MBA1487 How Stress Has Affected My Business + Free Ride Friday

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our courses. We're giving away ezcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at Ezcourse Co, but you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show where we give it to you straight every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how stress has affected my business. I touched on this on Tuesday's episode but I want to take a deep dive on this topic. The last 12 months for me has been quite stressful. I haven't shared this with anybody publicly but I realized that I need to do this on the podcast to help so many of you that are building businesses that may be going through the same thing I did. The problem with stress is that you don't know how bad it is until it's too late, until it's totally out of check, and it greatly affects the performance of your business. And we'll dissect why and how you can prevent it. I'm gonna share some of the things I have been doing recently now that I've become so aware of it. Listen, I get it. Building a business is not easy. It's challenging. And we want it really bad. We want success really bad. And sometimes we will do anything for that, even sacrifice the most important things in our life unintentionally because they're really important to us. We shouldn't be sacrificing them. The thing I really learned that I'm really gonna get into in today's episode is that not only is stress bad for you and your health and your family and your personal life and your wellbeing and your emotions and how you feel about life and business, it's also disastrous for your business, for your team, for your growth, for your performance, for your bottom line, for your revenue. It really does affect your business, and I'll show you why and how you can try to avoid it or keep it at bay as much as possible. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Do you ever go to bed feeling a sense of worry, a sense of I'm not sure if things are going to work out, a sense of anxiety, and you basically just get knocked out because you're so tired from all the work you've done. But then you wake up the next morning and you feel just the same. You don't feel any relief. You feel the same worry, the same anxiety, that same weird butterfly feeling in your stomach. Well, I have, and it's been very common in the last 12 months for me. I would wake up with a sense of I need to get things done, a sense of worry, a sense of anxiety and a feeling of a mountain of stress on my shoulders, Feeling of every single thing that I had to do was critical, like life or death. And I built it up in my head that way. Regardless if it's true or not, that's how I felt. In the past 12 months, I have fallen ill more than I ever had in the past decades. And I'm a pretty healthy guy. I eat healthy. I exercise four to five times a week. I try to get as much sleep as possible, eight hours a night. Health is a priority for me. But stress does not care about what you do. They will still affect you no matter what you do. Whether you exercise or eat right, get enough sleep, it will penetrate through all that and it will affect your immune system. What happens is basically your body's on overdrive constantly. It's like you're flooring the gas pedal in your car all, always. Every time you hit the accelerator, you're flooring it. You're really pushing your car to the limits every single time. The longevity of that car is just not going to be there. You're going to be in the shop constantly, and that's what happens to your body. You just get sick. And I'm talking about just falling ill, you know, just getting the flu or getting a cold, having headaches, migraines, really. And it's kind of hard for me to admit this. It's kind of hard for me to share this because I think I'm a pretty mindful guy. But I really didn't realize how much stress was affecting me. I didn't even make the connection. The reason why I was feeling that way is because I was so stressed out. I just thought, hey, I'm an entrepreneur. This is the lifestyle of an entrepreneur. You got to work hard, you gotta hustle, you gotta do a billion things to make a billion things change in your business, to improve, right? But I realize I have to ask.

The question, at what cost?

What am I paying to do that? Right? And I'm paying with my health. I'm paying with my enjoyment of life, my sense of feeling that everything's gonna be okay. And that has a lot to do with the expectations I put on myself because of the goals I put out there for the business. Now, I'm not saying not to be ambitious or to lower your standards. I'm saying understand that everything has a price. So you don't have to pay a price. You don't want to. You make up the rules. A book that I read recently that helped me realign my expectations, realigned my understanding of what it means to run a business is it doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Hanemeier Hansen. These are the guys that are behind the company Basecamp, and they've been running their company for almost 20 years. And they have a different philosophy about work. And they're in the tech industry, which is hyper competitive. And it's all about hustle and working hard. And, you know, stress levels are through the roof. And they say, nope, it doesn't have to be that way. You make up the rules. You can work 40 hours a week. You can work 30 hours a week. In fact, Basecamp has four day weeks, four day work weeks during the summer months. And yet they're a highly successful company. They attract the best talent. They produce great work. And it made me scratch my head. Maybe I'm doing this wrong. Right? It's kind of hard because you're in the midst of it all, and you're trying everything you can to grow your business. And for me, I felt like I could do more. I could do more, I could do more. Not understanding that everything has a cost, I started to realize that I was spending close to 15 hours a day on my computer. I was spending very little time recreationally, like going for a walk or very little time, maybe going to a movie or a concert or having fun on the weekends. I was working through the weekends, even. Even though I would advise against that. But, you know, I had a few projects I wanted to get done. I had a few things on my plate. I thought, let me put in a few hours here. And a few hours becomes, you know, 10 hours. What I realized is what's going on here is I had my priorities upside down. I built a business, and I'm trying to fit my life into the business instead of saying, hey, how do I want to live? What kind of life do I want to have? And what kind of business will help me live that life? That's why I got into entrepreneurship in the first place. That was the intention. And I was like that for a good three, four years. But things changed, and my life wasn't a priority anymore. My ambitions to grow my business and to build new things started to grow, and I lost sight of why I started this all. And because of this, I started to really get stressed out. I really started to feel unhappy, physically, mentally, emotionally, week after week, month after month. And I didn't even realize it. That's the thing about stress. You don't even realize it when it's happening. You just think it's normal. And that's why I call stress the silent killer. I also started to evaluate, you know, how much time do I have? You know, I turned 40 this year, and, you know, 40 is not super old. But for the most part, if I take a look at the average lifespan, I'm entering the second half of my life, meaning from this point on, I've lived more than I'm about to live. You know, we don't Know when we're going to pass away. We don't know when it's going to be the end for us. But if I just take, you know, in terms of life expectancy or statistics, time is more precious than ever, right? My free time, my time with my loved ones, my time with my friends, my overall feeling of happiness and satisfaction means more now. It means a lot more every single day moving forward. That stuff. Stock rises, and if I don't make some changes where I can let go a little bit and realize, hey, this is serious, I'm getting tired. It's affecting my life. Things will not change now. It really affected my business because I was making some really poor decisions at times because I was so stressed, because I was so tired, because I was under a lot of pressure. And when you make bad decisions, it cascades. That decision domino effects and causes a lot of issues in your business. Your job as a leader of your business is to make the right decision or to make the right decisions as much as possible. And if your number one job is to make decisions and that ability is compromised because of stress, you're in trouble. And often, when I look back, the reason why I was stressed, I created that environment. I created the environment to allow that stress to enter when I didn't have to. There's a great book by Derek Sivers called Anything youg Want. And it's all about how you create the rules for your business. If you're not happy the way things are going with your business, you have to change it. The amount of hours you work, who's doing what, or maybe you're taking on too much need to outsource it to other people. Maybe you need to change the people on your team so you have more people doing things that are stressing you out than people. People doing things that you rather do. We saw a dip in our growth. We saw a dip in our revenue because of the stress, because of, you know, rushed decisions, because of us scrambling to do things quickly. And when I got the chance to pause and to evaluate, I said, you know, this has got to stop. You know, we gotta. We can't do this anymore. And when we buckled down and said, you know what? We're gonna take our time, we're gonna do things right. We're not gonna rush. We're not gonna stress ourselves out. And as soon as we started doing that, the coming months started to see things change. Our churn numbers started to get better. Our growth started to happen. More and more reviews, positive reviews, more and more compliments and Great ratings from customers. All because we started to slow down a little bit. We said, hey, let's focus on quality instead of quantity or trying to solve every single problem at one time, which causes a sense of chaos on the team and a sense of stress. My advice to you, if you're feeling a ton of stress right now, you need to take a timeout and ask yourself, what exactly is stressing me out? What causes me anxiety? And you just got to write it down. It doesn't matter what the answer is. Is it financial stress? Why? What exactly would solve that problem? What are ways to solve it? Lower expenses? Increase revenue? What exactly do I have to do? Am I stressed out because I'm not hitting my targets? Maybe I need to change the targets because they're causing me incredible amount of stress. Maybe there's somebody on your team that's stressing you out. I had a member of my team this last 12 years that we unfortunately had to let go that was causing me a crazy amount of stress. One individual. This is your business. You don't let people dictate how you feel every day. You have to take control. So you need to write down all the things that stress you out. It's called a worry list. And it's great because it allows you just to put it on paper and say, okay, these are the things I'm dealing with. Let's think solution now. How do we get around these one by one? Right. What are some changes I have to do? Sometimes these are going to be radical changes, and sometimes it's going to be very small changes. One of the changes that we've done recently, I was really stressed out. The number of meetings. I had so many meetings, and it was on different days, and it was really, you know, fragmenting my. My flow when I work during the day. So what we did is we said, hey, what are the most important meetings that I have to attend? How can we make sure each meeting is as short as possible? And then we took all those meetings and we scheduled it on one day. I have one day of meetings. That's it. And the rest of the week, I have to myself to work on what I need to work on. Full concentration and no interruption. And that allowed me to relieve a bit more stress. So a worry list allows you to really dissect what's worrying you and how to solve it.

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You to check in right now, no matter how you feel. Even if you don't feel a sense of stress or anxiety when you go to bed, or when you wake up or during the day, it's important for you to periodically check in about how you're feeling about your business. If you're happy, if you're stressed, if you're having heart populations, or maybe you just worry once a week. The point here is that if you don't check in regularly at least once a month or so, then it can creep up on you and you can make mistakes or make decisions that are really going to affect your business not only in the short term, but even in the long term. This is not a woo woo episode. This is not woo advice. This is practical advice that you need to take seriously. Why? Because if you are not in peak performance, if you are not performing at your best, then your whole business will suffer. You're the leader. You're the person that's driving, right? You're the person that's, you know, commanding the ship. If you're not at your best abilities, if you're falling asleep at the wheel, everybody in the car, your whole team is going to suffer. So it's your responsibility to make sure you check in and make sure the stress levels are at bay. How many breaks are you taking throughout the year? Are you taking these breaks frequently enough? That's one of the mistakes I made recently. You know, I haven't taken a holiday in maybe a year, 12 months exactly, actually, and I'm due for one and that's way too long. You need to take some time and to reflect and step away from the business. All my best ideas have come when I'm on a holiday, when I'm on vacation, so. So it's actually good for your business to do that so some people, they need more than just one a year. You know, especially with entrepreneurship, it's a high impact sport. Maybe you need it every eight weeks, maybe you need it every three months. Even if it's a short break, four days, a long weekend, something like that. Step away from it and understand there is more to your life than your business. Your business is a part of it and it's something that is important to you and you love it dearly. But you are not your business. Okay? Your business allows you to live your life, not the other way around. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter RMBA show. I hope it helped. I hope by me sharing and opening up a little bit in today's episode, it's helped you be a little bit more aware of stress and your business. If this was helpful, let me know in an itunes rating and review, I'd love to hear from all our listeners and hear what you think of the show. Today is Free Ride Friday, so I gotta give away a lifetime membership. Let's see who wins the free ride this week. And the winner is Nicole Holland. Nicole Holland, who's actually a fellow podcaster, she says what can be said about the $100 MBA? The $100 MBA is the place to be for entrepreneurs at any level of the game. Thank you, Nicole, for that great review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. Just email me over at omar100mba.net and I'll hook you up with the Lifetime Membership 2 Easy Course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter this weekly random draw we do every single Friday. We call it Free Ride Friday. And while you're at it, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode of the show. Do that right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Gary Vaynerchuk always says life is too short to be doing things you hate. And you might not hate your business, but you might not really love the way you feel every day. You may not like sort of the job you've created for yourself and your business because you're stressed, you're tired, you. You're overwhelmed. Life is too short for that. You need to fix that as soon as possible because every day counts. You should be happy. You should enjoy what you do every day. That's more important than trying to build a billion dollar company. What are you going to do with a billion dollars if you're not happy. A million will suffice, right? But the point here is that even if you don't make a million dollars a year, even if you make, you know, $200,000 a year, $100,000 a year, for most people, that's plenty. To be okay, to live comfortably and to have a smile on their face every day, that's priceless. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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