Member Article

Looking after your mental health in an unstable economy.

As business owners, CEO’s and employees we are operating in difficult economic times and for many it can cause mental trauma. Let’s break down what trauma is and how can we deal with it productively as business owners.

Trauma doesn’t have to necessarily be a huge life-altering event. When we say trauma we often think of a car accident or some kind of medical trauma. However, it can be defined as an experience which is less than good. Therefore, we are all trauma survivors. There are varying degrees of trauma. It is about working out how trauma relates to you. Entrepreneurs and business people deal with trauma all the time. If a deal falls through that can feel like a trauma or failure. Many of us don’t realise we are dealing with trauma as other life factors override it.

If you don’t deal with trauma it becomes amplified. If you try and outrun trauma consciously or subconsciously you will find at some point it manages to get back up to the surface. Many of us don’t have the skills to cope with it. We are dealing with probably the biggest period of uncertainty that many of us have ever lived through. This has caused a lot of people to lose their confidence including business owners. This can affect a business and a business owners identity.

How can you succeed in uncertain times? Think about the people you around you who are excelling and succeeding in this environment. What’s different about them? It is how they perceive themselves and how they define themselves separately from the world at large and their place in it. Some of the most confident people are those who set up businesses within the pandemic. They haven’t been hampered by that legacy because they don’t have that previous frame of reference to hold them back. Freedom of creativity is important. The freedom of not knowing any better and not perceiving limitations can be useful.

How do the entrepreneurs that have lost their confidence move forward? Everyone who feels a lack of confidence should look around them. If you see someone else doing what you are doing, or want to do successfully and confidently, see if you can identify the gap between you and them. You will see what success looks like. It is easy to then work out how to bridge that gap. Learn from them. An easy control method generally is to control your breath. This controls your biological, physiological and chemical makeup in any moment. This then affects your performance. In a moment of distress, controlling your breath allows you to stay clear-headed, calm, and connected to your own confidence.

Our stress response can cause us to start climbing the wall of worry without even making a conscious decision to do so. Much of this is programming or habit. That can be changed through conscious re-patterning or neurological reprogramming. Think about the thing that’s most worrying you, close your eyes and give that feeling a number between zero and 10, 10 being the most worry. it will create an image in your mind. And when you get that image shrink it down and push it away from you. Interrupt your habits. Interrupt the programming that unconsciously starts by changing the neurological representation of the moment that you’re in, through the feeling that it creates in you. And then the vision that it creates. If you are not visual you can do this with sound.

Control, change, create. The third side of the triangle is to create. First Identify who it is you want to be, how you want to show up and get very granular and detailed about what that person would do and the actions they would take. Create the identity you want to inhabit. You can do that by looking outside of yourself and saying, “I want to be that way.” Think of five characteristics of the leader you want to be. This way you are automatically sending a message to your neurology and your unconscious, saying this is the goal. “This is my intention.” Then turn it into action. Now you’ve taken yourself from inertia into action. Now you have shifted yourself from uncertainty into a certainty in who you are. So while we can’t predict or control the outside world, you can most definitely start controlling, embodying and exhibiting your inside world according to your choices.

Never hide your feelings of trauma. Don’t normalise a lack of being able to sleep, a lack of engaging with others or hyper vigilance which are just some of the symptoms of trauma. Don’t feel ashamed. Once you have identified it you can change it. Your business will benefit.

This article was written by Peter Boolkah, an award winning business coach with over 20 years helping clients globally to upscale and build revenue and profit.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lucy Hood .