Business Owner Burnout: 7 Tips to Overcome It
When you started your business as a new entrepreneur, you were passionate about making it a success. You were inspired and excited to do what you’re good at and be your own boss. But with time, running the business and dealing with all the challenges becomes harder. Your enthusiasm wanes, and you soon succumb to business owner burnout.
You find it hard to turn your brain off from work when you are so vested in success. You dwell on the setbacks that you see as personal failures. And you don’t give yourself the breaks you need.
When this happens, your tasks start draining your energy rather than igniting your passion, which is not what you signed up for as an entrepreneur!
The good news is that there are steps you can take to break the downward spiral without giving up on your dreams. It requires you to make new habits and break old ones. It also takes discipline and brutal honesty to examine where you have been going wrong and take steps to correct it.
This journey can be challenging. But as an entrepreneur, hard work doesn’t scare you. Instead, it’s something you embrace.
So, let’s talk about business owner burnout…
Why Does Business Owner Burnout Happen?
Business owner burnout is so common because it’s easy to fall into. It happens for many reasons, but here are the top 5:
- Struggling with work-life balance: Business owners often have difficulty separating home life from work life. Always putting the business first makes your home life and relationships with partners suffer.
- Suffering from lack of accomplishment or success in business: Business owners frequently work too hard to reach a standard of success and experience financial stress when their business is struggling.
- Trying to control (and do) too much: Business owners tend to take on an unrealistic amount of work that could instead be delegated.
- Identifying too much with the business: When a business owner allows their self-worth to become dependent on their business’s success, the failures become personal too.
- Relying on the adrenalin rush that comes with a new enterprise: The business owner can’t find satisfaction in the business’s long-term success.
Why Is Burnout Bad?
It may seem obvious, but it’s worth pointing out that business owner burnout can lead to undesirable consequences for you and your business.
1. It Can Affect Your Business
As a business owner, you want to inspire your employees and set a great example. But appearing irritable, distracted, and exhausted tends to elicit similar behaviors in your team and harm morale. Moreover, exhaustion and stress can lead to poor decision-making and business failures.
2. It Can Affect Your Relationships
Your family needs you! You want to see your children grow up. Not only that, but when work becomes all absorbing, and you aren’t present at home, your relationship with your partner can suffer.
3. It Can Affect Your Health
When burnout goes unchecked, it can lead to depression. This is a serious condition that can make you lose interest in loved ones, work, and hobbies, as well as make you feel unable to cope.
Further, chronic stress and lack of sleep can contribute to major health conditions, including diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
What Are the Signs of Business Owner Burnout?
It’s important to recognize the signs of business owner burnout early so you can nip it in the bud. Here’s what to look for:
- Having low energy both physically and emotionally; feeling worn out
- Having low enthusiasm; having a loss of passion, purpose, and vision; feeling uninspired
- Lacking confidence
- Having trouble sleeping
- Feeling chronically stressed and anxious
- Feeling irritable, being frustrated constantly, and having negative reactions no matter what happens
When you experience these symptoms, it messes with your whole life. It makes you less effective when doing your work, dulls your happiness, and turns your passion into your prison. Ultimately, it makes you feel exhausted and unhealthy.
But don’t give up hope. You can overcome burnout and become more resilient at the other end.
7 Ways to Avoid or Overcome Business Owner Burnout
Whether you’re struggling with business owner burnout now or want to prevent it in the future, you’re in the right place. Rest assured, everyone faces it at some time or another. And the tips below can help you overcome it.
1) Strike a Work-Life Balance
According to a Harvard Business Review study, entrepreneurs who were “harmoniously passionate” about their businesses had a significantly smaller chance of suffering from burnout. These people were able to maintain a balance between their businesses and other activities in their lives without experiencing “conflict, guilt, or negative effects when not engaging in work.”
On the other hand, those they termed “obsessively passionate” about their businesses felt “emotionally dependent on their work, had difficulty imagining their lives without their work, and felt their mood depended on them being able to work.” They often felt distracted by nagging feelings that they were neglecting their families and health but felt compelled to work 24/7.
It’s clear that you must put obsessions related to your business in check to regain your passion for your business while also living a happy and harmonious life. Although you may hold yourself to high standards in your business, you are not immune to needing breaks.
So, make it a point to balance your work and family/personal life. Setting limits and developing healthy habits will put you in a much better position.
2) End the Disorganization
When you have a never-ending list of tasks to accomplish, it is overwhelming, which clutters your mind and makes it hard to focus. Plus, you tend to work on the tasks that aren’t the most important. Meanwhile, you allow everything to fall into a state of disorganization.
That cycle needs to be broken, starting with making a conscious effort to get organized and keep it that way. This includes your files, your computer, and your desk. It involves creating procedures that make things easier and more automatic, reducing distractions.
3) Put Everything on the Calendar
Have you ever noticed that nothing gets done unless it’s on the calendar? Saying “someday” means no day.
If you’ve wanted to go on vacation or a date with your spouse, you’re likely so busy that it hasn’t happened yet. If you keep meaning to sit down with your team, it will never happen. But if you schedule a meeting, it will. Also, think of all those times when you procrastinate until you finally work on a task the day before it is due.
Deadlines and appointments get things done. You need to schedule everything.
Put your most important tasks on the calendar and set up meetings. And yes, schedule your fun time if you want it to happen!
4) Don’t Try to Do It All Yourself
When you try to do it all, you wear yourself thin. You procrastinate doing the things you don’t want to do, and your business (and your health) suffers because of it.
Effective leadership requires you to learn the art of delegation. Your job as a business owner isn’t to do the work yourself. It is to find the best people to do it for you and ensure it’s done properly. That means it’s essential that you delegate any task that falls into the following categories:
- It doesn’t require your expertise.
- It distracts you from making leadership decisions.
- It takes you away from more critical work.
- It makes you cringe when you think of doing it.
- It could be done easily by someone else.
- It would be handled better by someone else.
If you started the business from nothing and built it with sweat, it’s easy to think you can do it all. In fact, you may feel you are the only one who can do it. In the short run, your enthusiasm will provide the stamina to get through.
That approach may work when the business is small and just starting. But you won’t be able to keep it up for long. And if you are enjoying any success, it will soon overwhelm you and throttle your business’s ability to grow. It’s the perfect recipe for business owner burnout.
But as soon as you learn to delegate, you will discover that you can focus on what you do best.
Your business will take off because you’ll no longer be holding it back, and you will be using the best person for each job. You’ll feel less stressed and more on fire about your business. You and your team will be happier, and your business will thrive.
5) Don’t Take on Every Opportunity That Comes Your Way
Whether it’s a client you don’t resonate with, a project you don’t want to do, or a new business opportunity, you can (and should) say no.
The truth is that when things are going well, new opportunities can seem endless. And that can feel great because it shows that what you’re doing is working. But you can’t do it all.
When you overcommit, you set yourself up for failure. That will only disappoint your new and loyal customers and cause greater business owner burnout for yourself.
You didn’t start your business to have another job and the lack of freedom that comes along with it. You started it to do what you do best in your own way with no one telling you what to do. If you can’t learn to say no to the opportunities, clients, and projects that aren’t for you, you won’t find the happiness of being able to focus on what you love and do best.
6) Try Block Scheduling
Block scheduling works wonders for many people. It’s when you schedule your day in blocks and stick to them. Here’s what this could look like:
- 8:00-9:00 – Plan your day, check emails, set up appointments
- 9:00-11:00 – Meet with clients
- 11:00-12:00 – Meet with the team
- 12:00-12:30 – Lunch
- 12:30-1:00 – Read up on your industry
- 1:00-3:00 – Meet with clients
- 3:00-5:00 – Do the work discussed with clients
The key to this strategy is sticking to the schedule and switching to the next activity, even if you want to continue what you’re doing or skip the following. You might want to set alarms that indicate when each task is looming to keep yourself on track.
This method is one of the best ways to be more efficient with your time and to ensure that you complete the things that always seem to get left for “tomorrow.”
7) Set Realistic Goals & Celebrate Achieving Them
Goals drive us. They give us something to work toward, keep us focused, and make us feel really good when we achieve them. As a business owner, you should set 2 types of goals:
- Your own goals – Set your own entrepreneurial goals that you can use personally to keep your business moving forward and to keep yourself motivated to do what needs to be done to make it happen.
- Company-wide goals – Work with your team to set goals that the whole company can work toward. This sets expectations, keeps everyone on the same page, and helps your employees feel excited about their jobs.
Make sure that the goals you set are realistic and within reach. Setting unrealistic goals will only lead you and your team to be dissatisfied and burn out further.
Don’t forget to award a prize for completing the goals, both for yourself and the employees. Sometimes just heartfelt recognition for work well done is enough. This serves as an extra driver for motivation and adds to the good feelings of accomplishing the goal.
Summary
If you find yourself losing enthusiasm even when your business is a success, you may be in the first stages of burnout. And if you let it go unchecked, your mental and physical well-being, along with your business and personal relationships, will suffer.
So, it’s critical that you take action to end the miserable road to business owner burnout now. That way, you can experience the benefits of business ownership, feel content and happy, and be the best version of yourself.
With a little more emphasis on balance, organization, and delegation, you’ll feel like a completely different person, and your business will also reflect that positivity. Outsourcing your marketing to a full-service marketing agency will free up your time to focus on running your business. Request a consultation with Viral Solutions today!
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
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