Over the past twenty-five plus years, I have witnessed the mental health decline of small business owners. This is not something that is specific to Central Illinois business owners.  In 2022, there were over two thousand business owners surveyed and more than 20% of them reported experiencing poor mental health. 

Another study pointed out that 72% of business owners stated their mental health was impacted by their entrepreneurial experience. If you’ve never owned a business, this may sound a bit far-fetched. There are so many misconceptions about the freedom and luxury of owning a business. The reality is that there is so much behind the scenes work that most people never even consider. 

Some of the myths surrounding owning a business include:

• You get wealthy off of everyone else’s work

• You reduce your work hours

• It’s basically a part-time job

• All you need is a good idea

• Do what you love and the money will follow

• You will have complete freedom 

Our current economy isn’t helping anyone feel more confident. In preparing for this blog, I read one research article that talked about how the biggest concern for many entrepreneurs was the rising costs. This article showed that overall costs have increased by  65%. This article went on to talk about how 26% of those interviewed stated that they were worried they would not even be able to pay their own bills in 2023. Another thing I found interesting was that three in five (which equals 60%) entrepreneurs said their overall profit margins were down.

Owning a business is a very taxing (both emotionally and physically) experience. It’s a huge shift from being an employee where you have the luxury of just coming to work, doing your work, going home,  and getting paid. You have to watch all of the costs of running your business. And in our current economy there’s a certain amount of a powerless experience that occurs with the cost of everything going up. 

A crucial mistake that many entrepreneurs make is that they begin to make the business their personal identity. This is such a slippery slope for many business owners. The biggest difficulty is that those same business owners begin violating their own boundaries. They start working from home (even if they have a physical business location to work from). It starts out as something seemingly benign like, “I am just going to respond to this email.” or “I just need to straighten out this one issue”.  With  the very best intentions, a quick glance at the email soon becomes three hours lost chasing a solution or putting out a fire. 

Employee retention is a whole other bag of anxious stirrings. How do you continue to motivate and reward your rock star employees when there’s not enough money for things like that.  Many business owners are so frozen in the angst of running the business that they can’t identify creative ways to motivate their employees. Living in the anticipatory reactions from taxes, to employee departures, to everything increasing from a pricing perspective can be absolutely overwhelming to say the least. Which begs the question, how do you protect your mental health as a business owner?

Here are a few of the suggestions that I give business owners when we are working together:

• Set Effective Boundaries: It’s crucial as a business owner that if you must work from home, you are not working from every area of your home. Otherwise, you begin to lose the reprieve from work. And slowly but surely, everything becomes about work. 

• Develop A Support System: We aren’t islands, we are not equipped or created to do any of this alone. Isolation is very real and also not healthy. Build a support system, no matter how awkward that is for you or how much of a misfit that support system is as it gets moving forward.

• Prioritize Care for You: Especially as a business owner, I’m continuously aware of the double standard of life I am living. I encourage each of my employees to take off one week per quarter. And yet, I haven’t even taken a full week off in over a year. I’m working on getting closer to taking two weeks off at a time before the year is up. I really want to be a good example of how to prioritize caring for me, to my employees, friends, and family.

• Become Comfortable With Delegating: 7 years into owning this business, there are only one or two things that I can’t have someone else do. This year, particularly, I’ve been focusing on delegating because I want this business to be sustainable. When we are trying to do everything ourselves, our stress level absolutely amps up! Asking for help, delegating, and not taking the thing back that you initially delegated are all learning curves. It’s also completely normal to want to take back those things you delegated. Whether that’s because you worry it’s stressing the other person out, or you think you can do it better; do not take it back! Trust your team. The more you delegate, the more skilled at it you become.

This is not an inclusive list, but it is a starting point for maintaining your mental health. In Central Illinois, especially, there are numerous networking and business growth-relevant groups you could join. You are not alone, no matter how unique your job is.

If you are ready to being mental health therapy, please check out our providers here: https://www.thementalwellnesscenter.com/providers  If you would like to schedule an appointment, please feel free to contact us at Info@TheMentalWellnessCenter.com or call us at 309-807-5077.