[00:00:00] We all have hard days. Yes, myself included. Here's the thing. When your energy is off, it can take you out of action. It can prevent you from doing the hard things that you need to do to grow your business. It can hold you back from doing your best work and contributes to mistakes, careless errors and potentially missing things that you otherwise wouldn't.

So knowing that we all go through hard things, I wanted to share with you some of the things that I do when I'm having a hard time. Are you ready? Let's go. Hello Boss and welcome back to the Run Your Business Like a Boss podcast. I wanted to have this conversation because I think that everybody can relate to the feeling of having a hard time and yet having to keep motoring forward.

When you run your own business, you are on your own and you just gotta get on with it. But the reality is, is that there are some helpful ways to help you manage those challenging periods, whether it's just for an hour or a couple of days, so that you can keep working through, but also be nurturing and looking after yourself.

There are a number of reasons for why you might be having a hard time. It could be personal challenges, and running an online business means that you [00:02:00] are working out of home, and that blend between personal and business is often blurred. It could be that you're feeling overwhelmed by all the things that you need to do on your to-do list and your client deliverables and all the things on the back end of your business.

There's so much going on and that then creates time pressure and for you to feel challenged by all the things that you have to do and achieve. Perhaps you are feeling all the fears around failure that I think every single business owner can experience. Regardless of why you're feeling challenged, I want you to know that everybody feels like this from time to time. You are most definitely not alone, and my hope here today is to provide you with some tools and support for you to employ if you are having a hard time. so with that being said, let's get into the list.

The first thing I wanted to share is to get active, shift your body energy. For me, I absolutely love going into our local reserve. We've got a beautiful, I call it the forest, but it's not a forest, it's just a reserve. But I love going in there when I'm feeling not the best, also when I'm feeling great as well, but particularly when I really need to get grounded back to nature and just get some perspective. There's something about nature that can give you perspective. The trees are big and things just get on with it.

There's no rollercoaster that the nature is riding obviously. So, uh, for me, I really love to be physical and to get out into nature and to really just clear my head. So that could be a morning walk or maybe if I'm feeling challenged during the day, I'll just grab the lead, grab Chia and off we'll go just to take an hour out of the day , to clear the challenging thoughts and to get some perspective so I can get work done. The second thing [00:04:00] I've learned to get really good at is managing how I self soothe.

Now, there are a number of unhelpful ways to manage stress or challenging situations. I wanna preface this with the fact that I am not a mental health professional. I am not a doctor, I'm not a nutritionist. I'm just sharing with you my experience. The first thing is that everything on this list triggers your dopamine, and that then feels good initially, but then doesn't feel good in the long term.

If you are finding that when you are feeling challenged, you go straight to a social media app, you feel good initially by getting all those reels or those interesting posts. But then over time you start to feel the pressure and start to feel comparison and start to feel bad about yourself.

That's when you know that things have started to go downhill and you need to close the app. But the thing is, is that social media is highly addictive and it can come under the guise of working. So I'm in there because I'm working and I'm promoting my business. But my question to you is, when you are scrolling and it's not feeling good, are you working and are you in there for business or has it become harmful?

Another way that is an unhelpful way of self soothing is with what you are eating. Again, I'm not a nutritionist or a dietician, but we all know that we can lean on comfort food. And again, it feels good in the moment, but then afterwards you don't feel too great. Or perhaps it's drinking. I think there's a huge culture in the online business space of popping the bottle of wine at the end of the day to, commiserate or celebrate.

But in this case, I'm talking about commiserate and helping you just to take that edge off and then you ultimately feel worse in the long run. I mentioned last [00:06:00] year that I finally gave up alcohol after many years of really feeling like it wasn't working for me. I wanna share my personal experience and by no means am I advocating for anybody to give up alcohol. That's completely your choice. But what I found was that even if I'd had a glass of wine or two, and this might be because of my age, I'm 44, but even if I'd had a one or two glasses of wine, I would wake up at three o'clock in the morning and I would feel anxious, and I would feel... I just didn't feel good in my body.

And then that would flow into the next day. So I never really had hangovers. I just felt anxious. And that would then perpetuate the horrible feelings or the challenging experiences that I was having. So, being really mindful of how you are looking after yourself and what you are doing to self soothe and being mindful that eating food that's unhealthy, drinking too much, or perhaps scrolling too much all starts with getting that big dopamine hit, but then ends up that it's not actually helping you with the situation. Again, I'm not an expert. This is simply my own experience.

The next thing that I wanted to share is this self-awareness peace. I've mentioned this on the podcast before. I'll tag the episode down in the show notes, but one of the most powerful things that you can have as a business owner is to be radically self-aware. And one of the things that can make you feel bad or can contribute to you having a hard time is worry and anxious thoughts.

Now, of course, if you are feeling anxious, you definitely need to see a doctor. But what I'm talking about here is that worry thoughts that you know, you're thinking about something that might happen in the future, because often worry and anxiety comes from future fear-based thoughts. You're worrying about something that might happen in the future, so you're playing that out in your mind.

Then you're trying to troubleshoot and figure out what it is that you're going to [00:08:00] do, but you don't have the complete picture. So it's really impossible to figure out what you're going to do. But then if you really think about it, you could be worrying about something that never, ever eventuates and what an absolute waste of time and energy.

That all sounds really good in theory, but how do you put that into practice? It's about being really mindful of what you are thinking and what you are worrying about. So if you're worrying about the eventuality of something that's going to happen with a client or a project or a launch or whatever that might be, being really mindful of what it is that you're worrying about and then finding a way to bring yourself back to your present situation.

So if you haven't had a chance to listen to episode number 65, the number one mindset tool to change your business and your life, I highly recommend you do listen to that. Even if you've listened to that episode already, go back and check out that episode, especially if you've been having a hard time.

So my point here is to become very aware of your thoughts and your feelings, and to bring that back to your current situation. What can you do today to help you to lead to a great outcome of whatever it is that you're working on, rather than worrying about what might happen down in the future?

Another thing that's really important for me when I'm having a hard time is making space for mindfulness and meditation. Similar to the last point, but also a little bit different. This doesn't mean that you need to start your day with a luxurious one hour long routine.

It can simply be going for a walk and repeating clear mantras for what it is that you want to recalibrate against, or what you wanna move towards, or how you wanna feel in the day. It could be an eight minute visualization exercise, or maybe it's journaling on what you are grateful for. The research body is really clear that it's hard to have that low energy and be grateful at the [00:10:00] same time. And if you wanna know more about this, I highly recommend looking into the positive psychology Godfather Martin Seligman, he is a pioneer of the concept of positive psychology and gratitude is one of the key elements of positive psychology. I took his course about six years ago and it absolutely changed my life. It doesn't mean that I always get it right, but I do know that every time I recalibrate my thoughts into gratitude for what I have, for what I've achieved, for what I'm doing, it helps to shift my energy away from those challenging feelings that can come when you're a business owner.

And the last one is to get support. Running a business is hard work, and you need people around you that are going to support you through the challenging times. The last thing you wanna do is to get stuck on a challenge, and that holds you back from moving your business forward, from achieving the things that you wanna achieve or delivering on your best work for your clients. So it's really important to have someone in your corner. That could be a coach, it could be a business friend, it could be someone in your personal or professional network that holds space for you, that helps you as you're traversing challenging situations.

Going alone in business is hard work, so I encourage you to get support. So there are a few things that I have personally done or continue to do as I'm working through challenging situations. As I said at the beginning of the episode, you are not alone in going through challenging situations, but how you handle those situations is really important and I do hope that you have got some ideas for what to do next time you're feeling a lot of pressure. And before we wrap up today's conversation, I just wanted to remind you that you are doing a fantastic job. Running a business is not easy, [00:12:00] and so I hope that these tools and strategies will help you as you are moving through challenging times in your business. 

Take care, and as always, I look forward to chatting with you next week.