If you’re like most business owners, you probably began your business with aspirations of wealth, freedom and fulfilment. But the reality isn’t so easy, right?
So let’s take a deeper look at what it takes to live a meaningful, fulfilling life.
The demands of running your own business are intense. Unlike employees, who can often just clock-in, do their job and then clock out, the job of a business owner never truly ends.
You carry your business with you, always. If you’re not negotiating prices, influencing customers, managing staff, chasing cash-flow or doing one of the other myriad of tasks necessary to keep the business operating, you’re thinking about the business, about solutions, about opportunities or threats. So much for a balanced lifestyle!
Thankfully, our brains and systems are wired to cope with a certain amount of stress. You know the famous analogy about the line you see on the ICU monitor that constantly jumps up and down? It’s a good sign – you don’t want a static flat line!
But there’s a limit. Unless you have a way to manage the stressors, challenges and disappointments that life will throw at you, you stop being a good owner and manager. Running the business becomes onerous, and eventually life becomes unfulfilling. And when that happens, many owners give up or fight on until their bodies give up.
The truth of the matter is that business owners choose to live in a frantic world. Your clients want immediate responses, your staff need guidance, your suppliers demand payment, and all the while you need to provide for your family. And naturally, all this places incredible stress on you and robs you of the ability to remain calm and focused, let alone fulfilled.
So what can you do? Are business owned doomed to live stressful, unfulfilling lives?
Thankfully, there are practices that can empower you to stay sane, focused and fulfilled while building a successful business.
At their core, these practices are about living more mindfully – that is, becoming more aware, more conscious, of how you react to events, and then choosing more deliberately and intentionally how you’ll respond.
There are 5 key practices that comprise a mindful living system:
If you can learn and implement those 5 practices, you’ll increase your sense of balance, focus and fulfillment, even in the face of challenges. And if you’d like more guidance on how to apply these practices to your life, you can try our Growth System program for free right here.
In the meantime, please let us know if you have any questions or if there’s anything we can do to help.
All the best,
Joel & Aryeh.