Nervous Biz Boss
Dear Trellis
I’ve worked for other people for 10 years and just jumped out on my own. I’m excited and terrified! What advice do you have for me?
Nervous Biz Boss in San Francisco
Dear Nervous Biz Boss,
Going out on your own is a huge step! I hope you took a minute or three to feel warm and fuzzy about the fact that you did it. You did a thing. A hard thing that most people never find the courage to do.
Now listen. Being your own boss is the best thing in the world, except when it’s an absolute nightmare and you are drowning in “shoulds” and tasks and your anxiety is at 1000% because you could fail and then your parents would have been right all along and what were you thinking? There is no guidebook for how to be your own boss, how many hours a day to work, how many networking events to go to, how many social media accounts to keep active, or a thousand other things you now think about and cause you stress late into the night. When did sleeping get so hard?
I’ve started nine companies and led an industry, and as I wrote that previous paragraph all of the angst of my first company came back to me in vivid color. Starting out is scary! And it stays scary until it gets boring (that happened to me after five years for both careers I’ve held so far). So how do you maintain positivity and not let anxiety and to-do lists spiral out of control?
Here are a few tips I’ve learned along the way that have helped me maintain my equilibrium despite all the crazy shit life and entrepreneurship throws at all of us.
Put three and ONLY three things on your to do list for the day. They can be big, small, fast, or time-consuming. But put the three most critical items on your list. You will never get through every task on your master list but looking at the whole thing at once is paralyzing. You don’t need that anxiety boost before you even opened up your laptop! Keep that list on standby but focus on those three things you can and will do today, that are important (either urgent or not). You complete those and check them off and feel the surge of dopamine flooding your nervous system. Then you decide if you want to add something else (now you are an overacheiver!) or go take a walk in the park, grab a beer, and congratulate yourself on a day well spent.
Your top priority is not to succeed! It is to learn. Is that crazy to hear? You might be scoffing. Of course the goal is success, massive success and an early retirement and to never worry about money again. I hear that and completely agree that your bills need to get paid and if you don’t make money that isn’t going to happen. I’m here to tell you that both your failure and your success (but more your failure) will teach you a ton and help you with your overall life’s success story. Edison learned 9,999 ways to not make a lightbulb, and then made the thing.
Your failure is just a learning step along the way to your ultimate success. Or will lead you to your next thing. So stop worryinig so much about success or failure, but focus on learning and improving. Did you learn something today? Something you can do better? Something to avoid doing next time? Great! Take a moment to enjoy it.
Celebrate every little success no matter how small. You got a new client? YES! Do a little happy dance. You had a client return for more work? YES! Happy dance. You made more than last month? YES! Dance. You figured out a better way of billing clients? YES! Dance. You stopped apologizing for things that weren’t your fault? YES! Dance dance dance!!
There are so many bad things that happen, and they are each going to sap your energy. You need to celebrate the little wins and take that moment to appreciate everything that is going RIGHT with your business, to maintain the resilience to keep going. You might do 10 happy dances a day! So when the roof leaks, covid hits, you lose a client, you get yelled at, you have a mental cushion of resistance to all the bad stuff getting you down.
Find your people. Being a solopreneur can be lonely and isolating. The wins don’t feel as amazing without someone to celebrate with (though it does feel damn delightful to happy dance). The losses feel bigger without anyone to help you reflect how much is going well and help problemsolve solutions. It’s easy to loop on the bad stuff, especially when you are alone. Our bodies are made to worry and try to avoid tigers, so the bad stuff feels bigger and more dire than the good stuff. No matter how high the highs or low the lows, having folks around you who care about you is crucial to your success and learning process.
A business partner can fill this role, a spouse can help, therapy is a terrific resource, and you need people you can talk to every day. If you are solo, you need a coworking space or a collective of folks where you feel comfortable and welcome, where you can share your wins and losses with friendly faces. You need someone to prop you up when you feel weak, and do this for others so you know you are not alone and neither are they, and you get to see that no one is as perfect as they may look on Instagram.
Your business is already off to a great start. You took the plunge, which takes courage! So you have courage. And you are doing a thing. A thing you know you do well. That’s all you need! So go do your thing and try not to be too hard on yourself. Some days will be great. Some terrible. It’s all part of the learning. The great stuff will be great, and the terrible stuff will make for the best stories. You’ve got this.
Rebecca