Startup founders may thrive on stress – to a point. Starting a business can be a grueling task, full of extreme highs and devastating lows. If you don’t know how to manage all that stress, your health suffers, and your business may fail as a result.
Here are some tips for surviving the startup game and thriving under pressure.
Keep Your Eye on Long-Term Success
When you’re starting a company, every day brings new challenges and frustrations. One day you can’t make payroll, and the next day you get funding from an unexpected source. If you focus on these daily fluctuations, your mood may fluctuate just as wildly.
Instead, focus on the long-term. Daily trials are certainly frustrating, but long-range focus allows you to ride the storm when they happen. That goes for daily successes, too. The thrill of a win is great, but it’s easier to stay sane if you put it in context with your long-term challenges and goals.
Stay Up-to-Date on the Stats
It’s easy to get caught up in the stresses and triumphs of daily life as an entrepreneur. Things can often look better or worse than they really are. When you stay in touch with the reality of your situation, you can maintain your balance.
One way to keep your perspective is to watch your metrics. You’ll not only be more effective and efficient as a startup founder, but you’ll also have a clearer view of what’s important and what really doesn’t matter.
Pay Attention to Consumer Feedback
One challenge of starting a business is that you want everything to be perfect before you release it to your clients/customers. While you do want your product/service to be useful for your consumers, you miss opportunities by holding onto it too long.
Don’t wait for perfection to magically appear. Instead, create something worth having and refine it when you find out what more your customers need from it. Take it as a process rather than a single goal, and you’ll eliminate your need to focus everything you’ve got on that one day of release. Plus, you’re expecting to make changes, so you aren’t as devastated by early consumer complaints.
Rely on Your Support System
They say it’s lonely at the top. It doesn’t have to be, though. Rely on your off-work support system to stay grounded as you steer your startup toward success. Spend time with your spouse, children, relatives, and friends, even if you have to put off some task to do it. If you’re a pet person, you can get a lot of stress-relief from spending time with your pet, too.
Stay Healthy
Successful entrepreneurs manage founders stress by giving themselves permission to take care of themselves along that way. That means eating healthy, getting enough sleep, and exercising daily.
It doesn’t hurt to take a day off to go to the spa or talk to a therapist to get counseling or friend who cares about you as a person, whether the business takes off tomorrow or not. Learn to manage your founder’s stress as early as you can to improve your chances of success and enjoy the ride along the way!
In association with BetterHelp.
