Back when I was running 3 busy businesses at the same time, I became programmed at saying “I am so stressed”. I said it everywhere to everyone, even to my children. I felt this way for quite a while even when I had nothing to be stressed about.
It wasn’t until one of my customers told me that they needed me to complete a task for them but that they didn’t want to ask me to do it because I was already under a lot of stress.
That was a shocking eye-opener that I had to deal with right away. The last thing I wanted was for my customers to know how stressed I was, I thought I was hiding it! I didn’t think my customers knew; I didn’t think anyone knew. I didn’t realize how much I said it. I certainly didn’t build my business to have a customer say this.
I am an action taker and used my stress as an alarm to get what I was procrastinating done, the outstanding projects, contracts, customer connections, etc. completed, done, and submitted.
When everything had been taken care of yet the heaviness remained, I recognized it wasn’t stress but anxiety.
Fear of failure, fear of losing money on a job, fear of employees not showing up, fear of just about anything that I could fear.
Because I was calling it stress, I never addressed the anxiety, but this was my heavy weight and once I realized this, I knew what to do.
Why is it important to know what you are feeling? So, you know how to deal with it.
Calling it stress when it was anxiety was not going to deal with the worry and fear.
What is stress?
Stress is how you react when you feel under pressure, struggling to manage a situation, or threatened.
Being a business owner means you hold all the business knowledge and problem-solving sources at your fingertips. You are the go-to person for everything, many things you don’t need to be the go-to person for. The constant interruptions of being that person in your business is stressful when you have a business to run.
Step one to deal with your stress is to take the time to set your day up when you first sit at your desk in the morning.
Step 1: Download the information pack and use the as your guide every morning.
Anxiety is an emotion driven by feelings of fear, tension, and worry that you keep reliving. These thoughts just go round and round and can take over blocking your productive happy thoughts. This is also something that you can control.
You’ll have a physical feeling along with these thoughts; for me, it seemed like there was a weight on my chest. When you recognize you are having these thoughts and the physical feeling, simply say to yourself “not now”! You will have to repeat this as these thoughts will show up over and over again and will stick around until you tell them to stop or not now!
These are the beginning simple steps to dealing with stress and anxiety. Running your business is a lot of work but you don’t have to be consumed by it. Find the joy in running your business so it doesn’t feel like work.