MBA2297 The Cost of Stress in Your Business

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Hey yo. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you'll learn what's the cost of stress in your business. Listen, I'm not one of those people that think that you can just avoid stress and anytime you're stressed out, you should just stop doing what's stressing you out. No, that's not how to deal with life. That's not how to deal with your business. You're going to have stressful situations. You're going to have pressure, you're going to have challenges. It's going to be hard. That's why it's such a great reward to be a successful entrepreneur, because it's hard. So the key is not to avoid stress stress but to manage it. To understand what the cost of stress is on your business and use that as motivation to deal with it in a better way. I'm going to show you why and how in today's lesson. Once you understand the cost of stress in your business, how it's affecting your business. You'll make the necessary changes and react to the stress in different ways. You'll deal with it differently. You'll do what you need to do so you don't have to take on that cost. Don't worry. I'm going to explain this all, give you real life examples and a plan of action. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Everything in life has a cost. And the three things we sacrifice in life is time, money and energy. And stress is in the bucket of energy, negative energy, right? It's going to drain you of your energy when you're stressed out. It's going to cause you to not be at your best to make bad decisions, to not to be able to lead your team in the proper way, not to be able to perform. Perform. Whether you're creating content or speaking on stage or raising capital or negotiating a sale, you're not able to perform at the right level. This is the cost of stress. When you're constantly stressed out, you best believe it's going to affect you and your business. And by the way, it's the same thing. You are the business, right? If you're leading the business and you are affected by stress, you're going to affect the business. It's like a tax on your business. So you're going to do everything in your power to not let stress do that, not take your energy. And I'm going to give you some exercises and strategies to do just that. But let's first discuss what are the actual, real, tangible costs of stress. Number one, stress makes the experience of being a business owner horrible, right? It's not an enjoyable experience. You're not enjoying your life, right? Most of your life is probably work. And if you're not enjoying it because of stress, it's like you're wasting your life because this time is not fun.

Next.

Stress wastes your time when you're in a loop, when you're just really in a funk because something's stressing you out and you're not thinking straight and you're not focused and you can't really do your best work. You're wasting time, valuable time. Time is your biggest asset, especially in business, because you need everything on your side, including time, so that you can have all the advantages to advance and grow. For example, let's say you have some sort of hack in your business. Somebody hacks your website. It's a stressful sit situation, right? So if you don't have a plan of action, if this happens, if you don't know how to react and implement those actions you need to take, then this is really going to make you lose sleep and waste a lot of time. That is time that you'd normally use to grow the business. Some of us, when something bad happens, when we're stressed about something even far less dramatic, we're like out of commission, we're not at our best and waste so much time. Time number three, it costs you money. I'm going to give you an example to make this really crystal clear. Let's say, for example, you hired a developer to build you an app or your website, for example. And one engineer is very, very skilled and a peak performer. The other, on the other hand, not as skilled, not as good. Okay? The quality of the product that you're going to build, the app, let's say, for example, is going to be far better with the skilled engineer, allowing you to charge more, allowing you to sell more of that product, allowing you to be able to get return customers. Now, the other engineer might do an okay job, but not as good as the other engineer, the skilled engineer, the high performing engineer, because they're just not performing as well and didn't create something great. Seems pretty logical right now. Imagine somebody who's not just building something for the company or building a part of the product or as a part of a department in a business. What if you're talking about the person that runs the whole business? You, if you're not performing, performing at your best, you're not going to produce the best work, the best product. You're not going to hire the right people, you're not going to make the right decisions. You're not going to be great on interviews, you're not going to be great on your videos or social media. You're just going to be less than yourself, producing a less quality product which will allow you not to be able to charge a premium or demand more sales. Everything that affects you, affects the business, whether it's personal or professional. All right, so what do we do about this? And again, stress is going to happen. You will experience stress, you will have hard times, you will have challenges. And that's normal. And it should be that way, right? That's how it just is. It's a rite of passage. So here are my strategies when it comes to using stress to your advantage. To flip it on yourself. When something bad happens, something challenging happens. When you're stressed out, use that nervous energy to, to work on the solution. Sit down and think, hey, we're in this situation. How do we turn this around? How do we become better than we were before because of this situation, because of what we learned in this mistake? Where's the silver lining here? What are some things that we can learn from the situation so that we can bounce back and be even stronger? That's the mentality you need to have. And it takes poise in the moment to recognize that and to have this thought experiment and go through these exercises. So even if you need a reminder on your phone, like put it on your wallpaper or your phone, or put a post it note on your monitor, write down, use stress to come up with solution. That's fine. But one thing that does help is when something stresses you out. Let the stress in, feel the pain, be angry for a moment, allow yourself to be angry, be upset, even say, this is why I'm upset, right? Write it down. If you want to talk to a friend, but allow yourself a limited time, say, I'm giving myself 30 minutes to just be angry. Okay? Or 15 minutes, whatever you choose. But once those 15 minutes are up, it's time to kick into gear and think solution to use it to my advantage. So feel the pain, allow yourself to be angry, get it out of your system. But that's the last time we're going to do that. Okay? This is the time limit you have. And then you kick into gear. You use that energy to think of solutions and get better and stronger. Sometimes stress is not just a once and done thing. Like it's just a stressful period of time because you're under maybe financial stress, or maybe you're under pressure because you don't know if you're launching is going to go well. Or maybe you have a lot of responsibility in what you're working on right now and you don't want to go wrong or to kind of fall flat. I'm a big believer that this is healthy stress. It's good to feel this way. This is part of our DNA as human beings, is to have that fear. This is what protects us from being eaten by lions, right? Is to say, hey, be on guard, be on top of things and use that stress to be like, hey, I got to be sharp right now to make sure I do my best work. I like that kind of stress because it gives me fuel. And if you see it that way, if you see it as energy rather than a pain, you realize, hey, I'm just using my biology to my advantage.

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What else can you do? Well, take some action. Any little action towards reducing the stress to relieve yourself of the stress is a good idea. So for example, let's say you are financially strapped, you're stressed out by your finances. Send an email to some of your vendors and say, hey, can we have a bit of a discount or a grace period? Or is there a lower plan that we can downgrade to that would fit our needs? Even just an email will make you start feeling like, okay, I've done something towards helping me cope with the stress. To feel better about the stress, take action. Okay, here's another strategy. It's more of a mindset that really has helped me through the years. Expect stress. Don't see stress as some sort of weird thing or a bad thing or this horrible thing that I gotta get rid of and it's like the plague. No, this is part of life. Expect it. Understand that this is going to happen. So when you are stressed, you don't feel bad about it. Like, you don't feel guilty. You feel like, okay, this is expected. I'm a business owner. There's going to be stressful times. It's going to be challenging. This allows you to stop dwelling on the fact that you're stressed and start working on getting into a better situation. Some of the best entrepreneurs are the best at dealing with stress or best at dealing with uncertainty or dealing with risk. People that are operating billion dollar companies with people's lives in their hands. It's not like they have a relaxed lifestyle, right? They have a lot of responsibility. They are stressed, but they understand that's par for the course. You don't think Elon Musk is stressed out when a rocket blows up in the middle of the sky or one out of like, I don't know, 10 million cars has a fire and it's all over the news. Like, his whole life is stress, okay? He's constantly dealing with one stressful thing after another, things that we don't even see. And why? Because he is equipped. He understands the bigger my ambitions, the bigger my goals, the bigger the rewards, the bigger the stress. That's just how it is. If you want to become a professional golfer and win the Masters one day, you're going to deal with pressure and stress. You're going to have high pressure situations that are uncomfortable. So understanding that this is normal and that this is expected helps a lot. Stress is not the problem, okay? It's how we deal with this problem. It's how we rebound from it so that it doesn't cost us too much. It's going to cost us a little bit because we're going to experience it a little bit in the beginning. But how we deal with it, how we combat it, how do we manage it, this is really going to help us have an advantage over our competition, who is a wreck, right? This person, whoever this competition is, don't have these strategies or is not willing to practice them, and therefore they're losing time, energy and money. You, on the other hand, are smarter than that. You understand this is part of business and you're not going to let it cost you too much because you understand you need to be your best self to run the best business. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I hope you love what you hear. If you do hit subscribe. On your favorite podcast app, hit follow or subscribe. Just click those triple dots in the corner on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and hit follow. You'll get our next episodes automatically and you'll get access to over 2200 business lessons in our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Here's the truth. I'm always stressed, okay? It's just a level of stress. Sometimes it's really low, it's really faint, and sometimes it's really high. But if you have any responsibilities in life and in business, you're going to feel some level of stress, you're some level of worry. So just get used to it, get comfortable with it and move on and keep moving forward. This is very unorthodox advice, I know, but this is what I've learned throughout the years. This is what I've accepted and this is what has helped me. Hopefully, it helps you. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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