How to Reduce Stress While Running Your Business
Owning and running a business is a stressful endeavor to say the least—between balancing your profits and expenses, managing staff, marketing and more, you have more than enough on your plate that is sure to increase your stress levels significantly. Unfortunately, the higher your stress rates, the less effective you will perform! So, here are a few things that will help you reduce your stress levels and keep you functioning as well as you want (and need) to.
Keep to a Schedule
Your mind has a hard time organizing things that are chaotic, random, unstructured, and unplanned. Create a schedule for yourself! Allow your mind and your body a chance to get into a routine—this is proven to train your brain into self-prepping for certain functions. For example, you may find that after a while of waking up to an alarm, your body begins to naturally rouse around the time of your alarm. You can train your brain to increase in productivity and focus if you stick to a regimen of scheduled hours of certain tasks. Create a schedule that gives sufficient time for sleep, meal breaks, and sufficient (but not overbearing) number of hours dedicated to working.
Create a Healthy Work Environment
Surround yourself with good things and good people. An upbeat and positive work environment will foster energy as much as maintain it! Emphasize healthy avenues of communication between yourself and your employees or partners. Make the workplace a little more casual—whether through team building activities, dress code, office design, whatever—to promote a more relaxed feel to your everyday interactions. Provide positive feedback and encouragement, and create opportunities to highlight successes! “Positive energy” is a very real and very effective tool for motivating people to work hard and work at a high quality level.
Delegate to Employees
Don’t take on everything yourself! Truly, handling all the aspects of a business is an impossible task, and requires a wide variety of skill sets that you may not have enough experience in to complete well. Instead, trust your employees to handle things for you! You have hired people who (ideally) qualified for their position because of their impressive work experience and ability to handle difficult situations that you would not be able to handle yourself. Allow them to utilize their skills to benefit you, your company, their peers, and of course themselves. If handing over tasks is a bit uncomfortable or anxiety-inducing for you, divide up those big tasks into smaller elements that you feel comfortable entrusting to others, and allow yourself the means to keep a close eye on the task at hand!
Outsource Functions Outside Your Skillset
You can delegate outside of your employees as well. If you do not have an employee or company area that handles certain needed tasks, outsource! Rely on the professional grade help from trained people whose entire job is to perform those singular tasks with heightened focus (and therefore heightened success and reliability.) Furthermore, this leaves you to be able to handle the more business management-related tasks that you need as much time as possible for! For example, outsourcing IT services can help you focus on what you know how to do best at your business. From construction contracting to graphic design to computer systems and more, you can get quality trained help to take care of the intimidating parts of your business.
Plan Well (Including Consultation)
Just as planning your day well will help you personally, planning your business schedule as well will help your company remain diligent, productive, and driven. Create a timeline that gives you a little bit of a buffer around due dates and deadlines, so that any unexpected roadblocks can have some time to be overcome. Consider consulting with financial advisors, marketing managers, and more to determine the best timelines for your business’s moves and to help you balance them so that no one time period is overwhelmed by stressful deadlines. These advisors have insights into the ways your market and society may change so that you are always prepared to ride the waves right!
Simplify Goals
Another common stress-causing issue is the goals you set for your business. If there are too many or if they happen too rapidly and require too many smaller pieces to fall into place, you will likely find yourself in constant panic and incredibly discouraged over the slip ups and let downs that will happen. Trying to devote your attention to a hundred things is sure to decrease the quality and success rates of all of them. Conversely, devoting your attention to a handful of things at a time ensures a better awareness of their progress and a better hold on their completion. Try simplifying your goals: in number, in expectation, in time period.
Find Things About Your Work to Love
You wouldn’t be running a business if there weren’t elements of the job that you loved. Emphasize those parts! Dedicate a good amount of your time to doing the things that made you passionate about creating or running a business, in the first place. These tasks are another form of energy boosts for your brain. They will help you feel accomplished and remind you of your talents for doing what you do. Having a strong motivation for coming back to work every day will make it feel less like work and more like an exciting project that you will want to spend time on!
Do Things for You
Finally, do some things for you that will decrease your overall stress! Take time to enjoy a hobby, relax, socialize with good people… anything that rejuvenates and energizes you, or that gives you something to look forward to. Take a step back, take a deep breath, and give yourself a break! Self-care is actually an essential part of improving self-function. You’ll be doing yourself, your employees, and your business a favor by making sure you take care of yourself.
Running your business is sure to come with some anxieties or stresses over the desired success. However, implementing some of these strategies into your own life or the management of your business is sure to relieve a significant amount of that detrimental stress, and allow you to perform your best (and therefore allow your business to perform well, too!)
Read this next: How Burnout From Work Can Start Affecting Your Health
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Many times these posts are generated from a group and peer process so are posted as open theme and drafted content