Never let stress prevent your passions from continuing to grow.
If you’re trying to marry your passion with your profession, you’re no stranger to stress. Pursuing a career that resonates with you on a personal level is an all-consuming process — one that often leaves you with little time to cope with the negative emotions that it creates. So, what do you do?
If you want to deal with your stress in an effective and positive way, you’ll need to train yourself to overcome uncomfortable feelings so you can continue to feel passionate about what really matters — creating a meaningful career.
If this sounds easier said than done, the following techniques will make this idea more accessible. Although it’s not a comprehensive list, the techniques outlined in this article are used by many successful entrepreneurs and businesspeople that overcome stress daily so they can achieve their dreams:
Flip Your Perspective
If you want to differentiate successful business owners from their unsuccessful counterparts, you might only need to look at one thing — mindset. Sure, this seems too simplistic, but it’s often very true. People that approach issues with a bad mindset often feel that their challenges are insurmountable. On the other hand, people that consider their hurdles with a positive mindset are more likely to overcome them successfully.
“Shortly after starting my own coaching company, I went broke trying to make it work. I spent a few days frustrated about this happening, but then I decided that this situation didn’t mean I had to give up. So, I considered my options, (and with my credit cards maxed out and no other assets) I decided to sell my car and use the profits to pay a mentor to teach me how to fix it,” says Sterling Griffin.
Although this personal account may seem extreme to some, Griffin says that selling his car created the exact shift in perspective that he needed to succeed. By exhausting all of his personal resources, he decided that failure was not an option, and with this in mind, he built a successful online coaching business.
Connect With a Mentor
As you experience the stress that comes hand-in-hand with following your passion, you’re more likely to feel overwhelmed and incapable of achieving your goals. When these feelings are present, you’ll be less likely to work effectively, and you might even burn out altogether.
For these reasons and many more, one of the key things you can do is to secure a mentor early on in your professional life. When a mentor is in the picture, you have someone to reach out to if you need a little boost in confidence to overcome stress. Seasoned mentors will ultimately help you stay on the right path, so you can overcome trials while gaining confidence and practicing personal perseverance.
Take Care of Yourself
Attending seminars and keeping your LinkedIn profile up-to-date are great for improving your personal brand, but what do these things do for your personal happiness? If you’re like many business people, tasks like these don’t do a whole lot for your inner happiness.
At the end of the day, in addition to improving your professional appearance, you’ll need to take care of yourself, too. The last thing you’re going to want to do when you’re overwhelmed with stress is to practice self-care, but the truth is that taking care of yourself needs to be a priority every day if you want to follow your passion sustainably.
When it comes down to it, self-care is non-negotiable, but there are many ways that you can choose to take care of yourself. “If you have a meditation practice, you can be much more effective …, ” says Robert Stiller, founder of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. If meditation isn’t for you, creating a daily exercise habit or eating more nutritious food might be your golden ticket. Regardless of how you do it, you need to take care of yourself daily so you can overcome stress and approach your work recharged and refreshed.
Remain Focused On Your Bottom Line
Conventionally, Americans are told to think about a monetary bottom line, but you are following your passion for much more than this. Before everything else, you set out on this journey because you were excited about creating a meaningful career, which is something you can always get back in touch with.
When the stress of following your dreams seems like too much, go back to the basics. Ask yourself what’s good about your job and remind yourself of why you started doing it in the first place. Thinking in this way will reconnect you to the joys of your job, and it’ll also help remind you that your career enables others to lead more meaningful lives.
Successful businesspeople, like Sterling Griffin and Robert Stiller, seem to have it all figured out, but the fact of the matter is that they’ve dealt with the same stressors you’re trying to overcome. Coping with stress is a skill that takes time to master, but with a little bit of practice, you’ll be amazed by how quickly you see results.
Originally published at journal.thriveglobal.com