Here’s a conundrum – your job involves facilitating an awesome experience for your clients. Yet you’re a business owner, with bills to pay, responsibilities to contractors and employees, taking care of a thousand little details that make up any one day.
Your business is busy. You experience stress. So what happens next?
Dealing with stress
I frequently see health professionals go out of their way to avoid putting themselves in situations which may lead to stress. I find this puzzling and somewhat bizarre because, surely, the best equipped to deal with stress are those of us who make a living teaching others how to negotiate stress.
When running a business, stress is somewhat inevitable. Particularly when we’re seeking to create something remarkable, certain stress-inducing activities are essential.
Things like:
- Starting conversations with strangers
- Introducing ourselves to influential people
- Learning new things
- Having difficult conversations
- Enforcing our terms and conditions
- Asking clients to commit
- Asking for the sale.
All these things can be stressful, sometimes massively so. Compound that by our desire to be authentic, to act with integrity, to not be greedy or covert your competitors’ achievements, and we have the perfect storm for creating stress.
Minimising the impact of stress
Say a woman is giving birth. It’s a strange phenomenon that, in between contractions of intense pain wholly unlike anything ever experienced before, peace is possible. A woman well-equipped to deal with labour knows that she needs to rest and conserve her energy as best she can in between contractions.
I think of stress like this: we put ourselves into stressful situations; we experience a multitude of uncomfortable and downright painful emotions; we work long days which we would prefer to avoid.
Then we use our skills as health professionals to return to peace as quickly as possible.
The privilege of stress
The privilege of our particular stress is that we are able to choose it. And that we have the skills to alleviate it.
It’s also our privilege to earn an income running a business, whether as a solopreneur or business owner, a privilege which we squander when we avoid stress at all costs.
Those in developing nations who struggle to make enough in one day to feed their families with nothing left over do not have the privilege of avoiding stress. They don’t have the luxury to worry about integrity, to apply yogic philosophy to business competitors, or to avoid hustling at all costs because it’s “out of alignment with our values”.
Someone living hand-to-mouth is preoccupied only with getting through the day, not dreaming up a better, more fulfilling tomorrow. The ability to sustain ourselves and provide for our families is a privilege. If your business is not sustainable and you’re not making a profit, then someone else is paying for you.
Work without stress
Two men are painting a wall. One is young, one is old. The old man is cajoling the younger to work faster, paint better. The young man speeds up but starts to experience discomfort, then stress, then pain.
He stops and asks the older man what his secret is to working so fast. The older man replied, “I work faster without becoming stressed.”
I think of this fable often when I’m feeling overwhelmed, stressed or strung out. I have two options – I can bury my head in the sand, duck my responsibilities and run away. Or I can try to work faster with less stress.
I figure, of all the people out there, we, as health professionals, can do this. We’ve got this. We’ll be fine.
