Join me as I explore the topic of Stress Relief for Entrepreneurs and get ready for this month's Business Animal interviews!

Entrepreneurial Pep Talk: Stress Relief

By Kimberly Beer

The Business Animal interviews this month are going to be around finding stress relief as an entrepreneur. Because of scheduling, I’m going to do my Pep Talk episode now and hopefully inspire you tune into the interviews on this same topic.

I’ve heard the adage, “An entrepreneur would rather work 18 hours a day for themselves than 8 for someone else.”

I deeply resemble that remark.

That said, I have many times fantasized about that 8-hour job — and the freedom that I think would come at the end of the 8 hour shift where I could go home, play with my horses, take a walk, write on my book, do whatever my heart desires without my brain being largely absorbed by my business.

Let’s be real — work-life balance is a different set of challenges when you own a business. I don’t know about you, but it is virtually impossible for me to temporarily completely turn off how I’m tuned into the channel of my business. At best, the noise becomes background, not foreground. It is always there. And my mind will reach out for it even when I’m not doing something business related.

And if I’m having an intrusive thought about my business during a leisure activity there’s a good chance it’s either highly growth oriented or it’s directed at solving a problem that has become so uncomfortable it has gotten my attention outside the office.

Both paths bring stress.

Now here’s the thing about stress: our minds and bodies are uniquely built to handle stress. Both your brain and your body have all kinds of alert systems, support systems, and regulatory systems to recognize, handle, and dissipate stress.

The thing that neither your brain or your body was built to do is handle continual stress. I believe the mental stress we are under in our culture, day-to-day life, let alone with the addition of being a small business owner can be overwhelming to the whole system.

It doesn’t matter if your business is a side hustle you keep around for “mad money” or supports your entire family and the families of your employees, the stress to perform, to meet expectations, to do better, and to run a business when you may or may not have all the awareness to do so with confidence, is a heavy weight to carry.

I won’t get into what chronic stress does to bodies. I believe most of us have heard the statistics and, if you’re more curious than that, there’s a whole hole you can follow that Google rabbit down to discover more. I know what stress and trauma does to minds (which rains down the body as well), because I see it on the regular in my Gestalt and hypnosis clients.

What’s more, I know it personally after 30 years of running a small business.

As entrepreneurs, we are born problem solvers. The challenge is to solve our own stress problem without that solution adding yet more stress to our lives.

Let me tell you a slightly irrational story.

When I was in my 40s, I began to recognize how stress was playing out its effects on my body and mind in some not-so-nice ways. I went looking for answers and the first one I found was meditation. I had hired a coach to help me with accountability, which in hindsight was a clear indication my stress had teamed up with my childhood trauma. (The needing accountability part, not the coach part). The coach recognized some aspect of this and, for her, meditation had worked relatively well in calming her mind and body to the point it could function better. She had built a business that included the practice for her clients.

Sound familiar? I’ll bet a lot of you built businesses around using the tools you found to solve the problems in your own lives.

The problem for me was: meditation, the universal remedy for stress relief, did not work for me. The realization of this fact and the added pressure to not be so stressed out about stress relief compounded my stress level. Talk about spiraling.

I became a meditation drop out.

I’ll circle back to the lesson in all this in a moment, I promise. Before that, however, I’d like to share another antidote from an early episode of this podcast where Cara shared that she didn’t like it when people offered her a bubble bath as a solution to her problems. “it’s painful to me when self-care gets reduced to bubble baths and candles. It minimizes the struggle we are facing instead of acknowledging the real issues causing the stress.” She said this to me during the planning of that episode.

The truth is the prescription for finding stress relief is incredibly individual. Please know, if what works for everyone else doesn’t work for you in this arena, you are still capable of getting stress relief.

How do you find what works for you? is a great question. Experimentation is a good place to start. One thing I love about people, is they are full of ideas. So is Google. Try them all.

Also, and I can’t overstate this: stop adding stress to your life.

The hard part of that adage is knowing when you’re in a hole. It sounds easy, but I’ve found myself looking up from the bottom of a dark pit wondering how it got this deep this fast more than once. When I do become aware, it’s often not the depth of the hole that scares me, it’s the amount of energy I put into digging it! And, in so doing, creating myself a bigger problem and more stress. Ug.

Here's a suggestion you can take or leave: What if you kept a daily journal for one month. Every evening, write down the things you did that day and give each, one of three grades: stressful, neutral, joyful. At the end of the month, I’ll bet you’ll have a pretty good idea of where you’re digging those stressful holes deeper.

Although I full recognize you can’t Marie Kondo your Quickbooks and throw it in the trash because it doesn’t spark joy, you now have a path to understand where your stress is coming from and how you might be able to reduce it. For each of those stressful tasks, ask yourself: how does this stress me? Why does it bring me stress? How could I lessen the stress in this area of my life? In this particular case, would hiring an accountant or, if you have an accountant, a more full-service accountant, reduce your personal stress? Does the stress come from examining your money, or lack thereof? Would working with a coach to look at your beliefs around money be helpful?

Beliefs, my friends, are often some of the highest stressors we encounter in our lives. Carrying around ones that you took on from someone else or that no longer serves you is decidedly counterproductive.

Remember, as an entrepreneur, you have problem solving prowess. Use it!

I promised you I’d circle back around to my meditation practice and now is a good time to do that. I failed at meditation in my 40s because I didn’t have enough personal, self-awareness yet to be able to be quiet within my own being. Back then, I hadn’t done my personal work. I didn’t even know what personal peace might look like so how on earth could I expect myself to find it?

In our culture, stress is valued when it is presented in the right way. Ambition, dedication, perseverance, are revered. All of these can be stressful and especially so when taken to the extreme. That extreme can look like success — but inside, it is putting immense pressure on the entire human system of a being.

Please recognize that you were built for this — and you need rest. You need time to allow for your natural resilience to find coalescence and a pattern in your life that can support that process over and over. That is the goal of stress relief.

The answer is highly individual. My challenge to you is to find and implement a set of stress relief practices that work for you and then practice them like your life depends on it.

My guests this month, who I think you’ll find both inspiring and practical, will be sharing with you how to take small steps toward reducing the amount stress in your business and life. Please take away what works for you and leave what doesn’t behind.