Founder burnout is real: 3 strategies to avoid it

Get the most out of your business journeys while avoiding burnouts

Being a business entrepreneur can be incredibly rewarding once you have tasted success. However, the trials and tribulations of being an entrepreneur or a founder can take their toll over time. Handling the finer nuances of your business to ensure healthy profits often means that founders have their hands full. Spending sleepless nights, managing high levels of stress, and the roller coaster ride of emotions with the ups and downs of business is part of the ball game.

As a business founder, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and burnt out. Such instances can not only affect a promising founder psychologically but also lead to the business suffering consequently. Statistics indicate that 8 percent of start-up failures are owing to founder burnout. However, there are some strategies that can help you avoid founder burnout. Based on insights from Forbes, let’s take a closer look at what these strategies entail.

Build self-awareness

Why is self-awareness so important for founders and entrepreneurs?

It’s all too easy to forget about your personal needs when you’re so focused on what’s going on in your business. Worse yet, you could dismiss your physical, mental, or emotional well-being in light of what you’re going through at work. We hear about horror stories in the news of promising young entrepreneurs losing their lives due to undiagnosed ailments, strokes, or heart attacks because of a hectic and stressful lifestyle.  Focussing on personal well-being is something that is put on the backburner by many entrepreneurs and business founders.

Ignoring the body’s physical signals can eventually lead to burnout. Increasing self-awareness is critical for the decisions taken and subsequent actions during a crisis. Better self-awareness is pivotal to deliberate decision-making and improved stress management. By placing attention on current phenomena and the present moment, the first steps to greater self-awareness are instilled: By focussing on what is going on within the body and mind, the latter is being trained to bring attention to the body and thereby respond in a more conducive fashion. The mind is also being trained to focus away from inconsequential white noise and place attention on the task at hand.

Set clear boundaries

Regardless of your business organisation’s level of development, chances are you’re taking on more duties than you need. Invoicing, for example, is a common example of a monotonous but vital work that adds up to a real-time burden that keeps you from stepping away from your desk.

Finding ways to delegate or outsource to trustworthy persons will help you reduce the number of hours needed to work each week, allowing for more time for self-care.  In truth, more entrepreneurs need to say “no” to adding extra duties to their plate. You can’t accomplish everything on your own. Learning to delegate or outsource certain activities as a founder might be one of the most effective strategies to reduce stress.

Identify de-stressing activities

There are more options for unwinding for entrepreneurs and founders. Unfortunately, many avoid de-stressing activities because they believe that an hour-long massage or meditation session is the only thing that counts as self-care. The intentional act of doing something that benefits our mental, emotional, and bodily well-being. Self-care may thus be as basic as drinking adequate water throughout the day or taking prescribed medications on time. Self-care can include a long walk in your favourite park, re-reading your favourite book, and yes, if you’d like, some meditation in the morning.

Take a step back to analyse which activities make you feel peaceful and relaxed as part of your self-awareness journey. Once you’ve determined this, schedule time for your de-stressing activity into your hectic schedule. A daily stroll or reading break may give you a significant brain reset that will leave you feeling refreshed. If necessary, don’t be hesitant to arrange such things expressly on your calendar. Setting an alarm for a half-hour reading break might prevent you from being so engrossed in your job that you remain up till four am.  While many if these steps may seem somewhat logical and obvious, they can spark a domino effect when implemented. After all, the most effective strategies are simple but difficult to follow-through. Striking a balance is the key. The old adage still holds true, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. In this case, all work could lead to the body getting more worn down with stress.