It’s easy to feel mentally balanced when things are going well, but it’s often difficult to maintain or regain that equilibrium in the face of conflict. However, bouncing back from issues, both minor and major, is a crucial skill to master, especially when it comes to your career.
As a leader, you’ll face many challenges along your journey. If you lose your composure every time something goes wrong, you’ll only hinder your progress and potential. So what kinds of approaches work when you’re trying to regain your balance? To find out, we asked a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council members the following:
What is the best way to regain mental equilibrium and then bounce back when something major — or a whole lot of minor things — go wrong?
Here’s what they said:
1. Reset Your Brain With a Quick ‘Win’
I think in a situation where you’re dealing with any sort of loss, it is very important to reset. Do something you love doing for leisure. Go out with friends or play a video game you’re good at it. Winning at something will help you feel better. This will keep your brain from being overworked and help you blow off some steam before working again. You’ll deal with the problems a lot better.
2. Practice Mindfulness and Meditation
The beauty of practicing mindfulness and meditation is that it can be done at any time and almost anywhere. The benefits can be wide-ranging and help to enhance listening skills, quiet anxieties and promote positive emotions. When things go wrong in business — and they will go wrong — meditation and mindfulness can help us see clearly and respond in a way that maintains a mental equilibrium.
3. Look Toward Your End Goal
Stay focused on your end goal. This is how you can really bounce back when you lose control and equilibrium or get distracted. The process is never made to be easy. Don’t just be motivated by the end goal, but stay passionate about the process, so that you’ll love the journey and stay on track.
4. Allow Yourself to Feel Sad
That liminal space between how you want things to turn out and the way they actually turn out can be painful, but it shouldn’t be ignored. Allow yourself time to connect with your sadness in a compassionate way and realize it is just a step in a larger process of learning. Acknowledging and even writing your feelings down allows you to dust yourself off, get back up and to go get your dreams.
5. Talk to a Trusted Mentor
It can be very challenging to make clear decisions when under extreme pressure or when facing significant loss. Open up and share your frustrations with a trusted mentor who has relevant experience handling similar issues. Use the time to evaluate your circumstances. You may need to change course, take a step back or wait it out patiently, any of which can be hard to do without proper insight.
– Thomas Minieri, Minieri & Company
6. Step Away From Work
Stepping back from a hectic situation is often one of the best ways to overcome it. While this situation will vary at times, depending on what is going on, it’s often best to not react right away and without time to reflect on what’s going on. For simple matters, this can mean just stepping away and going outside; for other bigger events, it might require some time off to reset.
7. Take Problems on, One Step at a Time
When things go wrong, we tend to want to tackle everything at once. If you’re in a situation with many minor problems, work on solving those issues one by one, in order of urgency. If you’re facing one major issue, try to sort out the cause of the issue and tackle the smaller root causes of the major problem.
8. Sleep on It
During times of high stress, often we tend to make hasty decisions that end up making the situation even worse, stressing ourselves out even further. So, when things go wrong, before making a decision, sleep on it. Getting a good night’s sleep will help you be able to look at the situation more clearly and allow you to tackle it head on with a sound mind.
9. Get Outside and Take a Walk
Studies have shown that get outside and spending time in nature may be able to increase your resilience to stress. So, when things aren’t going well, I like to get outside and go for a walk. It’s calming and helps you come back to a stressful situation feeling more refreshed.
– Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
10. Focus on the Solution, Not the Cause
When something goes wrong in business, many entrepreneurs start looking for the reason why it happened — and that’s exactly what stresses them out and makes things even worse than they really are. If the issue is so serious that nobody else can fix it, take full responsibility and come up with the solution. This should be your biggest priority at that moment.
These answers are provided by Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most successful young entrepreneurs. YEC members represent nearly every industry, generate billions of dollars in revenue each year and have created tens of thousands of jobs. Learn more at yec.co.