By Jewelle Saunders
Entrepreneurs know that it takes a lot of time and effort to get their dreams off the ground. Meeting your goals as an entrepreneur often requires long days and long nights, navigating stressful decisions and finances, and dealing with rejection and redirection.
In order to meet these goals and find success, as an entrepreneur you may experience poor work-life balance and periods of burnout, where you can feel overwhelmed and unable to meet the demands of your daily life. Self-care is an important part of creating a work-life balance that helps you keep your pace and get back on track to sustained success. Let’s take a deeper look at why self-care is important to your path as an entrepreneur.
Avoiding burnout helps productivity
What does burnout look like? While you can be excited and motivated one day to accomplish your goals, when you work without stopping and without focusing on yourself, it can result in a feeling of burnout the next day.
Signs of burnout include:
- Lack of creativity.
- Fatigue.
- Reduced productivity.
- Anxiety.
- Difficulty concentrating.
- Headaches.
- Change in appetite or weight.
- Negative attitudes to coworkers or family.
- Difficulty sleeping.
It is important to know that everyone can get burned out. There is an expectation that you should always “go, go, go” as a small-business owner, but it is natural to have periods of exhaustion. Explore different ways to care for yourself to avoid this feeling of burnout before it even starts.
Many forms of self-care help you become more productive and organize your work better. By exercising, practicing mindfulness, taking regular breaks and vacations, focusing on your sleep and developing your support network, you are taking steps to be more productive and excited about your periods of hard work.
Self-care helps you make better decisions
When you feel burned out, you lose focus and you lose confidence. By turning your attention back to yourself and things you find joy in and that give you the time to rest, you gain new energy and ideas.
When you are your healthiest self, you are able to organize more easily and you gain confidence in your decision-making. By helping to better take care of yourself, you are more easily able to take care of others and find solutions for clients with your business.
Learning to delegate helps you and your team
One way to start focusing on self-care and building a work-life balance is to learn that you do not have to do everything yourself. When you outsource some of your tasks and assignments, such as to your employees, freelance writers or design firms, you give yourself a chance to delegate.
By delegating, you can start taking some of the daily pressure off of your own back and you can give your team an opportunity to show off their skills and their unique talents. It can be hard at first to relinquish control of a company you built yourself, but learning to delegate will help you avoid burnout and help you and your team grow in the long term.
Learn about more resources on maintaining a work-life balance at #YLAIStrong, and connect with like-minded entrepreneurial peers on the YLAI Network Facebook group!