“Life” happens to everyone. Even if you don’t experience extreme hardships, there are still unexpected family emergencies, you or kids getting sick, smaller incidents, etc. None’s life is filled with rose petals making it easy to go through it.
But somehow, some people, when starting their business, forget about that and have this “entrepreneurial ideal” of the sun always shining.
On the contrary, when you’re an entrepreneur, and the business depends on you to run, such unexpected events can create a lot of personal stress and potential loss of income. Unlike in a 9-5 where maybe you have paid sick days, or even can take an extended leave of absence to deal with whatever comes your way and still have a job to go back to when running your own business, that cushion might not exist.
That’s why being able to keep showing up consistently in your business in order not to jeopardize your income and with it creating more stress is so paramount.
How do you do that? Here are the 4 key steps to managing your personal stress while running a business.
Take care of yourself first.
To run a strong business and support your loved ones in any aspect, you need to be healthy and strong first. Getting enough sleep and rest to recharge, eating healthy wholesome foods, staying active, and nourishing your mind & soul are not luxuries but non-negotiables for you to function at your best.
It’s much easier to handle stress and think clearly when quick decisions and pivots are needed when you’re nourished, well-rested, and grounded. Establishing healthy habits in your life ill allow you to adopt and maintain all this with ease and consistency.
Develop robust systems in your business
If you’ve already been running your business for a year or two and haven’t set-up any supporting systems, you need to start doing it now.
First, ensure you have a back-up for all the critical information.
Second, automate as much as possible so certain things “run themselves” without your constant oversight.
Next, ensure that you have great relationships with everyone who provides critical support to your business: employees or outsourced tasks, suppliers, vendors, etc. Build these relationships on mutual trust, work ethic, and integrity. With that, establish clear expectations of everyone’s roles, provide them with tools, training, and clear direction.
They can help you run your business when you’re unable to do so from time to time. You should take it as far as creating and training everyone on your business continuity plan. It can be as simple as a listing of who does what when unexpected events happen.
Establish an emergency fund
Unless you are already financially free, you should have an emergency fund. It’s an X amount of quickly available cash that will not only allows your business function without income for a minimum of 3-6 months but also will cover your personal expenses.
And yes, I know that it might be hard to achieve but just like personal savings, but it is indispensable to get to. Having such a fund will reduce your stress and allow you to focus on whatever emergency you need to deal with at the time of need.
Become proactive and a highly performing CEO
Lastly, the same way you set up healthy habits to support your well-being, you must set-up high-performance routines and habits that will allow you to be highly effective and proactive in our business. Both support and complement each other.
Strategy and weekly planning are the first two vital must-have high-performance habits.
Why? Because strategy allows you to focus only on your business’s most essential things and not give in to “time-wasters” keeping you busy but unproductive. In the time of personal emergencies, it creates time, allowing you to switch to dealing with them without jeopardizing the business as much.
Moreover, a weekly planning habit puts you in charge of your time. Days and other people’s agenda’s no longer run you. You control what you do when you do it, and how. So again, when unexpected things happen, you can quickly understand how this will affect your week and be able to proactively rearrange things (contact clients, suppliers, employees, or vendors) and tend to the emergency.
The next high-performance keys are your mindset and ability to make quick decisions.
Keeping your cool when “things happen” instead of panicking allows you to better assess the situation. You can better remember all the critical things you need to arrange in your business to focus on dealing with personal life. Making fast decisions in those moments is a must.
And if right now you’re overwhelmed by the amount of “must have’s” to set up and are not sure if it’s even possible, I can assure you it is. We’re capable of waaay more than we give ourselves credit for. Sometimes, we just need a little push.
Read this piece from one of my clients and see for yourself:
After trying every productivity strategy, I read about online with lacklustre results, I found Maggie. In the same month, I started receiving coaching from Maggie; I doubled my income even in the midst of a family emergency. After another family emergency came up in the second month of coaching, with her guidance, I doubled my income again. In the third month, I maintained my new income level, hired a staff member, and scheduled myself completely for the month ahead with plans to expand my business and do some more hiring. Beyond that, her insights go so far beyond building good habits. She has a way of completely shattering your perception of what you think you can achieve, then replacing it with mind-blowing possibilities that you suddenly realize are completely achievable. Those new mindsets alone have taken me farther than I could have imagined. This is how she has changed my life for the better at least three times over. It happened so often, I started losing count.
Jenni, founder of WP Pros(e)
So if you feel like you’re ready to step up your game and establish proper strategy and habits in your business to grow it in the best of time and also to able to run it (and even grow it 😉) in not so great times, then we might be a for to be working together.
But wait, working with me is not for everyone. I only work with women who are ready and want to grow. If you’re 100 % committed to doing the work and want to invest in yourself and your business, then let’ stalk and see how I can help you. Step 1 – Click here to schedule a free discovery call with me now.
