’re done. Unless it’s a genuine emergency, it can wait.

Why is this important to you?

One cause of flagging motivation at work is the perception that one’s job, or a specific aspect thereof, is not really meaningful. When confronted with the daily tedium of “going through the motions”, many professionals feel disinclined to exert their best efforts. Instead, they may wile away the hours by indulging in distractions and diversions at work—like games, online shows, or Facebook.

Of the many advantages of entrepreneurship, arguably the foremost is the knowledge that you are your own boss—and thus, you reap the benefits of your own hard work. Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to set goals for yourself that are both ambitious and realistic, while remaining mindful of the importance of the task at hand. If you can’t remember why it’s important, then your best bet is probably to leave it aside and move on.

How to Burn the Candle at Both Ends and Stay Healthy

After packing a 40-hour workweek into just three days, and with several projects still to get through in the four remaining days, I had to take a deep breath and think about how I was going to make it to the end of the week and still have my sanity. Every so often, no matter what’s on our plate, it’s important to make time to look out for number one and make sure that all those hours, and all that pressure, don’t catch up to you and knock you down. One of my favorite health podcasts recently took the opportunity to address this very question about how to stay healthy while doing shift work. While the podcast is specifically addressing people who work off hours, most of the tenets of health outlined in the podcast are universal.

It’s all about the Melatonin

Melatonin is a hormone that’s naturally produced by the body that regulates the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle. During the day melatonin is naturally low and high at night, and is a result of millions of years of evolution of our bodies working in harmony with light and dark cycles. This rise and fall in melatonin secretion is related to our circadian rhythm and what happens when we work late into the night is we expose ourselves to artificial light which disrupts melatonin production, raising cortisol (also known as our stress hormone), and interfering with our body’s natural rhythm. The health effects of this hormone disruption are significant.

Some frightening statistics

Every cell in the body seems to be affected by this disruption and shift work is associated with a wide variety of problems including insomnia, depression, and gastrointestinal disturbances, as well as an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, decreases in fertility, increased risk for diabetes and other metabolic disorders, increased risk for cancer, and an overall increased risk of death. More specifically, rates of prostate and breast cancer in men and women who do shift work rise 40% to 70%. There’s also some evidence suggesting that one’s risk of stroke rises by 5% for every year of doing shift work.

The deeper problem

Obviously it’s not as simple as just hormone secretion. What we find is that people who do shift work, or who work late into the night, also adopt a number of poor lifestyle habits.  For example, shift workers are more likely to eat at restaurants or eat poor quality fast food instead of cooking at home. They’re also less likely to seek an adequate amount of exercise. Mixing poor lifestyle habits with hormone disruption appears to be a recipe for poor health.

What can you do?

Well the obvious answers here are to make sure you’re eating a healthy diet, getting adequate sleep, getting enough exercise, and, when possible, obeying our body’s natural rhythms. Less obvious is a handy trick called light control. That is, first, ensuring that when you’re sleeping during the day that you’re blocking out all light sources and sleeping in total darkness. Second, while working at night it’s important to use the right kind of lighting, and when working at night you should be using very bright LED lighting at full power. The idea here is essentially to trick  your body that night is day and day is night. Chris Kresser also recommends that when leaving work in the morning when the sun is beginning to rise, that shift workers filter out blue wavelengths of light by wearing amber tinted glasses. By filtering out these blue wavelengths you are sending signals to your body that nighttime is coming, even if it’s not.

Get more information about this podcast by following this link:

http://chriskresser.com/how-shift-work-impacts-your-health-and-what-to-do-about-it