Building Your Personal Resilience and Wellbeing as an Entrepreneur: 5 Steps | Eastern North Carolina Now

Jessica Fender

   Entrepreneurs experience mental health issues that often go unnoticed. Recent studies have indicated that the majority of people in business are sleep-deprived and overworked. This has led to widespread concerns around the wellbeing of entrepreneurs. While it is important to hustle and the benefits of resilience are many, but in the process, mental wellbeing cannot be ignored. How you deal with the setbacks in your business is what defines the rest of your business journey. In the face of threats and difficulties, maintaining your calm and remembering why you started and how far you have come helps you stand your ground. Whether you are just starting out your new business or have a well-established one already, a poor mental health condition can be a hurdle to your dreams. Needless to say, when you prioritize your mental health, not only are you able to work with peace of mind, but your efficacy increases multifold. Here are five of the many ways one can build resilience and also keep their mental health in check.

    1) Treat mistakes as learning opportunities

    Who does not make mistakes? We all have had done things we should not have done, things that we still sometimes regret doing. It is either you keep pondering over past mistakes and ruin your present life, or learn from them and do better. One's mistakes teach them a lot. They prepare you to move forward as a learned individual- who is capable of using a better approach to handle the same situations that earlier seemed too difficult to be in. Failures or mistakes are nothing but learning opportunities for you to learn and grow. Having gone through a phase where you could not give your best serves only as a reminder to continue to be resilient and ace the next opportunity you get.

    2) Take a note of how you feel

    It is very important that you consider your feelings to be valid and just. Ignoring your feelings may lead to bottling up of your emotions, and that is not good for your mental wellbeing. If you feel stressed out, or overwhelmed, it is crucial that you pause for a moment and acknowledge what is causing the problem. Business owners are often faced with negative feelings- of stress, anxiety and uncertainty. The first step towards prioritizing your emotional as well as mental wellbeing is to take into consideration whatever you feel.

    "Whether you feel positive or have negative emotions, take note of it- doing this enables you to keep a track of what made you happy and what led you to feel sad and stressed out." - says Peter Oberlton, a professional content writer and editor at Writingfalcons.

    If required, you should not hesitate to seek the help of a professional therapist, who can guide you all along on how to evaluate and manage your emotions well.

    3) Make connections

    Connecting with people can open a wide range of opportunities for you. Most importantly, these connections help you sustain and reduce pressure in stressful situations. Relationships that foster trust, give role models, and provide encouragement, according to the American Psychological Association, can assist to enhance a person's resilience. So, how wonderful it is to have the support and love of people while you achieve your goals. Entrepreneurs tend to feel lonely and fear uncertainty, thus, restricting themselves from reaching out to people for help or to share what they feel in stressful times. This is where having valuable and trusted connections help. For they not only assist you to bounce back from the challenges you face, but also provide you with the necessary social support.

    4) Learn not to worry

    Learn not to care what others think about you. Even if you fail a task or are not able to give your best to something you prepared hard for, just give yourself a pat on the back for trying. It is not always that one can execute all the plans that they made, for sometimes initially made plans may not work out. That said, you should not worry if something that you intended to happen could not be done due to whatever reasons, as you can always try another approach to it. It is a lot easier said than done, but this is the way to go about it. When you do not worry or care about not being good enough, you can focus on yourself and the vulnerabilities that make you unique and stand out from the crowd. Your success in your business is not dependent upon how perfectionist of a person you are, but how resilient and self-confident you are. As long as you keep trying and working towards your goals, nothing else matters, especially not anyone's perception of you. Many business owners face a lot of challenges before establishing their brands and getting acclaimed recognition.

    5) Focus on yourself

    There is nothing you cannot achieve by practice. Though it takes time and perseverance for someone to get back onto the track after facing a major setback in their entrepreneurship journey, practice can undoubtedly help. When you focus on yourself and work towards developing your skills, you can improve your business to a great extent. Believing in yourself and your capabilities is one of the key steps towards maintaining your mental wellbeing. Business owners often ignore this part owing to how invested they are in other things, Not believing in yourself and focusing on the things that do not matter in the long run does not do any good either for your business or wellbeing. Therefore, while keeping your curiosity and determination alive, you should not lose hope in yourself. Additionally, avoid hanging out and staying around people who bring your energy and confidence down. If you are starting your new business journey, many naysayers will cross your path and advise you to give up. However, it should not affect you and interfere with your motivation to achieve what you want to.

    Always remember that the most important and valuable aspect of having a successful business is to maintain a healthy work-life balance. With big professional responsibilities come the need to prioritize one's emotional wellbeing as well as mental health. It is equally necessary that you thrive as an entrepreneur and also stay mentally and physically fit - for both are required to sustain in the competitive space that the business world is. With the above-mentioned tips, you can easily achieve a perfect work-life balance that is otherwise very hard to have. Just focus on yourself, believe in your capabilities, and grab the right opportunities whenever you get one, and you can become the better entrepreneur that you always desired to be.