10. How to Identify Where Your Stress and Overwhelm Comes From

Maliquea Starnes shares insights on ways business owners can identify where their stress and overwhelm comes from

In this episode we discuss stress and overwhelm in running your business. Too many times we are led to believe that if we are not stressed, overwhelmed, saying “yes” to every opportunity, and just overall pushing ourselves to the limit; we are not really doing all we can for our business. This simply is not true and often being overstressed and overwhelmed can lead to burnout. 

Being able to identify where your stress and overwhelm comes from is one of the key steps to managing it. Taking a step back and taking a pause can be one of the best things you do for your business and yourself.

We discuss…

• Identifying your stress and overwhelm

• Learning if your pressure is internal or external?

• Making a “Today List” and a “Someday List”

• Taking a look at your process to make sure you’re using your time well 

• Taking a step back so you can identify where stress is really coming from

Taking a step back.

“What is life even if I’m not stressed and overwhelmed as a business owner, what would that look like? Well, I’m here to tell you exactly what it would look like. It would look like you actually getting to spend time with your family. It would look like you actually going on a vacation once in a while. It would look like you having a team that you can outsource and delegate to, and it would look like you saying, I don’t care that everyone else around me is in this chaos energy and just trying to do all the things, because I’m at peace. And also I believe that running a business can be easy.”

 Saying yes all the time.

“If someone asked me to be on their podcast and I just instantly say yes, without creating pause and space to decide if I want to do it or not? What happens is there’s all this other stuff on my plate that I haven’t even considered because I don’t have a process for accepting or saying yes? My kind of response is to just automatically be like yes, sure, I’ll do it. And that comes from seeing opportunity as a limited resource. And that is when the pause between a request and saying yes, gets shorter and shorter. 

When we see every single opportunity as a limited resource or we have a scarcity mindset around the opportunities that are available to us, or things that may present themselves to us in entrepreneurship; what happens is that we are saying to ourselves, if I don’t say yes right now and if I don’t hurry and say yes to this, then this opportunity is not going to come again.”

Ask yourself why?

“Business can be easy. Once we start to accept some of these mindset shifts, when we have stress and we have overwhelm that creeps up, we’re going to be able to identify them because of things like metrics of success being joy and freedom of time. So when we’re thinking about how to identify things that are causing us stress and overwhelm, some of the things that come up for me as well, is like, how much joy does this thing bring me? 

If you’re like “None. I don’t like sending invoices. None. I absolutely hate showing up on a live group call each week.” Then the next question to be intentional about it is, then why do I do it? Then why am I doing that? Sometimes the number one way to identify where your stress and your overwhelm comes from is just ask yourself why?, a lot of times we are doing so much in our business for no reason at all.”