Mental Health and Starting a Business

Mental Health and Starting a Business

I have written and spoken at length on this topic, but wanted to share one of the most popular excerpts from my book that is currently available online via the Amazon store.

In the book 'Don't Build Rollerskates For Birds'; I discuss some of the phases that you naturally go through as a start-up and small business owner, often beginning your journey with 'just you' and then evolving through the phases. But I also speak candidly about my own challenges, the challenging and upsetting times, as much as the successes.

I didn't want people to feel that they had to 'go it alone'. I wanted to help people and share this knowledge as the journey is lonely and challenging and for those that are neurodiverse (dyslexia/ADD/ADHD/Dyspraxia) there are even more challenges to face and overcome.

Often the biggest challenge is yourself, your mindset and balancing your own wellbeing and mental health too. Overthinking, procrastination and exhaustion do not make for mental wellness; so I decided to start writing about it.

An excerpt from Don't Build Rollerskates For Birds - My Early Stage Start-up Story:

Pre-Start-Up – The Ideas Phase

This is where you have a great idea but haven’t yet started trading or gained any customers. Some call this the ‘pre-start-up’ phase.

There are so many ideas in your head that the options are never-ending.

But you need to start to ‘sift’, to see which ones are worth thinking about, then act upon them and take them a little further to investigate and validate your idea(s) further.

Start looking at the business model canvas to get your ideas down and out of your busy brain.

In this phase, you also need to talk to your friends and family about the reality of starting your business, and how that will impact on them.

The following are the realities of running your own business:

Friends and family – What they and you need to know

·      You need to be honest with them; if you are to see this through, it will affect all that you do.

·      Your time won’t belong to them anymore. 

·      You will have no social life.

·      You will always be working or thinking about work, even in the middle of the night when you are wide awake.

·      You will have no weekends at all and you may not sleep a lot.

·      You will miss out on family events and evenings out. That is what this will take in terms of your commitment to succeed. 

·      There is no easy way.

·      It will put your closest relationships to the test; it may break your marriage or closest partnerships. 

·      You need to think that your ‘big idea’ will be worth the above. 

·      It is not for everyone.

·      If you are prone to having ideas and then not following them through, then don’t start your own business or if you do, find a co-founder who can execute the parts that you cannot.

·      You cannot just get a team to run things for you, you need to lead. You need a mission and you need to drive it. Every day of the year, for the rest of your life. 

·      Are you ready to make that choice yet? 

·      Are your family and friends ready?

·      Are you mentally ready?

·      Are you resilient enough?

·      Can you be told ‘no’ each and every day, all the time and still remain upbeat and forward-thinking, even when you have been up for twelve to fourteen hours straight?

·      This is not about macho culture; this is about the will to do what it takes to succeed.

·      You may be earning nothing or £3 an hour in the early stages. For a very long time.

·      Are you prepared to make sacrifices?

·      How will this impact you emotionally and psychologically?

·      How do you deal with stress?

·      Day in and day out, for the rest of your life? Even when your kids are growing up?

During this ideas stage, I would suggest that you undertake multiple psychometric and personality tests. These are commonly used in the recruitment and selection of sales teams. It identifies your personality traits and how you like to be managed.

In the world of start-up, I cannot understand when articles say, ‘know yourself’, that what they actually should say is ‘take a psychometric test’, and then take a long hard look in the mirror and be honest with yourself.

You will always be learning at such an accelerated rate when you start. This ‘pre-start-up’ time should be spent wisely. The more you know about yourself, the more competitive advantage you will have in the market, when you later launch your business.

When you come up against a barrier or problem in your business, you can then step back and look at the issue more objectively, as you will know more about what drives and motivates you, what skill-set you have and what skills you need to compensate for/develop.

You can go back and refer to the tests and profiles and think, ‘right, that’s how I react, and this is how I get over it, fast!’

There are plenty of free tests online, find out what drives you; find out what you are no good at. Yes, we all have things that we cannot do, and this can go against the usual bullish entrepreneurial ego, but you need to know yourself first.

I call this process: ‘Start With Self’.

Find out what motivates you and bores you rigid. For me, I am driven by being with people and getting results (back to Myers-Briggs ENFJ).

But you would never employ me as your accountant. It would be commercial suicide.

I know this as a fact. I know myself. Find out how you will emotionally react to situations, are you quick to anger?

Do you procrastinate?

Are you an introvert or extrovert?

What other personalities and people do you need as your business grows to compensate for the parts that you are weak at?

You need to know your strengths and weaknesses; you need to be brutally honest with yourself and those around you.

This may take the form of sitting down with all your close friends and family and discussing the impact, right down to who will do the shopping, put the kids to bed and take the dog for a walk.

You may not be able to do any of these things, for a long, long time.

Tip: Know yourself - ‘Start With Self’.

Your start-up will test you to your limits (like a bad relationship) so do all that you can, in advance, to prepare and keep reading and learning.

You never stop.

You’re ‘all in’.

Become a sponge. For every. Little. Detail.

Becky Lodge is a degree and CIM qualified Founder and Director with a 30 year career history in STEAM based markets as an international sales and marketing professional.

 Founder and Director of Little Kanga Ltd (2015) Becky later founded the brand ‘StartUp Disruptors’ a community that helps early stage start-ups and aspiring business owners to fund and scale their projects and businesses and look after their mental health on the journey.

 Started with 9 people in a pub in Portsmouth in 2016 (to protect the interests of new business owners that were neurodiverse and subject to exploitation), Becky grew the membership community via social media to 150 members in year one and now the community has over 50,000 social media followers and 2,000 members on Facebook, via a subscription based service from just £19.99pcm that allows people to access to qualified experts at a fraction of the normal costs for business coaching, advice, support and community.

 This has now become known as the ‘Netflix’ of entrepreneurship education in the UK. This model will be rolled out to LEPs across the UK, starting with her home LEP in the Solent region and then on-boarding the rest of the UK.

 One of Sky News 100 Women in business in 2017 and a contributing author to BBC News online for Technology, Becky was the first tech mentor in the UK to be approached by Faster Capital (Venture Capital) in Dubai to aid their tech start-ups for mentoring. A lecturer in operational sales management at the University of Portsmouth Business School, Becky has an agenda around enabling social mobility and gender parity through making entrepreneurship accessible and affordable for all.

 ‘StartUp Disruptors’ is sponsored and supported by Uber, Funding Circle, Faster Capital, Notion Capital, Mind, University of Portsmouth Business School, Xebra Accounting and many others.

This disruptive model has been the result of Becky’s ability to ‘see around corners’ due to her own neurodiversity. The StartUp Disruptors community and learning is backed by the power of the University of Portsmouth Business School and the University of Essex.

Becky is considered to be the ‘go to’ person in the early stage entrepreneurship space and she is a passionate future thinker, innovator and social media influencer in B2B in the UK with over 15,000 connections and followers on LinkedIn and 10,000 followers on Twitter alone. A super-connector with high EQ/emotional intelligence and open mindset, Becky is driven to help change the entrepreneurship education space for future generations.

 You can find out more about Little Kanga via the website: www.littlekanga.co.uk and StartUp Disruptors has a dedicated website at: www.startupdisruptors.co.uk

 You can buy the book via Amazon here.