By Bizna Brand Analyst
As an entrepreneur, you battle uncertainty daily. Will you make enough money? Will you lose clients? Will the market suddenly shift and cause a change in your business plan? While studies have shown some stress can be helpful and even fuel your success, when stress turns into anxiety, it can be detrimental both to your mental health and to the health of your business.
A little concern about how thins are happening is totally okay. After all, you can’t just assume things for the sake of keeping yourself happy. You have to tackle daily issues. But when stress crosses the line from being helpful to harmful is when it begins to impair your ability to enjoy life and running your business.
So, how do you prevent stress from crossing the line from provoking success to fueling anxiety?
1. Balance your need for perfection.
The old adage “in every failure there’s success and in every success there is failure” certainly holds true, but individuals who suffer from stress often hold the belief that everything has to be done right. They succeed at 100 percent, but fail at 97 percent.
While there’s nothing wrong with aiming high, perfectionism causes you to look at the world in all-or-nothing, black-or-white terms. This kind of thinking results in exacerbated stress levels and can be debilitating in our working lives. Imagine if you expect your product to be absolutely perfect. It may never make it to market.
2. Stop being a people pleaser.
Others, too, can feed your anxiety. Seeking to impress everyone you meet and being devastated if you feel you’ve disappointed someone means that your self-worth is defined by others’ opinions of you. This type of thinking can be debilitating, especially for entrepreneurs. Individuals who suffer from low self-esteem frequently doubt themselves and have difficulty making decisions because they’re too afraid of the consequences and what others may think of them.
3. Give up the illusion of control.
Of course, we know rationally that it’s impossible to have control over everything that happens to us in our lives, but individuals who suffer from anxiety often have an incessant need to for control. The problem is the search for a guarantee that things will turn out the way they envision will only serve to make them feel out of control and fuel their anxiety.
4. Practice relaxation techniques.
Therapists recommend deep breathing (breathing from the diaphragm to send a boost of oxygen to the brain) and progressive muscle relaxation (slowly tensing then relaxing muscle groups) to calm the body’s stress response and help prevent an anxiety. You can also o out to do activities that you love. This will not only help you relax but also give you time to come up with fresh ideas.
