Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about tips for fighting stress and anxiety as a founder.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- LeadFuze
- Bidsketch
- CartHook
- Useronboard.com
- Penzu
- Helpguide.org
- A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
Transcript
Mike [00:00]: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about tips for fighting stress and anxiety as a founder. This is startups for the rest of us episode 245.
Mike [00:16]: Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob [00:25]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [00:25]: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Rob?
Rob [00:30]: Well, me and the family were up in Oregon last week and I had a pretty cool meetup with a few founders out there with Ruben from Bidsketch, Jordan Gull from CartHook, and the Bootstrap Web Podcast, and Samuel Hulick from useronboard.com. It was cool to hang out with them for a couple of hours and as usual, 10:30 rolls around and I just wanted to sit there and keep talking. I had hours more on conversation than I wanted to have but we had the bail and I had like a 35-minute drive back to this music camp that I was out my kids. So, I wanted to say thanks to those guys for hanging out and if you’re in Portland, next time I’m up there because I’m up there probably once a year during the summer to hang out with you, how about you?
Mike [01:10]: Well, as the listeners know I was in Hershey, Pennsylvania last week for a family vacation and I had a really good time recording the terror of my children on the rollercoasters.
Rob [01:21]: Yeah, that’s always fun. I saw those pictures on Facebook. It was pretty hilarious.
Mike [01:24]: I think the part where he said, “Is it over yet?” halfway through the rollercoaster was probably the best one.
Rob [01:29]: That’s the best, yeah. So update on a couple of [?] marketing approach as we started the past couple of weeks. One is I’ve started using LeadFuze from Justin Miguel, he’s a founder café at Micropreneur Academy Member and we met him at MicroConf and LeadFuze, F-U-Z-E, and it’s basically outbound email and it’s been really interesting. It’s already been more successful than the previous outbound, the three-month outbound email campaign that I ran with another provider and we’re like two weeks in and we already have more leads from this. So there, I don’t know if it’s the market they chose or if it’s the approach they’re taking but it’s interesting. I’ll have to see, I want to wait about a month or two and kind of see what volume we get because my experience with outbound email like this is that it’s great for really high-price services right because you might get 10 leads or 15 leads a month, but when you’re doing more a SAS that’s lower price, 50 or 100 bucks a month, that 10 or 15 new people to talk to doesn’t often move a needle unless they’re pretty high price. So, in vertex allow but certainly the frontend results have been positive so far.
Mike [02:35]: Cool. And you also recently ran a contest for LeadPages, right?
Rob [02:39]: That’s right. Yeah, so basically, we use the KingSumo plugin which is a wordpress plugin for Map Sumo and ran a contest, one winner would win five years of LeadPages which is worth like $4,000. And, overall, I mean the contest with tons of Tweets I mean there’s a [?] rally to it where you enter and then if you Tweet and other people user length then you get like three extra entries or whatever. Overall, there’s a ton of bus during the contest. We ran ads, we mailed our list. We kind of did what you would expect to promote, but in the end the results were not where I wanted them to be instead of getting several thousand new emails. It was substantially lower than that. So, we did a post-mortem and I couldn’t pinpoint anything that I felt like we did wrong. Part of thinks that contest are so common place now that maybe they’re not the kind of the purple palette that used to be. Part of me thinks perhaps we misexecuted on something but it is what it is at this point and I don’t foresee doing another one in the near term but we’ll see what happens a few months down the line. So, what are we talking about today?
Mike [03:42]: Well, today we’re going to be talking about tips for fighting stress and anxiety as a founder and I kind of came over this idea because last week, I was on vacation and it occurred to me that this is probably one of the first vacations I’ve taken in a while where I didn’t feel stressed at all while I was on vacation and I kind of thought back about why that was and kind of came to the conclusion that one of the things that I did just dramatically differently this time was that I basically saved up money to pay for the vacation first so that I could go on vacation and enjoy it rather than thinking about all the things that I needed to do when I got back and how I was going to pay for the vacation afterwards. So kind of like frontloaded of what my savings were going to be for that and it occurred to me that there were a number of different places where I was feeling some stress and anxiety about the business and what things were going on and so I sat down and actually kind of did a stress review to figure out like what things in my life, in my business were stressing me out and I did this before I went on vacation and realize that there were a lot of ways that I can address some of those issues and by the end of my vacation, aside from getting sick was a little bit stressful. I was completely stress-free. It was not a stressful vacation in any way, shape, or form and I didn’t worry about anything the entire time. It was fantastic.
Rob [04:55]: That’s great. I mean that’s kind of the purpose of a vacation right is to get away and not feel stressed. I find sometimes it’s a mix bag where if you go away, it can make you a stressed out if A, if anything goes bad back at the office that you can’t handle then of course you’re going to get stressed out. And the other way is I feel like if I leave and there’s something undone or I realize that there’s a big push that we want to do and I’m not there and able to kind of participate in it, that always makes vacation kind of suck because it’s like you’re not being part of moving the business forward. But, when things are going well and you stuck away for a short amount of time, like I said, I think that’s the purpose of this to come back super refreshed and motivated, and ready to go. And so you’ve been back for a couple of days at work since vacation is over, have you had a lot of motivation to kind of get to work and get stuff done?
Mike [05:42]: Well, I’m kind of on the tailend of being sick. I started getting really sick on Thursday. So, and then through Thursday, Fridays, Saturday, and even up until today, I mean right now it’s Wednesday and we’re recording for next week, and I’m still feeling kind of the lingering effects of it. So, I’m not getting as much sleep as I probably could have but in terms of my motivation and my ability to get things done, it’s still there. It’s just I feel terrible throughout the day is really what it comes down through. But it has nothing to do with being stressed out or worried or having things to do that I’m procrastinating on and not getting done. It’s just my face just doesn’t feel good.
Rob [06:15]: Right. Yeah, that’s a bummer. Cool. So, let’s dive in to these tactics you have.
Mike [06:19]: Sure. So, basically, we’re going to walk through four different stages of taking a look at the stress and anxiety that you’re facing and talk a little bit about what to do in each of these, I’ll call them faces because it’s kind of an analysis of the anxiety and stress that you’re facing. And the first one is think about the big picture of what’s going on. And this is about identifying the things that stressing you out and understanding and recognizing the different science of that stress. So, for example, if you’re procrastinating on certain things or you’re avoiding certain types of work, or if you’re spending a lot of time thinking about a specific problem or a specific subset of problems that you’re facing during your business or your personal life, let’s say that you’ve got some bills that you’re trying to pay down and maybe it’s credit card debt or something like that. Or if it’s just the marketing strategy that you’re trying out and it’s not working and it’s frustrating. So, all of those things are things that can kind of contribute to the stress that you’re facing and are ultimately going to essentially drag you down in other ways that are not necessarily easy to quantify but will definitely impact your business in the bottom line. So, some of the science of this are if you’re overindulging into something whether it’s videogames or if you’re smoking a lot more or you’re drinking a lot more, eating, watching TV or movies and just [?] out in front of the TV at night, doing drugs that you shouldn’t be doing or sleeping much more or much less than you typically do, any sort of withdraw from social situations. So if you’re avoiding going out with your friends, or essentially just avoiding talking or interacting with people in general because you think to yourself, “Oh, I’ve got all this work to do, so instead of going and hanging out with my friends, I’m going to do this work and try and get it done.” And what I found tends to happen is that you end up spending more time in front of your computer trying to get work done than you do actually get in any of the work done. And it kind of comes about as much more a surface is a much more of a form of procrastination than anything else, and to me that’s when I know that I’m stressed out or I’m anxious about stuff is like I start procrastinating. And the natural reaction for me is to sit in front of my computer more or try and get more work done, but that never happens. It always end up putting me in a position where I end up procrastinating when I’m sitting in front of my computer and I’m still not getting as much work done which is essentially a vicious cycle. So, you spend more time in front of your computer, trying to get stuff done. It’s not getting done. You procrastinate and then it makes you want to spend more time there because you’re not getting things done. To me, that’s just the vicious cycle and to me that’s the sign that I need to do something about it.
Rob [08:46]: Yeah. I think the big signs for me personally is when I notice that I have this kind of feeling of stress or anxiety and I can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from and I always take that as a point to where I need to stop and think about when started and what kicked me into it. And oftentimes, I’ll find that it’s some ridiculous thing like an email I got from someone that was confusing or that means that I have to do some work tomorrow or that, I don’t know, it’s something that didn’t go exactly the way I wanted to but it isn’t actually that big of a deal but it somehow triggered a reaction in me that I then carry with me for an hour or two, or three. And as soon as I can pinpoint, “Oh, that’s why I’m upset? Like that’s why I’m feeling this?” That’s when I’m able to let it go, right, and to either do a short, I won’t even say it’s a meditation but it’s kind of just a short check in and saying, “All right. I’m letting this go because there’s no other reason that I should be feeling this way.” But the other thing, I think the excess of angry you talked about, I think overindulging them and I found myself definitely watching too much TV at times, not this year as more in 2014 where I had kind of a, yeah, just kind of tough battle with there’s some cash flow and there were other things going on there trying to grow drip that I was frustrated with and I think all the indicators that you mentioned about zoning out and withdrawing from social situations or things that I’ve certainly experienced.
Mike [10:10]: Right. So, as I said, step one or stage one I guess is just thinking about the big picture of what’s going on and recognizing that there is some sort of stress or anxiety that you’re facing. And then stage two is really just identifying what those stressors are. So, what I find it helpful is to list all of the different things that may or may not be stressing me out or frustrating me. And it’s helpful to just write them down and say what it is, why it’s stressful and what is about that particular thing that is stressful. So, one of the things that I find helpful doing this is keeping a personal journal. So I use a service called penzu.com or you can just go in and you can have it send you emails and notifications about when you’re supposed to be doing anything in your journal and I just have it send me a reminder that for certain things, so for example I keep a sleep journal that just says, “Hey, how did you sleep last night?” And what it does it helps me keep track of how well I’ve been sleeping and whether or not I’ve been well or sleeping poorly, and it helps me just pay attention to it. So it’s not about measuring it so much as it is about just kind of being aware of what my sleeping patterns look like. I used to use a [?] to actually measure how much sleep I was getting on any given night but they went out of business and the machine went on the [fret?] so I haven’t found anything else to kind of replace that yet, but I found that this journaling application has helped me to understand when I am and when I’m not getting good sleep. And you can use a journal and application for anything so you could use it for your personal life, use it as an end-of-day check-in, you could use it for sleep, you could use it as an exercise journal for example. I mean there’s lots of different things that you can use where the activity isn’t easy to measure but by journaling about it, you can give yourself an opportunity to just think about whatever it is that’s going on. And by listening to those things, you’re essentially identifying them, and once you’ve identified them, you can move onto stage three which is just dealing with that stress. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can deal with it and kind of the five that I came up with was you can ignore it, you can avoid it, you can outsource that stress, you can eliminate it, or you can adapt. So, let’s talk about those five different things in order. And the first one is ignore it. There are certain types of stresses that you can just completely ignore them. So for example, one of them is negative blog comments. If you have a blog that you’re writing and we talked about this a little bit in a previous episode where we talked about dealing with haters, but if you a blog you’re inevitably going to get people leaving blog comments on there and if you’re in anyway controversial, there are people who are going to believe negative blog comments and just reading those is extremely detrimental, I mean we talked about it quite a bit before but the way to avoid that stress by reading those things is just completely ignore those comments. You don’t have to even read them. There’s pros and cons to not reading the comments on your blog, but if you’re getting enough comments you’re recognizing the negative ones throw you off for a couple of hours, or for a couple of days, it might be worth considering just ignoring them entirely.
Rob [13:01]: Yeah. There’s definitely a pretty large group of stressors that you can outright ignore I think, blog comments and hacker news comments, and Twitter comments and frankly feedback or input from people you don’t know or that’s unsolicited or that you didn’t ask for I think is typically something that you kind of have to learn to ignore as you build up an audience or as you build up a customer base because there’s always going to be somebody, you know, someone off case of one in a thousand or one in ten thousand people who’s going to say things that stresses you out and learning to kind of deal with that and not let others have the power, that power over you I think is definitely one way to avoid the stress because frankly, at this point, if every time I heard a negative comment about something that I’m involved with all that we do in terms of MicroConf, the blog, the podcast, all the apps, everything; if I got upset every time someone made a negative comment, yeah, I would be stressed quite a bit. And so, I think getting a little more fixed scanned and learning to ignore those things that should be ignored, is a learn skill.
Mike [14:10]: Right. And just to kind of clarify a little bit. There is a slight difference between ignoring the entire thing versus not letting to get you, I think because there are fine line between those two so that you can take it one of those two different ways. The second one in this list is to avoid at something entirely. So, one of the things that I found is that overcommitting for me can be a big stress and nobody likes to say no to somebody especially if somebody comes and says, “Hey, can you help me out with this?” I love to say yes to anyone who comes to me and ask for help, but at the same time it’s not always possible. So, especially if people come to you and earlier on, I think in most of our careers, we always have family who come to us and say, “Hey, can you help fix my computer?” And I used to kind of jump and say, “Oh, yeah. I can totally help you out with that.” And overtime, I got to the point where I realized that not only was that not helpful for me or for them because they weren’t necessarily learning to fix or address the wrong problems. They were just basically passing them off to me, but I was committing to things that I didn’t necessarily have time for, and at this point, I definitely don’t have time for them. So, it is a lot easier to be able to say no to those types of things, and saying no can be really, really hard and that’s one of the issues that a lot of us are going to have to face at some point. You’re just going to have to say no sometimes even if it doesn’t feel good at the time but you have to understand that sometimes saying no is the right decision for you in the long run.
Rob [15:27]: Yeah, earlier on in my career, I said yes to everything and I think that’s probably advice I would give to most people is to take advantage of it as many opportunities as you can early and then as things build up for you, you have to start switching that to a mix of yes or no and then at a certain point, nobody comes your default answer, and that’s been my default answer for a few years now where I don’t have time to think about it, or if unless it’s like what [Derek?] [?] says, et cetera, hell yes or a no and that’s at a certain point how it has to get if you are overcommitting and I think most of us overcommit. This is not just about business, right, this is about personal life and this about overcommitting your kids to play three sports and do gym and ballet and all the stuff and you’re driving all over the place, that can be crazy even though you’re not overcommitting yourself, you’re kind of overcommitting your time and your family and spending a lot of time in the road, these are things we’ve chosen internally, as a family to kind of pick one thing and invest heavily in it. So my kids each playing instrument and then maybe they do one sport that kind of comes and go and gives us a gap. Some families may work to do three or four things at once, but we know that overcommitting in our personal lives can be as bad as just committing to help everyone who emails you which just becomes impractical at a certain point.
Mike [16:42]: Yeah. I mean even this past year, my kids were just currently entering karate and they were doing karate two days a week and then they had soccer another two weeks a week, and they both decided that in this coming fall, they don’t want to play soccer because they’re already doing karate and they know that it takes up a lot of their time and they have to basically be there for one or the other almost every single day of the week. And they just decided they didn’t want to do that. So they’re going to take a year off and kind of see how things go which is kind of very admirable of them. We didn’t fight it, we just said, “Okay. If you want to take a year off from soccer, that’s fine.” But karate like for your kids, it’s music for our kids it’s karate and they just do that and it’s kind of their primary thing but it’s nice to kind of be aware of those types of things that they are both business related and personal life related. So the third strategy for dealing with some of these things is to outsource it. And this usually comes with certain types of tasks especially if you tend to procrastinate on any of these types of task. And one thing that I did a while back was I started outsourcing a lot of the financial stuff for my business and I kind of got to the point where I almost wanted to go over to doing on the personal side as well because I hate seeing money come out of my bank account especially in large quantities. So, I hired a bookkeeper other basically manage all the books and handle them and it’s not that I completely ignore them, it’s just I’m not looking at them on a daily or weekly basis in order to figure out what bills to pay or whether I need to pull money from one account or the other like that stuff is just taken care of for me and I don’t have to worry about it anymore. And when I did that was I hired a bookkeeper to do all that stuff for me and she pays the American Express bills. She goes in and she runs the payroll. And I don’t have to worry about it. I just basically just ignore it and trust that she’s doing the right things, and if there’s a problem, I’ll deal with it but otherwise, I just don’t want to be involved in that kind of thing. Another type of thing that you might want to outsource is if you’re running any sort of a SAS products where there are cancellations on a semi-regular basis. Well, you want to reach out to those people and ask them why they cancelled but if you are the one getting the email every single time there is a cancellation, then that may very well be a source of stress for you. So, a better strategy would be to hand that off to a support rep or to hire somebody who’s sole job is to go out there and email those people and aggregate their replies and put them into a spreadsheet so that you can review it maybe once a month or something like that. And what that does is it essentially offloads it and aggregates it all into an hour at the end of every month that you look at that spreadsheet versus once a week or two or three times a week you’re getting these emails that you have to go in and you have to make sure that the account is cancelled and you have to go out and send an email to that person or ask them why they cancelled and then you see the response. All that stuff can be detrimental and instead, if you’re outsourcing that responsibility to somebody else, you are consolidating all of that into one single interaction instead of 15 or 20 throughout the course of the month.
Rob [19:27]: Yeah. Virtual assistants, bookkeepers, I mean we’ve covered this before but these are the things that had a major impact on my ability to get more done and to be less stressed about it when I made that shift from trying to do everything myself to hiring these folks out and I don’t know, I can’t say enough good things about it and I think that the cancellation stuff you said is a good deal. I think customer complaints get old and having one or two support people who can kind of feel bad upfront after you’ve dealt with stuff for a few months and you get a feel for it and the complaints or the feedback aren’t helpful anymore and you know that it’s either someone just being angry or it’s not a good fit for your product or whatever. As long as it’s not something that you’re not missing or ignoring, then it’s definitely something that I think there’s value [?] yourself from this type of feedback and that virtual assistant that can certainly help by handling score for you.
Mike [20:20]: The fourth strategy for dealing with these situations is to see if you can eliminate the source of whatever the stress is. So, if you can fix the underlined problems, then the symptoms of the stress go away. So for me, for example, the vacation stresses that I used to feel was that I would worry about paying for it afterwards but of course when you’re on vacation, then that becomes an issue that you think about why you’re on vacation. So you don’t enjoy your vacation nearly as much. And instead, for me, I just decided to say for it beforehand and that way, when I was on vacation, we would go out to breakfast, we would go out to lunch, we go out to dinner, and I just didn’t care how much it was going to cost because I knew that I already had the money to pay for it. I wasn’t going to have to go out and do any sort of consulting work or pick up a couple of extra weeks of work or work extra hours or anything like that. It was already paid for. It was already taken care of and handled. So, I was just able to enjoy myself completely as opposed to worrying about what was going to happen down the road. And there’s other places where you can eliminate those sources of stress and we talked about some of them more already about being able to outsource or just avoid them, but at the core of this is being able to completely eliminate the source of whatever that stress is.
Rob [21:26]: And I think we tend to have more options than we think. I think that there’s a learned helplessness that some folks fall into is kind of trap and you can say, “Well, I’m stressed out because of this and I can’t change it.” But there’s almost always a way to change it, and it may not be something obvious or it maybe something that’s difficult to do but sitting down and taking a retreat to figure out if it’s big enough and worth it, or just spending 20 minutes in writing down 10 solid ideas of how to eliminate something. One of those is going to kind of come about and be a feasible idea, I would bet. Even if you have something like, “Well, I don’t have enough cash to pay for this.” Well, it’s you’re not tied to your current income if you’re an entrepreneur. And so, could you do a really quick info product. Could you just go sell some consulting really quickly if you have a name recognition or you have some old clients, like there are a number of ways to get around things that seem insurmountable but you actually sit down and think about them, there tends to be a way to get around them. Another thing I would do is talk to folks in your mastermind, right and say, “This is a problem I have. It’s really bothering me. Can you help me figure out ways, think of some ways that I could get around that?” I think that’s just a strategy that can help a lot as well.”
Mike [22:38]: The fifth strategy for dealing with some of these stresses is to adapt to it. Are there ways that you can change how you think about the problem or can you reframe it? Or can you adjust your standards? If you’re building something and you’re disappointed or frustrated with how things are going, maybe it’s time to adjust your standards about what your expectations were for that particular thing, whether it’s for a product or whether it’s for a particular marketing strategy that you’re trying. Focus on the positive elements of what it is that you’re doing and make sure that they are realistic, because if you’re trying to do something and let’s say you’re trying to build an email list of 25,000 people and you’ve never built an email list before, then 25,000 is probably a ridiculously high number that is just out of your reach, so it’s going to be frustrating, it’s going to be stressful. And just by reframing and adjusting your expectations about what your current capabilities are, then you can reduce the stress that’s going to be caused by that. Let’s say that you’ve set a deadline of 12 months to get that, and it could be very, very difficult for you to do that. But, if you look at that and say, “Well, I’ve never done this before. This is a learning experience for me and I will learn how to do this better in the future.” That right there has reframed your expectations to say no, it’s not about getting the 25,000 subscribers. It’s about getting as close to that as I can and learning as much about the process as I can, not about that end piece of it. So, in a way, you’re kind of adjusting what your goals are and what your expectations around those goals are.
Rob [24:04]: You know, one thing that helped me with this is this book called A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. And I was a bit skeptical of going to it. I mean it’s kind of been an interesting title and stoic is something that seems to be kind of all the rage or whatever and a lot of people are talking about it. But, to be honest, I really enjoyed this book and it’s written by a philosophy professor I think he is and I love the way he ties everything together and basically, the idea of stoicism is not to be some cold-hearted person who never feels anything. But it’s to not hang onto everything. It’s to not be stressed about everything. I mean that’s really what it comes down to. There’s some other elements to it and I took so many notes from listening to this book about different ways. They have things about dealing with difficult people. They have things about even with your internal strife and it’s just a mindset thing. It’s just kind of a life philosophy. So if this is something that you struggle with which I certainly do kind of feeling stressed often and having kind of an ongoing anxiety, I definitely recommend this book, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.
Mike [25:09]: Yeah, I’ve read that. I would definitely recommend that as well although I guess you listened to it instead of read it, so.
Rob [25:15]: Right. Right. And so, in terms of reframing it and adjusting your standards of focusing on the positive elements, I mean that’s really kind of the main core message of the entire book.
Mike [25:25]: I think the last part of today’s podcast is going to be about some of the different stress recovery activities that you can use to help deal with some of the existing stress and I think if you just go and do a quick Google search on how to relieve stress, you’ll find a lot of, I’ll call them really basic types of things that really do work. So, for example, you’ll find things like walking and exercise, going on vacation, socializing, listening to music, doing any sort of meditation, yoga or massage, self-reflection tends to be up there as well, I find journaling helpful for example and then any sort of movies or comedy shows, or anything that gets you to laugh, those are all typical stress recovery activities, but those are things that are essentially coping mechanisms for existing stress that you may or may not be able to do anything about, and if it’s possible to completely get rid of those stressors, then that’s definitely a profitable course of action than to deal with the symptoms after the fact.
Rob [26:20]: I found that under the right circumstance working helps me relieve stress. It depends, and it’s not if I’m working super long days and it doesn’t help me, but if I’ve been away from work, and I’m stressed about something that needs to get done or stressed about something that I’m uncertain about, then sitting down and making a plan and kind of writing it all out in a notebook or writing it all out and just making sure that I can see the vision in the next 30 or 60 days, that helps me quite a bit if I’m stressed about kind of an unknown because I think that’s something that freaks a lot of people out, me included is not knowing what’s next, right? It’s about having this kind of unknown blackness over the next 30 to 60 days that you can’t see or it’s about having a specific scenario like, “Boy, I have this big webinar next week and I have no idea what I’m going to talk about or I have this talk to deliver and I don’t know what to do or the business is not growing and I don’t know what to do.” As soon as I have a plan of action or game plan, that’s when my stress tends to go away and then I want to go into work mode and actually execute, grind it out, and get stuff done. And so, I think that could be another way is to kind of make a plan on how to do things to remove that kind of unknown that stands ahead of you.
Mike [27:26]: Yeah. It’s interesting you bring that up. That actually made its entry into one of my talks from MicroConf I think the year before last where I talked about the fact that fear of the unknown is something that people are much more afraid of than negative consequences and it’s not knowing what’s going to happen or how you’re going to deal with the particular situation is way more stressful than knowing that things are going to turn out poorly and I could definitely see how if you don’t know what is happening in your business or how you’re going to deal with stuff, it’s sitting down and going through some of that work and some of that planning effort can help out. But obviously, if you’re procrastinating about working then that’s not going to help, but there are certain circumstance where I can definitely say that helping out a lot.
Rob [28:06]: Yeah. And I think if you go back and watch the two talks from MicroConf where Sherry basically covers this type of stuff in her talks about how to kind of stay mentally fit and stable while you’re starting up. She has a lot of good mechanism and even a breathing exercise that can help with this kind of thing.
Mike [28:24]: One of things that we’re going to do in this episode is we’re going to link up in the show notes to helpguide.org and there is a specific article on stress management that you might want to take a look at. It’s got a lot of good information on not just how to go through and take a look at some of the different stressors in your life, but how to go about coping with them as well and they’ve got six or seven different stress management techniques that you can use. Some of this podcast episode was pulled from that but not a lot. So, there’s a heck of a lot more good information in there. So if you’re feeling any kind of stress about your, either your business or your personal life, definitely head over to that link or check it out.
Rob [28:59]: As a closing comment, I can’t think of a time when I was stressed about work when my business was growing. So, I think that one of the remedies for feeling stressed at least for me is to be successful. It’s to be getting the end results that I’m shooting for in my work and I think that wraps us up for today. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by Moot used under creative commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.
