When we start working with business owners and nonprofit leaders, two universal realities emerge: 1) they are overwhelmed at work; 2) due to both internal and external factors, many of these leaders don’t know how to address their predicament. They all struggle, even those with a game plan.
Recent studies and statistics reinforce this observation:
- From a group of 100,000 local businesses polled in July of 2022, 72% of small business owners feel burned out from the pandemic’s impact on their businesses.
- The National Federation of Independent Business said its Small Business Optimism Index hit the lowest point ever recorded in June, with confidence at a 48-year low.
- Exhaustion, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma are all unfortunately common in nonprofits. In fact, 95 percent of nonprofit leaders worry about burnout.
External Factors
External factors over the past 2+ years have not been favorable to business or nonprofits, particularly small businesses. The pandemic, supply-chain disruption, inflation among other economic instabilities, and global conflicts have all wreaked havoc. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now that we live in a VUCA world. “VUCA” — Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous — means that ugly, unpredictable stuff happens, and the causal variables are so complex that it’s hard to know how to deal with it.
Thoroughly depressed at this point? Don’t be. There are effective, proven ways of dealing with the VUCA environment or any external factor impacting your business or limiting its growth: market conditions, business processes, employee behaviors, etc.
Internal Factors
The internal factors on the other hand– which can be summarized as your mindset – are more important than external, VUCA-driven factors. Why?
- You cannot control or change many aspects of the external factors. However, a strong mindset and mindfulness helps you see them clearly and navigate opportunities to mitigate them.
- Your mindset affects how you feel and everything you do. Not just in the work sphere, but in personal contexts, in social interactions, and in the tough mental work that accompanies running a small business. Master it, and you master your life.
- You have a large measure of control over your mindset. This is not like flipping a switch, but with consistent practice (like any other skill), you can improve your resilience, mental focus, powers of persuasion, and other critical leadership elements. These elements directly impact the bottom line of your business.
The Whole System
Attacking either internal or external factors alone is half a solution; dealing with both represents the “whole system”. Note that both external and internal issues require behavioral changes. So, what’s the real difference between them? External issues have to do with how you relate to your environment. Internal issues have to do with how you relate to yourself.
Let’s start with the factors in your environment (external). How are they contributing to your overwhelmed state? What can you do to address these factors?
DEALING WITH EXTERNAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
1. Delegate and Empower
Delegation is the key to maintaining your sanity as a business owner. Without delegation, you cannot recover the one resource which represents the most direct route to addressing any external issue – your time. This is difficult for many entrepreneurs, who trust themselves (primarily) and want to control everything. Without delegation, growth is not possible. With delegation and empowerment, you gain: capacities that help mitigate your overwhelmed state; a better team; more time to work on – not in – the business; scalability; stronger work relationships; and a more innovative team and work culture.
If you don’t have people onboard who fit your culture, that’s the first order of business. Hire people with the right skills who can grow. Mediocre employees will not allow you to trust outcomes when you unload time and tasks; they will do the opposite and add to your stress.
2. Stop Multi-Tasking
Multi-tasking is a myth, reinforced by our interrupt-driven culture. When we indulge in multi-tasking, we actually get better at ignoring important stuff (the signal) in favor of the meaningless interruptions (the noise). That’s not a skill you want to cultivate.
Multi-tasking is really task switching, and the human brain has not evolved to be good at it. Studies show that it always takes longer to complete two tasks when we’re switching back and forth between them. Equally important, we are more error prone and work quality degrades. Finally, it works against mindfulness. Here are some tips to head-off the temptation to multi-task:
- Consider that what you are dealing with is not how you are dealing with them. You might have many external issues to manage, some of which are time-bound. That doesn’t mean that working them in parallel is more efficient than knocking them down one-at-a-time. If you’re not serializing your tasks, you’re adding unnecessary time and stress.
- Use do-not-disturb. Or switch off notifications that aren’t really serving your efficiency. Protect your focus time.
- Use Timeboxing. Timeboxing is a management strategy that increases your productivity by setting a goal to finish a particular task within a discrete time-frame. Read more about it here.
- Align your priorities. Not all external issues are equal. Sometimes it’s tempting to multi-task because everything seems equally important. See more about this solution below with “Big Rocks First”. By identifying the most important external issue-task of the day, you reduce the pressure to juggle and multi-task.
3. Big Rocks First
Neuroscience endorses intentionally prioritizing your most important tasks to be more efficient and less overwhelmed. Don’t wait to tackle the MITs (Most Important Tasks) until after the easy stuff. Completing them early makes you feel better and creates business momentum. Use two variables — importance and urgency – to help you prioritize in this order:
- Important and Urgent Issues
- Important and Non-urgent Issues
- Unimportant and Urgent Issues
- Unimportant and Non-urgent issues
4. Accountability Partners (Coaches)
If you’re running your own business, external complexities and volatilities will numb your ability to delineate high vs. low priorities. A business coach, who functions as an accountability partner among other things, can help with how you respond to VUCA issues. A coach’s authority does not run counter to yours; they support you in enforcing boundaries you set in place. Great coaches help identify the most critical tasks at the right times. With this intervention, you increase your clarity about priorities, improve your efficiency, and create a safety net to protect against VUCA overwhelm.
5. Micro-Actions and SMART Goals
Complex external challenges require complex action sets to resolve them. If you’re thinking about everything you need to do to address a multi-dimensional issue, you’re adding to your mental overhead and the sense of overwhelm.
Instead, break down the solution task set into finite, actionable steps and write them down. This gets it out of your brain where it is generating background noise and stress. Make sure that every goal is “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound). Every stellar performer — whether in sports, business, or arts & entertainment – follows this rule to subdue external challenges, build an enviable skill set, and achieve success.
Conclusion on External or Environmental Factors
The solutions suggested above offer a general, effective approach to meet ANY set of external challenges. If practiced consistently, they will build capacity for you, your team, and your business. Those outcomes will reduce your sense of overwhelm, and increase your sense of self-efficacy.
DEALING WITH INTERNAL FACTORS OR “MINDSET”
Mindset issues are both less obvious and more difficult to overcome than most external issues. Because of internal biases (over 150 of them exist for humankind!), socialization, and the way we have evolved, mindset issues are often not visible to us without a perspective shift. There’s a chicken and egg issue here; we often need a mindset shift to see and correct mindset issues!!
1. Give Up Perfectionism
People with high standards (read business owners/leaders/CEOs) tend to succumb to perfectionism, which kills spirit and productivity. Why? Internally, perfectionism sets up self-judgment that makes you feel bad needlessly. Externally, perfectionism wastes time, energy, and motivation (all finite resources). Better results are achieved over time with new insights from experience, customer behaviors, product experimentation, etc. Trying to create the perfect thing or process before it’s “ready for prime-time” slows you down and delays those insights. It’s truly counter-productive.
If you fall into this category, embrace your own imperfections and start practicing “perfection is the enemy of progress”. Imperfection is unavoidable, and provides fodder for learning and continuous improvement. Pay attention to how you can make improvements without beating yourself up. Observe without judging yourself. And while you’re observing and addressing your own high expectations, note how accepting the expectations of others (or your perception of others’ expectations) can also generate negative emotional states that are useless.
2. Change How You Process Fear and Stress
This issue is the toughest one to conquer and takes the most practice. The first step is to realize that fear and stress are mind-killers. They dull or diminish many cognitive abilities: mental clarity, ability to focus, reasoning and objectivity, creativity, motivation, emotional resilience, to list a few. All critical qualities that business owners need to thrive and grow.
The second step is to learn to observe yourself without self-judgment. The best way out is always through. Don’t try to escape or repress the fear/stress. What triggered it? Are particular triggers common and predictable? What were your subsequent behaviors? How did the fear or stress compromise you in that moment?
The third step is to realize that you have the freedom to respond to any emotion reflexively or reflectively. Knee-jerk reactions (reflexive) almost never serve us well in any context. Learning to recognize, allow or accept, and briefly investigate your fear or stress is a powerful way to disarm it. When you do so, you are creating space between the fear/stress trigger and your response to it. With that space, the likelihood that you will respond constructively increases. How do you practice this? See “Self-Care” below.
3. Use Time Outside of Work Wisely
Let’s face it. Difficulty in life never really disappears. You will never get caught up. Your to-do list will never be empty.
Radical acceptance of this reality allows you to stop postponing other activities which are healthy for mind and body. In doing so, you create some work-life balance for yourself; no-one else is going to do that. A wise mentor once told me that you cannot wait until difficulties are gone to extract joy from life; happiness is not merely a function of eliminating problems (glass half empty); it’s more important to add practices that make you feel good (glass half-full).
If you think you have no time for exercise, social relationships, or fun in any form, consider what a friend of mine said (jokingly) about his future epitaph: “Here lies Bruce. He wishes he had spent more time at the office.”
4. Learn to Focus on Process, Not Outcomes
This mindset practice is counter-intuitive. Doesn’t it make more sense to focus on outcomes, particularly in business?
It’s great to have a big vision or set of goals. But when we’re working, focusing on outcomes creates two problems. First, it’s distracting and disempowering. Let’s say you set a goal to lose 20 pounds and compete in a 10K race, and it’s your first day at the gym. Then you start thinking about the food you will have to forego and all of the tough exercise sessions you’ll need to endure to get there. Suddenly the task in front of you seems overwhelming.
Second, you don’t have total control over most outcomes in business or in life. Attaching to a specific outcome doesn’t actually change the outcome, but it does set you up for disappointment.
You achieve better results and feel better when you focus on what’s right in front of you – the process. And you might discover that there’s inherent satisfaction in the activity you are focusing on, regardless of the outcome.
5. Self-Care
This solution set is very broad but addresses one of the most common afflictions of business owners. They take care of everything else before and/or instead of taking care of themselves.
For better or worse, your health – both psychological and physiological – dramatically affects your performance as a business leader. Modern science tells us that there’s a complex relationship between mind and body; what we think influences our body, and what we do (or don’t do) to our body influences how we think.
This means that if you’re eating poorly, not getting enough sleep, and not getting exercise, you are compromising your cognitive abilities (mindset). A great example is sleep deprivation. Studies show that people who are sleep-deprived consistently perform worse on tests measuring cognitive function. Interestingly, those same studies show that people who are compromised don’t think that they are compromised. This outcome is common for other health deficiencies, as well.
In addition to all of the traditional forms of self-care, consider adopting a mindfulness-meditation practice. Anyone can do it, and it provides a foundation for all of the other mindset issues and solutions described above.
Being overwhelmed is not unavoidable. Most of it is generated by our own behaviors and thoughts (or lack of them) in response to stimuli, whether those stimuli come from external conditions or our own brains. It’s true that you don’t have much control over global VUCA events that might be impacting your business. But no-one does. Exercise the control you have and don’t hesitate to get support, whether it’s from your friends and family, your team at work, or a coach.
Chip Carter, Co-Founder of Summit Business Growth
chip@summitbusinessgrowth.com
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