You’re stressed, maybe anxious. You’ve got lots on your plate. You’re fighting fire every day. But surely this is just a day in the life of an entrepreneur, right? Shouldn’t this be normal? Yet, there are some who struggle emotionally and try to keep up a brave front, not revealing just how intensely pressuring it is until they lose it and become unhinged.
Okay, I’ll have to admit, I’m a psychologist. I’ve seen thousands of people through their anxiety, and while many employees of large organizations have encountered a significant jump in their anxiety levels over the COVID period, business founders and entrepreneurs are also experiencing heightened anxiety.
And… I’m a bit of a wreck myself sometimes. Much of the burden is taken away from you when you have a large team, which was what happened when I first began my journey to an 8-figure business. It was not bad, considering that this approach saw a rise in relatively competent teams. But after I started to do things on my own, I developed certain anxiety. I had limited resources and had to cope with the pressure myself.
It ain’t pretty at times when I get anxious. And I remember times when anxiety was at its peak. I’d head down to conduct workshops for my corporate clients and have a massive amount of tension build up on my way there, I’d feel like I was about to burst.
Strangely, this experience of being a victim of anxiety has guided me to connect better with other people who experience the same thing but don’t necessarily have the right tools to cope with anxiety.
During this time, I’ve also had the good fortune of working with high-performing entrepreneurs and seeing how debilitating anxiety can be. For instance, in a recent series of talks I was invited to speak at, I managed to help many people who claimed they had ‘low energy.’ This was nothing more than a symptom of many deeper things, including family trauma, relationship stress, and even sexual identity.
I’ll explain a little more in later sections.
However, anxiety can also be amplified when scaling due to a lack of foresight in your systems and people. After all, building a high-performance team often carries with it the pressure of managing them… even though they can support the demands of the business itself. The common challenge of blind spots often makes one feel even more uncertain whether we have it all together in the first place.
Fret not – anxiety is a response to an external trigger, and once you know how to work with it, it often is a way to know yourself better and grow. In this guide, I’d like to put forward some ideas about how to unlock yourself from the clutches of anxiety from the perspective of a practicing therapist.
How anxiety affects our lives.
As a founder of an enterprise, your mental well-being matters. Without it, your business can dwindle into non-existence. You might damage your team unknowingly. You are likely to sabotage your success in the long term. This thought itself might give you anxiety! Here are some other consequences of not dealing with anxiety.
You find it more difficult to make decisions.
I had a chance to speak to an 8-figure entrepreneur who experienced anxiety attacks that were off the chart. His team found him volatile and unapproachable. Yet, he was high-performing. When I had the chance to speak to him, one thing was clear – there was so much mental junk in him, and he jumped from one thought to another, being distracted by his distraction.
You start to lose what you love.
As an entrepreneur, you founded your company with vision and hope. The problem is that your work turns into firefighting anxiety that amplifies on a daily basis and you end up losing love for what you started. When emotional states are disrupted due to anxiety attacks, you often cannot get to do your work in a smooth flow that used to make the things you do enjoyable.
You might spiral into a worse situation.
You might not know that anxiety is often a precursor to other kinds of mental disorders if the pressure stays there. I’ve known people who don’t deal with their anxiety and develop depression over time, which is an even more debilitating state.
Overcoming Anxiety
Over the years I’ve advised entrepreneurs to seek help if they have debilitating anxiety. As a therapist and an executive coach, I know that many of the behaviors that are deemed unacceptable by any leader often stem from some kind of psychological or cognitive trauma. But to the average person, an anxious leader who gets suspicious of his or her team’s intentions can come across as a negative leader who is also damaging the psychological safety of the team.
The trouble is that whenever one encounters such situations, the last thing they do is seek help. It seems to be a social stigma to have to find help for emotional issues. However, just like ignoring a sprain in an ankle, not seeking some kind of professional input is likely to let the problem persist at best, and aggravate the situation at worse.
There are 3 ways to deal with such anxiety.
- Hiring a good team
- Building a good team culture
- Mindful meditations
Hiring a Good Team
As we know, the workload that exists in any kind of business tends to build over time. As an entrepreneur, it is very likely that without a good team, you are going to face a tremendous amount of stress moving forward. The problem that most beginning entrepreneurs have is understanding the trade-off between revenues and hiring good people. Very often, it seems like you have to create a huge chunk of your cash flow for someone whom you have no clue can or cannot perform.
However, it is very clear that progress cannot be made without people. So, make sure that you look out for people to form a good team. If you are someone who likes good leadership, then seek out people who are able to enjoy what you struggle at doing.
We created a detailed guidebook to help you with your hiring processes, and invite you to download this if you are thinking of hiring world-class team members.
Building a Good Team Culture
The next way to reduce your anxiety will be to establish a solid team culture. The start of this is to ensure that you build a foundational philosophy for your employees to thrive. When you are able to build a foundation of good communication with your team members, they are more likely to understand you. When you are in a state of anxiety, they may be more likely to pick up the slack if you need to rest.
In the book Super Scaling, we mention the idea of Mastery, meaning, and autonomy. These three aspects of work need to be included in order for team members to want to be part of this team. Aside from this, a cycle of good work needs to be enforced to build a solid team and a good company culture. It consists of five areas:
Purpose. Your employees will need to understand your vision. Without this, they won’t know whether or not they can fit in, or whether they have the capacity or even drive to want to help.
Ownership. Instill a sense of ownership in your team. Designing interdependencies within your team will typically enable your team to talk to one another and also relieve the pressure off you.
Iteration. You may have noticed that a team that goes through tough times tends to stick together. Hopefully, that does not include you. In order for teams to go through tough times, they need to put themselves under some kind of pressure. This could include stretch goals that require them to plan for certain events that are increasingly difficult. Once they are able to go through this together, they will learn about their strengths and weaknesses. By going through an effective debrief iteratively, you can acknowledge and address weaknesses, allowing the team to work on them by supporting one another. This basically means that you have opportunities to communicate and develop a sense of connection, clarity, and consistency.
Education. Any member of a team who is able to learn and share important learning skills within their job context tends to progress. This kind of progress is sometimes even more important than salary progression. Take time to establish a strong education stance within your business. During our weekly meetings, we encourage team members to share their learnings to enrich the team.
Recognition. I’ve met quite a number of business owners who are “praise-stingy”. To them, praise is a bad thing because they think that their employees will feel even more entitled to higher and higher salaries. While that may not be uncommon as a personal desire, it is also true that with a more enlightened culture, people who do good work are likely to generate good results for the organization, and therefore should receive equitable rewards.
Mindful Meditations
Mindfulness is a wonderful activity that you can immerse yourself in at the start of the day. Personally, I’ve utilized mindfulness so frequently that I often find myself squeezing 2 to 3 minutes out of my daily schedule here and there to sit down and just get myself into a mindful state.
The simplest way to describe mindfulness is about shifting your attention from being totally unaware to being immersed in awareness. For example, I would spend these two to three minutes simply relaxing and paying attention to muscle tension in my body.
Another way to spend these mindful moments would be to notice your breathing. Just spending a few minutes and doing this often relaxes the tension and allows you to come to an awareness of yourself, thereby relieving you of autopilot behaviors.
Being triggered by an anxiety attack often comes with thinking about the future. When you use mindfulness, you detach yourself from anything else other than being in the present. This trains your brain to be more present-focused rather than expend energy thinking about future probabilities.
Remember that meditating mindfully helps you to adjust brain wave patterns. By utilizing your breath, there is a conscious way for you to adjust your brain waves. When you’re utilizing certain types of breathing methods that heighten your energy, such as the Wim Hof method, you end up intensifying your brain waves so that they are more energized for the activities you need to do subsequently.
However, if you are experiencing a high amount of anxiety, slow alpha brainwave meditation will be very helpful for you in order to entrain your brain to become more attuned to relaxation and calmness. I often consider this a baseline state for all entrepreneurs.
Technically, you can utilize thousands of guided meditations that are available on free apps such as Headspace. Take some time to select your favorite meditation, and then use it to spend some quality time being with yourself!
Conclusion
Getting ahead is stressful. The fact you are an entrepreneur tells me that you have hope for the future, and seek to create something from nothing. That’s an admirable direction. In this sense, having anxiety when you are in the business is doing more than just the business. It is actually the business functioning like a mirror to reveal what you need to work on. Why is self-awareness important? Founders are the nexus of the business, and without them, the business will always encounter blockages.
Through a combination of help from professionals in the field, and also through educating oneself in terms of mental practices that can support positive well-being, entrepreneurs can establish the right foundations toward success so that even in an uncertain environment, the can-do spirit guides the business scaling efforts. In spite of anxiety, such approaches can still support you in your efforts to scale and achieve freedom!
