Badassery Magazine January 2018 Issue 20 | Page 51

A
sk many modern entre-
preneurs what their most
prevalent problem is, and
a countless number of them won’t
tell you that it’s cash flow, product
development, time management,
or even marketing - many of them
will say that it’s handling all of the
emotions that come with entre-
preneurship. Namely, anxiety and
overwhelm.
Being intrepid trailblazers at
heart, entrepreneurs can solve
many of the issues that we face
on our own, given that we’ve got
some grit and put in the work.
Resources and information on all
of the more technical facets of
running a business are out there in
abundance, but managing entre-
preneurial anxiety is still fairly
new and barren territory for the
modern world.
Sure, we’ve heard about how es-
sential oils, a cozy book, and some
herbal tea will calm us down tem-
porarily - and that might just do
the trick at the moment - but I’ve
just always wanted more. I need
more answers, not temporarily
fixes. (Holler if you hear me!) For
example, where does anxiety even
come from? It’s not all chemicals,
right? Why am I more anxious
when I’m in creative mode? How
can I accept and integrate anxiety
into my life?
Step 1 in Unconventionally
Managing Your Entrepreneurial
Anxiety:
Instead of trying to just ‘manage’,
‘eliminate’, or ‘slay’ your anxiety,
reframe your thoughts about it
altogether - accept that you can use
it to your advantage
Maybe anxiety’s not as bad as
society always paints it to be.
Don’t get me wrong - anxiety that
leaves you with tendinitis, panic
attack hangovers, and hospital
bills from thinking that you were
having a heart attack are definite-
ly no laughing matter. (I actually
thought that I was having a heart
attack the first time that I had
a panic attack, and I called my
mom to tell her that I loved her
one last time, just in case). Anx-
iety’s extremely uncomfortable,
but it definitely has some upsides.
In fact, you could even befriend it.
I can hear you now: “What? Anxi-
ety has some upsides and maybe I
should stop trying to kill it and be
its friend instead?”
HEAR. ME. OUT. The same peo-
ple that are full of enough imagi-
nation to conceive a company are
the same people that can imagine
up worse case scenarios. Anxiety
usually just comes with the ter-
ritory of being an entrepreneur
because both take vision, and with
the good, comes the bad. Dealing
with the plethora of tasks and
responsibilities that come with en-
trepreneurship only fuels natural
anxiety further.
“There are people who are ambi-
tious, competitive, big-thinking
and novelty-seeking, but who also
have a makeup that leads them
to become easily overstimulated
and anxious. They often feel like
they’ve got one foot on the accel-
erator and the other on the brake”
says Alicia Boyes, Ph.D., author
of 'The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies
for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and
Moving Past Your Stuck Points'.
Step 2 in Unconventionally
Managing Your Entrepreneurial
Anxiety:
Acknowledge anxiety for what it
is - energy
All energy can be channele d and
harnessed, and as entrepreneurs,
we need all of the energy that we
can get.
So if you think of anxiety as the
negative manifestation of imagi-
nation energy and creativity as the
positive manifestation of it, can
you start to see how anxiety can
be channeled into creativity?
Step 3 in Unconventionally
Managing Your Entrepreneurial
Anxiety:
Make a list of 3 creative projects
related to your business that you’d
rather your energy flow to instead
of anxiety
These can be regular ol’ run of the
mill creative projects that you’re
already working on, but go for the
more exciting, daring, and auda-
cious ones.
An example of these are: start a
webinar series, make a comic strip
as part of your next promotional
campaign, or try making a parody
music video about an aspect of
your business. (These are totally
current creative projects of mine.)
Step 4 in Unconventionally
Managing Your Entrepreneurial
Anxiety:
The next time that you feel anxiety
run down your spine or flutter in
your heart, shift your mental ener-
gy to one of those 3 business-relat-
ed projects
For at least the first few times you
do this exercise, you’ll have to
keep re-focusing your brain when
it wanders off down Useless Anxi-
ety Lane, but you can just steer
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