How to Prevent, Manage, and Reduce Stress as a Business Owner
When I (Lyndon) was a junior in high school, my first real girlfriend was a girl from out of town. One weekend when she was in town, I was so excited to meet up with her at the beach to watch the sunset… and she broke my heart.
On the drive home, as the weather changed and started to rain, I realized I didn’t want to talk to anyone; I didn’t want to numb out. The only thing I wanted to do was go running.
It was on that run in the pitch black freezing rain on narrow country roads that I learned - I process emotions physically.
A few years ago, Jo read a book that broke down the concept that rest & recovery generally looks needs to be the opposite of what caused the emotions/stress. If you work on a computer with your brain, recovery is physical in nature (eg: walking, working out, standing desks, etc). If you do manual labor (or carry a camera), then recovery is mental (eg: reading, TV, coffee with your BFF, etc).
Many people who work a 9-5 have one big luxury that business owners don’t: they can clock out, turn off, or even walk away from the stress of the day.
Over the past few years, Jo & I have started collecting techniques for preventing, managing, and even decreasing stress as business owners. None of these will be perfect fits for you; take them more as inspo to give you ideas of what could help.
Part 1: How to prevent stress as a business owner
You can’t.
At least not all of it. You’ve traded “stability” (or the mirage of it) for a much higher-risk career that also can result in much higher rewards.
What you can do is proactively minimize the number of things that create stress for you, and build your own structure/predictability.
Put your routines in your calendar
Week one of starting your business, you were excited about the freedom of controlling your own schedule and all the possibilities. By week 53, it’s not uncommon for people to start to wish someone would just tell them what to do every day, so that it’d be one less decision they had to make.
What this looks like:
- Actually putting everything in a calendar, Apple iCal or Google Calendar are the most common tools, and both have good mobile apps
- Put your personal non-negotiables in blocks on your calendar (eg: dinner with your family 5:30-7pm every day, or morning workout from 7-8 am)
- Designate when weekly repeatable work tasks will happen (eg: CEO Days, or client project focus before lunch)
- Update your schedulers, email footers, and auto replies to proactively make people aware of when they’ll hear from you (eg: “I read & reply to emails on Tuesdays & Thursdays between 10am & 4pm est”)
- Follow. The. Schedule. (You can write emails/texts whenever you want, but schedule them to send during your communication blocks)
This allows you to sit and enjoy your coffee every morning without being stressed about what you’ll do that day; it’s been pre-decided so that you can spend time on actual value-add decisions for your business.
Rank order your priorities
Everyone has priorities. But I’d bet on any given day you add a new priority because, of course, it’s just as important as everything else.
I had a manager in corporate who once told me, “When everything is a priority, that means nothing is.”
Your work week only has so many hours in it, and I can guarantee you won’t make progress on all of your priorities. So which ones do you actually work on?
Put your priorities in order of importance, even if this is as simple as a note on your phone called “priorities” with a numbered list of all your priorities. And anytime you add a priority, you have to decide what position in the list it deserves to be, because it will “delay” something else from getting done, and this is all about consciously deciding once how important it is, rather than second-guessing every time you work on something if it’s the right thing to work on.
You can even stack these two things together and put a 10-minute check-in with yourself on your calendar at the beginning of the week to confirm that you still agree with the ranking of your priorities as you start the week.
Set decision dates
For a lot of people, there’s more anxiety caused by the anticipation of a thing than actually doing the thing.
If you make a decision too early, you’ll have stress that you made a decision too early and limited your options. But if you wait too long, you'll be worried that you missed out.
In college, you had a syllabus that defined when projects were due, and for most people, that allowed them to not stress about (or even forget) things that were in the future, while still learning what they needed to throughout the semester to complete the assignments.
When an opportunity or decision is brought to your attention, either make a decision immediately or schedule a date for when you will make the decision (based on when it’s actually needed). For everybody, this is slightly different, but for things like “I want to launch a podcast next quarter,” there are some things that would actually limit your options if you made the decision too early, so schedule it on your calendar or a reminder and don’t worry about it until you actually need to.
There’s also the flip side – perfectionists that will keep delaying a decision… the decision date forces you to make a decision and move on, because in reality, it’s probably good enough already.
Part 2: How to manage stress as a business owner
Some seasons suck. You see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still a ways off. Managing is about getting you to a place where you can make meaningful changes to remove the stress.
From personal experience, trying to use (just) these as long-term solutions just means starting to stack more and more to manage if you’re not solving the underlying thing contributing to your stress.
Learn what your stress “signs” are
When I’m overwhelmed, my (unproductive) Instagram scrolling time increases. And I’ve started to see that as a warning sign that something isn’t right.
Other common ones are:
- Delaying tasks you used to enjoy
- Shorter “fuse” where you get irritated with people
- Getting sick more often (or taking longer to recover from little stuff)
Pay attention and knock off early, or move around what you’re focused on that day/week so that you can meet your body where it’s at. Also, start to notice the things that are causing this, because over time, you’ll want to cut back, discontinue, or outsource them.
Think/create before you consume
Most people check Instagram and/or email before they even get out of bed. Maybe keep your phone on do-not-disturb until you’ve had a chance to have a cup of coffee, take a shower, or read a morning devotional. Then once you’re centered & grounded, check in.
If you’re a thought leader or content creator, I’d recommend at least one or two days a week to delay checking notifications until after lunch so that you can do your own deep thought work before being influenced by what’s happening in the world or with your clients.
Pro tip: on iPhones, you can turn off the red bubbles on apps with notifications when do-not-disturb (or any other focus mode) is turned on, so that you can still use your phone to check the weather, do a meditation, or open your bible/book apps without seeing the red dots.
Get physical
As we started this, there is a huge mind-body connection. Oftentimes, it doesn’t feel like you have time to go outside for a 10-minute walk because you’re so busy, when that’s the thing that will actually make you more productive than literally anything else you could do.
It doesn’t have to be super huge (or expensive). Here are a couple of easy options:
- Habit stack a walk to your lunch break
- Take phone meetings while on walks
- Standing desks
- Keep a dumb bell by your desk so instead of playing with a fidget toy, you “play” with a weight
- Join a walking/running/biking group to build community
- Do a free yoga from YouTube/Peloton so that you don’t have to leave your house
- Meditate (I used to think it was a joke until I did 400 days straight, and it really helped)
It doesn’t really matter what you do, but if you can build a habit of doing at least 1 physical activity per day, and getting outside once a day (off your devices), it’ll go shockingly far at calming down your stress.
Part 3: How to reduce your stress as a business owner
Yeah, I know, is that even possible?
The answer is yes. But it doesn’t come free. This is definitely a place where the Pareto Principle applies, the idea that 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes.
You just have to identify what the few things contributing to the majority of your stress are and get rid of those.
Audit your clients
Is one or a small subset of your clients causing you the majority of your stress?
What would it take to replace the income you get from working with them?
If you made it priority 1, how quickly could you bring in that income and part ways with those few clients?
It may sound stupid to part ways with a client who is happily paying you money, but if they’re taking an outsized amount of your time, effort, or stress, it may actually be costing you money to keep them if you could be working with multiple clients in the time it takes to work with just them.
Audit your comparisons/benchmarks
In the book Gap & Gain by Benjamin Hardy, he talks about the idea that if you’re walking across the desert and looking at the horizon, no matter how far you walk, you’ll never get any closer (“the Gap”).
If you’re comparing yourself to everyone you see online, your best friend, or the thought leader you look up to, you’ll never be doing as well as they are.
Focus on the progress you’ve made and the specific goals you have (“the Gain”). Everything else is just noise & inspo.
Audit your time/tasks
Over time, we collect “best practices” and routines that solved a specific problem. But then it becomes familiar & comfortable, and even after the reason we started doing that task is long gone, we're still doing that task the same way (this includes offers).
Much like if you stay in the past too long, you can become a Kodak in business (once a famous camera company that refused to adapt to digital until it was too late), you can think about your time/tasks the same way. Maybe you’re in much need of a major innovation in where you’re spending your time in your business or how you’re serving your customers, and you subconsciously know this, and it’s causing you stress that you haven’t changed yet.
If it doesn’t serve a purpose, getting you closer to your goals or priorities, you may have to say goodbye to that comfort routine that’s now just holding you back.
The end?
Yeah… this got kinda long.
And this is only some of the top hits; we touch on many of these in most of our coaching sessions with our clients. Along with continually iterating on what we’re doing for ourselves to proactively prevent stress, actively mitigate stress, and eliminate as much stress as possible. Wanna go deeper on any of these topics? Send us a DM on IG @joandlyndon, or if you need help building a plan to reduce the stress your business is causing you, you can see our coaching options here.