There are dozens of unanswered emails, missed deadlines, clients calling; when was the last time you didn’t feel this weight on your shoulders?
Being a business person, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a freelancer, can often feel overwhelming. You’re managing your own business, the financial burden falls onto you, and while there are many silver linings, right now, you find yourself focusing on the negatives.
Today, our topic is what being overwhelmed feels like for entrepreneurs and freelancers. See if you can relate and keep reading all the way to the end for some helpful tips and tricks to feel better. Let’s get started!
Essentialism
by Greg McKeown
⏱ 18 minutes reading time
🎧 Audio version available
Expectations Are Too High
If there is one thing entrepreneurs and freelancers share, it’s the crushing weight of expectations weighing them down– expectations placed on themselves by their own hands and expectations of others.
This is why being overwhelmed often feels like the new normal. It comes with having too high hopes for yourself and your team. It feels a little like imposter syndrome, where you try to live up to the overly ambitious and unrealistic goals you set for yourself.
There is a bitter irony in this. The more expectations we put on ourselves, the more we end up failing. And the more pressure we put on ourselves, the more we end up procrastinating. We end up feeling surprised and disappointed when things don’t turn out the way we planned.
Fear of Disappointing Others
Then we have another set of heavy expectations: those set by others. Sometimes the expectations that cause the most overwhelm come from those around us. Whether they are our friends, family, coworkers, partners, investors, share holders, or employees.
If you tend to want to please everyone around you, the fear of disappointment can dramatically escalate into a feeling of overwhelm.
Decision making often can feel paralyzing. No matter what you do, you feel like you are letting others down. Soon enough, we stop being the innovative leaders we set out to be, the leaders we started out being. This recipe for disaster can lead to even more negative and unwanted emotions.
There is Not Enough Time
Another form of feeling swamped by work is the debilitating feeling of not having enough time. With starting a new business, or even years into it, you can find yourself working, and thinking about work, 24/7.
This affects entrepreneurs and freelancers in two ways. The first is that they don’t have time for themselves. In favor of getting more work done, you forget to make time on your calendar for yourself, to unwind, to de-stress, and maybe watch a movie.
And seeing as it’s in your job description to be accessible to your clients, the work and life balance can feel almost nonexistent. That sinking feeling, like there is not enough time, can occur when you find yourself putting in long hours, working on the weekends, having to cancel fun activities, having to leave dinners early to deal with work issues, and so on.
Then the second way? It involves taking on more than you can handle, and thus, you feel like you don’t have enough time to satisfy all of your clients while still providing high quality work.
This can also cause immense stress. Both of these time management related stresses lead to the same thing in the long term: burnout.
Feeling Like You Need to “Fake It Till You Make It”
The advice “fake it till you make it” is doled out far too often. Entrepreneurs and freelancers are encouraged to hide their vulnerabilities.
But this can lead to a unique sort of anxiety. Since you often have to juggle multiple roles and deal with numerous obstacles, you’re probably dealing with competition, problems with your staff, disputes with your team, complaints, disgruntled customers, and let’s not forget about financial problems and payroll.
But faking it until you make it can often overcomplicate things, and new entrepreneurs often end up making themselves less resilient by committing too hard to this route.
How so? They end up neglecting their health. Eating too little or too much, ignoring sleep, not exercising, not taking mental health breaks, and overall pushing and abusing their bodies too much, which, of course, leads to being burnt out and overwhelmed.
Did you know that a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index found that 34 percent of entrepreneurs– that’s four percent more than other workers– experience more anxiety and worry?
In this index, it was discovered that 45 percent of entrepreneurs reported that they were feeling stressed, which is also three percentage points higher than other workers.
Feeling Unproductive
Productive, unproductive– these words are both the center and the bane of self-employed workers.
It’s a vicious cycle. You start feeling unproductive and become overwhelmed. Or you become overwhelmed due to other factors, so you start feeling unproductive.
This is why time management skills and planning ahead are so necessary. For any business person, these skills are beyond important. Planning ahead will make you more productive– if only because when you plan your goals, they are easier to reach.
Feeling Personal Pressures
Every self-employed business person will agree with this. Starting your own path, embarking on your journey to becoming a business owner or providing services, has an inevitable effect on your personal and home life. There is the lack of the security found in ‘regular’ jobs, which bleeds into other parts of your life.
A study found stress levels in self-employed workers versus employed workers to be dramatically different. When entrepreneurs and freelancers considered themselves as having good health and well-being, they were actually scoring much lower than those in regular employment.
This study goes on to add that 41 percent of self-employed people agree that their work has negatively impacted both their mental and physical health, at least at one point in their career. In contrast, employed people scored 33 percent.
Why is this? Possibly because they not only feel the need to make sure their business is working, but also the need to provide for themselves and their loved ones, and make sure that their future is financially secure.
Now that we have discussed what being overwhelmed feels like for entrepreneurs and freelancers, let’s take talk about tips and tricks to help ease that overwhelmed feeling.
You need to remember what you’re doing this for. There are tons of advantages and benefits to being your own boss and having your own business.
Each person has a unique reason for taking this career route. So, the first thing you need to do is take a deep breath and calm down. The goal is to have a clear mind, even if only for a moment.
Then you’re going to beat this overwhelming feeling the same way you tackled launching your business!
The next thing you want to do is to set your goals and priorities. But instead of piling on lots of goals and targets, focus on just three goals for the next 12 months. After you complete them, add others.
Brushing up your to-do list is next. If it’s structured in a way that causes you too much stress, then find other ways. Maybe you’re putting too much on your plate, or not planning your time well, or you haven’t left enough time to complete a large task.
Next, focus on just one task at a time. Multitasking is a fast route to being overwhelmed. You might want to set a timer to limit the amount of time you spend on each task. It can be 20 minutes, followed by a break. And every week, increase that time by adding five more minutes.
Lastly, you need to know your productivity peak. This is related to almost all of the video. Knowing when you’re at your most productive during the day is a game changer, even if it isn’t during traditional working hours.
Are you most productive first thing in the morning, waking up early and finishing by 5? Or are you the type to stay up until dawn creating? Knowing the answer will help you be more productive and produce better quality work. Then the remaining time you have, your “non-peak” time can be spent on other, less taxing work that doesn’t require as much focus.
Remember that you’re not supposed to feel this bad about your job. Yes, it can be stressful, as are all jobs, but you can implement the necessary steps to lessen the feeling of overwhelm.
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