Why business owners often feel overwhelmed in their lives?

It is no surprise that one of the most common issues is that business owners have is feeling overwhelmed in their lives. This is due to a variety of factors all of which can contribute to difficulties, stress and problems for business owners unless addressed.

It is no secret that business owners often work 60-hour weeks. This constant focus on the business with all the tasks at hand can often be stressful. When you have to manage one business that is hard enough. However, many business owners I work with have multiple businesses in different markets even in many countries. It’s not hard to imagine the amount of sheer volume of work that can often be overwhelming to them. However, all business owners have lots of work, there are some that feel overwhelmed and others that don’t, so perhaps there are some deeper causes for feeling overwhelmed.

Set too high expectations

Many business owners have incredibly high expectations of themselves and of every other person in the business. This maybe true for you where the expectations you set are incredibly high for yourself. It’s not surprisingly that you may feel overwhelmed when trying to meet these targets not only for you, but also as an example to others in the organisation. The irony is that often this pressure is so high that you may end up procrastinating,due to the fear of not being able to reach the goals that you set.

You may even have perfectionist tendencies, which means you are an incredible person when it comes to detail in business and getting things right but when it comes to expectations you will always fall short. No one can reach perfection. This means that no matter what happens you will never hit the target exactly and constantly be feeling overwhelmed in the business.

Focusing on the fear

Fear of failure, fear of not being good enough or fear of not being able to provide for their family; are just a few fears of many, that business owners I have worked with face, as they build their business success. Often it’s this fear that makes business owners feel incredibly stressed, as if they make a wrong decision then these fears become much more prominent in their mind as they start to manifest into reality.

When you focus on the fear it often gets worse and as you run through different scenarios of this happening in your mind it unconsciously makes it a reality. The mind can’t tell the difference between a do and a don’t. For example have you ever told someone to not drop the plate and guess what happens they drop the plate! In their mind they are thinking don’t drop the plate, don’t drop the plate. This fear when focused on so much can actually create the exact results that they fear most. Its no wonder that the business owners living in fear are feeling overwhelmed with everything going on, as they may feel they are one step away from that fear becoming a reality

Expectations of others.

Its not just your own expectations that causes overwhelm, but also the expectations of others. These are from your investors, share holders, board members, staff and family members, to name a few.

This often becomes magnified when coupled with a pleasing mentality, as it’s a recipe for disaster. Pleasers will constantly feel internal struggles, as they want to please everyone. This is great when everyone agrees, however, often there are conflicts of interest and where they please one side, they will disappoint another. For a person that is a pleaser there is nothing more overwhelming in life than these double binds that often leave pleasers paralysed, as they don’t know what to do.

Although pleasers will experience an almost paralysis of overwhelm with not knowing what to do. It is not uncommon for many business owners to also struggle. Perhaps you too face this issue? Where you haveso many different expectations to meet that are often contrary or beyond what you are capable of. You may feel that you are letting people down; that you are losing control of the business and that you aren’t being the leader you want to be. This in turn can lead to a lot of unwanted negative emotions such as anxiety and stress.

You have no me time

Business owners, when they are constantly working on the business don’t have time to actually stop. You maybe in this position, where you don’t have time to unwind, distress and actually detach from the business and look at it with fresh eyes. This is more common now than it has ever been due to us being constantly connected with one another.

When issues arise, more likely than not people can immediately get hold of you. This can cause you to work over time, which many unbalanced business owners do. You will also end up working on weekends, having interrupted dinners and constantly having to leave certain activities in order to deal with issues in the business. Although this can be effective short term, in the long term it leaves the business dependent on you and you can’t look after yourself as a result.

Health deteriorating

Are you prioritising your health whilst you build your business? If not, perhaps you feel yourself breaking down in your body through experiencing constant aches and pains? You may exercise here and there if you can, but you spend most of your time in meetings, travelling and expanding the business. The sad thing is this also leads to overwhelm, as you aren’t looking after your body, you’re deteriorating away and you’re not utilising your whole mind!

That’s right you MUST exercise in order to improve yourself when it comes to your business. It’s been proven time and time again that exercising reduces inflammation, increases your ability to reduce insulin resistance and stimulates chemicals being released in the brain. This helps keep your brain cells healthy, and helps enhance thinking as well as memory. It has even been proven that the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal cortex are greater in volume in people that have regular exercise.

If this hasn’t convinced you yet well just think about how it improves your mood, sleep, stress, anxiety and depression! When your health deteriorates you are in pain, have a lower tolerance to get stressed and ultimately will be thinking at a lower capacity of what you are capable of.

No system to help organise yourself

Another reason for overwhelm in business is where you don’t have a system for organising your life and your business. This ultimately leads to a life where you are living in reaction. It’s very sad that on average, when I take people through their lives almost 83% of business owners spend the majority of their time living in reaction! You wonder why you are so stressed when you are reacting constantly to new issues in your life.

If you don’t have planning time, and you don’t proactively go out of your way to organise all the tasks that you need to do, you will feel overwhelmed.

If you don’t have a system that stores all the tasks as opposed to keeping everything in your head then it’s no wonder you will feel overwhelmed.

If you don’t have software to store everything that you need to do in different segments for the different parts of the business, then it’s not a surprise you are feeling overwhelmed!

This was the primary reason that I created the ULM program, which is a way to help business owners manage their personal and business lives. I found that there are so many business owners that feel overwhelmed purely because they don’t know how to organise themselves and their lives. Without a system in place you will undoubtedly experience stress and overwhelm in your life.

Feel you can do everything

You may feel that you can do everything in your business. Many people get stuck in this zone,where you are your business. The truth is that at this point you are working in the business. You are self-employed by the business and if you want to not feel overwhelmed, you will have difficulties doing business this way.

Often this occurs where you may not be able to trust people and want to always be in control. This means that you will not only be feeling overwhelmed from having to do so much in the business, including tasks that you aren’t skilled to do. You will also feel out of control if things don’t go your way. The world is changing so rapidly that its much harder to remain in control as there are so many variables that you didn’t have to consider previously.

You will also have doubts about whether or not other people can really do the job you have assigned to them. These doubts will run through your mind often leading to you feelinganxiety, as you can’t fully focus on the task at hand. We can see that being the business, coupled with a few negative patterns is another recipe for overwhelming emotions in your life.

As you can see there are many different reasons for feeling overwhelmed in business. More often than not it is a combination of these that causes many unwanted emotions for many business owners. Take your time, work with an expert and start to improve these variables so that you can start to have even more success but feel fulfilled in the process.