How Therapy Can Help Entrepreneurs Thrive Instead of Survive

Entrepreneurship can feel like a thrilling adventure, but let's be honest—it can also be incredibly lonely, high-pressure, and exhausting. 

If you're a business owner, you're likely juggling an endless to-do list, constantly making decisions, and facing uncertainty on a daily basis. It’s a lot of pressure to have the livelihoods of people rest on your shoulders! Starting a business is a ton of work, any way you slice it. It can be hard for non business owners to relate to what you’re going through, so working on your own business can be a lonely prospect, even when you’re passionate about it. While the excitement of building something from the ground up is undeniable, the weight of that responsibility can take a toll on your mental health. This is where therapy can be a game-changer. 

Working with a therapist doesn’t just help you survive as an entrepreneur—it helps you thrive. 

As an entrepreneur, therapy can make a real difference in your business and personal life, while meeting you right where you are. Here’s how:

Improve Work-Life Balance 

Entrepreneurs often blur the lines between work and life, especially when starting a business. It can seem like there aren’t enough hours in the day when you’re running your own business, and it can be hard to know when to stop when you still have so much to do. Pouring everything you have into your business can come at a steep cost to your health and your relationships. 

Therapy can help you step back, re-evaluate how you're balancing your time, and find ways to create more joy, meaning, and fulfillment across all areas of your life. A therapist helps you ensure that you're thriving not just professionally but also personally.

Take Creative Risks and Develop Business Instincts

Being an entrepreneur often requires taking risks, and that can be terrifying. Therapy offers a safe space to explore the fears and insecurities that might hold you back from reaching your full creative potential. Working with a therapist can help you learn more about your strengths and help you tune in to your sense of intuition, so you can trust yourself more and take those big leaps with confidence in your business. 

Freedom from Anxiety, Stress, and Depression

The weight of entrepreneurship can sometimes lead to anxiety, depression, or burnout. Stress is often a daily experience when you’re running your own business. Working with a therapist can give you the tools to navigate the mental health challenges that often accompany running a business, helping you gain freedom from the constant stress and pressure. When you're feeling overwhelmed, a therapist helps you ground yourself and find ways to ease the emotional burden, while giving you a safe space to discuss what’s going on. 

Find Your Voice as a Leader

You are the driving force behind your business, but do you feel confident in your leadership? Therapy can help you discover and develop your unique voice as a leader. Whether it's practice making tough decisions, learning how to build a team, and developing your management skills, therapy helps you refine your communication skills and grow into the kind of leader that inspires trust and connection. 

Connect to Your Core Values

Many entrepreneurs struggle with staying true to themselves amid the demands of running a business. Therapy allows you to understand and connect with your core values, which can help you find your "true north" so you can make decisions from a place of authenticity. Exploring what’s truly important to you can be a powerful guide in both your personal and professional life, because knowing what you value helps you make decisions that feel more aligned with who you are. 

Build a Community

Building a business can feel isolating, but therapy can help you find and connect with your people—whether that's your clients, a supportive community, or a business network. A therapist can also teach you how to communicate in a way that maximizes your impact as a business owner, helping you build relationships that truly matter in and out of work. 

Redefine Failure and Keep a Growth Mindset

All entrepreneurs face failure—it’s inevitable when you’re starting something new, both in big and small ways. Remember that failure doesn’t have to be something that stops you in your tracks. Through therapy, you can reframe how you view setbacks, seeing them as opportunities for growth instead of evidence of your limitations. You can learn from your past without punishing yourself for it, which can help you grow. Maintaining a growth mindset helps you stay adaptable and open to change, no matter what challenges come your way.

Enhance Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Skills

Running a business isn’t just about strategy; it’s about people, but we don’t always have the people skills we need to do things effectively. Developing emotional intelligence through therapy improves your ability to connect, influence, and lead others. You’ll learn how to communicate with empathy and foster an environment where both you and your team can thrive. Therapy can also help you practice emotional regulation, which is essential for effective leaders. 

Practice Stillness and Intuition

In the hustle of entrepreneurship, it’s easy to lose touch with yourself and what you need. Working with a therapist can help you to develop practices of stillness and reflection, allowing you to tune into your intuition. When you cultivate this practice, you’ll notice how it strengthens your decision-making and keeps you grounded, even when the chaos of running a business threatens to overwhelm you. Therapy offers you a chance to learn how to create kind, compassionate space for yourself — and others, which is essential for successful businesses. 

Celebrate Strengths 

As an entrepreneur, it's easy to focus on what’s not working or where you feel inadequate. Our brains naturally focus on the negative, and it takes real practice to notice and celebrate the positive. Therapy offers you a safe place to acknowledge and celebrate your successes and strengths, and build upon them. 

Get Support That Fits Your Schedule

One of the challenges of being a business owner is finding time for everything, including self-care. That’s why online therapy is a perfect fit for entrepreneurs. You can meet with your therapist from anywhere—whether you’re at home, at your office, or even traveling for work. Scheduling therapy sessions around your busy life gives you the flexibility you need, without sacrificing the mental health support that can help you thrive, in your personal life and in your business.

Achieve Alignment in Life and Business

Therapy helps you align your life and your business in a way that feels sustainable and fulfilling. You’ll gain the self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and leadership abilities you need to navigate challenges, seize opportunities, and create a business that supports the life you want to live.

Your journey as a business owner is unique—and you deserve the support that empowers you to keep moving forward. If you’re looking for a safe place to explore everything that comes with being an entrepreneur, working with a therapist can help. Our clinicians are accepting new clients, so reach out to us today to begin. 

What to Do When You’re Burned Out

Do you know what to do when you’re burned out?

Burnout is something that many of us are all too familiar with, especially since the onset of the pandemic. While many of us know on some level that we’re burned out, it’s less clear what to do when you are burned out. A complicating factor with treating burnout is that it leaves you feeling exhausted, depleted, and hopeless, which can make it harder to get started doing anything that will help you feel better. Coping with burnout doesn’t have to be complicated, though, and there are some simple steps you can take to start feeling better. 

What is burnout, anyway? 

Burnout is excessive and long-term stress. It’s easy to confuse burnout with stress, but they’re a little different. Stress is generally about a specific thing or situation, and it has an end. Burnout, on the other hand, is long-term. Burnout lasts until we do something about it, even if the situation that originally stressed us out has passed. 

Anything that causes lots of stress can lead to burnout. Some situations that can lead to burnout include:

• Being a caregiver or parent

• Struggling with relationship problems

• Having to work multiple jobs

• Being in a rigorous academic program 

• Having to deal with too much at work

What does burnout feel like?

Burnout is a message from your body that you’re doing too much, going too hard, and you need to listen before you cause serious damage. As you can imagine, it doesn’t feel good! 

Some of the physical and mental symptoms of burnout are:

• Feeling cynical, helpless, trapped, or defeated

• Getting sick more frequently

• Procrastination

• Struggling with self-doubt

• Problems with concentration or memory

• Being exhausted and drained all the time

• Coping with substances 

• Becoming more detached and isolated from the people in your life

• Feeling consistently bored or overwhelmed

• Irritability 

• Loss of motivation for things that are important or meaningful to you

• Frequent aches and pains (like headaches or stomach aches)

• Changes in appetite

• Shifts in your sleeping patterns

Why is burnout so common?

Burnout is common because our culture values work/productivity above personal happiness. Our worth is often tied to our jobs and how much we can produce. Being busy is rewarded and not being busy is seen as lazy. With inflation rising and the economic unpredictability from the pandemic, many people are working more than ever and having less time to recuperate. 

Being stressed for a long period of time is harmful, both mentally and physically. Our bodies aren’t meant to be stressed for months and months on end, and when they are, it can cause problems, from mood swings to health problems like heart disease. 

Dealing with burnout takes a two pronged approach of treatment and prevention.

Burnout always has a cause, but it’s not always easy to figure out what that cause is. Understanding the cause of your burnout can be key to prevent it from happening again. Figuring out what is making you feel burned out can help you focus on relieving the symptoms of burnout so you can make yourself feel better. 

What can you do to feel better right now? 

The first step to treating burnout is to ease the symptoms and start feeling better. It might seem like there’s nothing you can change, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes there’s not much you can do about a situation, but other times you can make changes that will help you feel better. Try approaching the problem after a few good meals and a good night of rest. When you’re feeling slightly less depleted, try to think about where the burnout is coming from. 

It can feel bad to have to cancel plans or to ask for help, but remember that you’re not meant to go through life alone. Even if you feel like you’re the only one who can do certain things, you deserve to have a break too. Go through what’s on your plate and cancel or reschedule a few things. Ask for help from the people in your community. 

It can also be helpful to let people know what’s going on with you so you don’t feel so alone. Most of us have dealt with burnout at some point, and it can be comforting to know that someone has gone through something similar and come out of it. 

How to prevent burnout in the future

Once you understand a little bit more about where the source of your burnout is coming from, you can work on strategies to prevent it from happening again. If you struggle with being assigned too much at work, you can work with your boss to clarify your job responsibilities and learn how to delegate. If you are burned out from caregiving, you can call in your support system and ask for help. 

Do you tend to be a people pleaser? When you struggle to ask for help, it can lead to burnout because you feel you have to take everything on yourself. No one can do everything alone, but it takes practice to feel comfortable asking for help from your support system. 

Make it a habit to celebrate what’s going right. Our brains naturally try to focus on the negative to keep us safe, but sometimes they overdo it. It takes effort to focus on the positive sometimes, but when you make it a habit to celebrate what’s going right, it can help you feel less hopeless about the future. 

Finally, it’s crucial to give yourself breaks. Schedule time off in your calendar. Take all of your vacation and sick days. Switch shifts with people to give yourself some time away. Say no to plans when you’re overwhelmed. 

The way that we work and live in the modern world is pretty tough, and it doesn’t give us a lot of time to ourselves. It’s important to take time off regularly and use it to replenish your energy. This is hard because a lot of us spend our free time running errands or completing tasks, not resting. It can take time to learn how to really rest in a way that replenishes you, but it is possible. 

What to do when you’re burned out and can’t take a break or change jobs

Work is a frequent source of burnout. While it can be fun to imagine just leaving your job and never coming back, that’s not always possible for people. Most of us need our jobs to keep the bills paid and keep a roof over our heads. If you’re burned out at work and you can’t take a break or change jobs, you’re not alone. There are some things you can do to help feel less burned out. 

Start with setting boundaries. Talk with someone you work for like a manager or supervisor and explain what you’re experiencing. Your employer should have an interest in supporting your mental health, because employees who are burned out aren’t as productive. Your productivity doesn’t define you, but it may be something your boss cares about. Using this logic can help persuade your boss to help take some things off your plate or find solutions where they can. Try to set boundaries like when you will respond to work messages or how much you can realistically handle. 

It may also be helpful to challenge your sense of urgency. Are the things causing you stress really urgent, or do you just feel like it is? Try to assess whether you’re pressuring yourself to do too much. Remember it’s okay to have boundaries, and not everything needs to be done right away. In most situations, what is happening is not an emergency, even if the people around us are behaving like it is. 

Finally, take good care of yourself when you’re burned out. Treat yourself like you would when you’re not well, because you’re not well when you’re burned out. Get enough sleep, eat enough food, drink enough water, take enough time for yourself, do things that make you happy, move your body, and spend time with people you love. 

Burnout is unpleasant, but it is treatable. Working with a therapist can help you cope with burnout and find solutions to prevent it from happening again. Get in touch with our office today to get started.

How to Unlink Your Self-Worth From Your Job Status

How to Unlink Your Self-Worth From Your Job Status

In the United States, we put a lot of focus on work and productivity. When we meet someone new, we often ask “So, what do you do?” right away. We define ourselves by our jobs, and so it can be damaging to our sense of self-worth when we’re not being productive.

However, in the last year, unemployment has soared due to the covid pandemic, and many people are still out of work. We often hear statistics on unemployment, but we often don’t see the reality behind those numbers. Some people are also feeling conflicted because as jobs open back up, some businesses are having a hard time hiring. After the last year, many people have decided they don’t want to work low paying service jobs where they’re treated terribly. Some people aren’t vaccinated and don’t feel safe going back to work. Some people have realized that the path they were on is no longer the right fit for them and are trying to figure out where to go next.

If you’ve been out of work for any length of time, you know that lots of feelings can come up unexpectedly about your job status. Even if you’re happy with your current situation, the expectations and judgement from other people can be exhausting. 

If you’ve spent most of your life tying your self-worth to your work, you’re certainly not alone. Here are some ideas for how to cope when you feel like your self-worth relies on your productivity or job status. 

Be nice to yourself 

This advice is true for so many things. Lots of us are hard on ourselves without really knowing or understanding why. It’s a habit that we’ve formed, and it can be hard to break. Try to talk to yourself kindly and with compassion. If you’re having a hard time with this, imagine you’re talking to your best friend. How would you talk to them about this? Would you tell them they’re worthless because they’re not working right now? Of course you wouldn’t. Channel that same compassion toward yourself. 

Ask yourself: Who profits when I feel this way? 

Insecurity makes the world go round. It’s how advertisers convince you to buy things. When you notice feelings like “I”m not good enough” or “I’m only worthy when I have regular work”, try to dig a little deeper. Where are these thoughts coming from? Are they true? What is the evidence of their truth? Is this sense of insecurity trying to nudge me toward buying something to soothe my discomfort? Reminding yourself that someone is profiting off of your distress can be a helpful way to remind yourself that there’s nothing wrong with the way you feel, but you don’t have to act on it. 

Use mantras or affirmations to remind yourself you are inherently worthy 

We are reminded from a young age that our work is our identity. We talk about what we want to be when we grow up and focus on careers, instead of on our values or our emotional state. It takes a lot of work to undo that programming. When you notice those old messages coming up, you can remind yourself that they’re not true. It takes practice, so repeating affirmations or mantras to yourself on a regular basis can help counteract the feelings that you’re not good enough. What you say to yourself matters.

Cultivate interests outside of things you can get paid for

Your worth has nothing to do with the value you create monetarily. While everyone deserves to be paid for their labor, there’s also freedom in finding joy in things you don’t get paid for. Not everything has to be monetized. You can start a hobby without turning it into a side hustle. It’s okay to spend time on things that don’t add to your bank statement. 

Participate in mutual aid groups

If you ever need the reminder that we are not alone, there are tons of organizers doing the work to bring together resources to support local folks. Even if you’re not able to donate monetarily right now to mutual aid, it can be a helpful reminder that there is help out there outside of our traditional systems of charity or government aid. We have the ability to help each other. We have this idea that if you’re not in the traditional job sphere, working 9-5, then you can’t get help, but that’s not true. Local organizations do the work every day to keep people from falling through the cracks. Can you donate time to an organization? Can you drop off some food at a local food shelf? Can you share local mutual aid requests with your network? All of these things help. 

If you are not working right now, for whatever reason, know that you are still a worthy, valuable person no matter what. That will always be true, regardless of your employment status. Your worth is not defined by your productivity or the money you can make. It’s a hard lesson to learn, because we spend so much of our lives hearing the opposite is true. Be gentle and try not to judge yourself for whatever feelings come up.

If you’re looking for more support as you deal with the fallout from the pandemic, including unemployment, our clinicians can help you during this tricky time.