Special message honoring Emotional Health Awareness Month:
Emotional Health Awareness Month: #VeggiesFirst Challenge
I'm coming to you today with a big ask for your help. As you may know, I have been studying entrepreneurial burnout and I'm particularly interested in understanding how the systems that are in place in our business, or in many cases, not in place in our businesses actually impact our quality of life as entrepreneurs. And with the release of my book, The 4 Week Vacation™, that will be coming out early March, I want to have a solid database of research from entrepreneurs to really capture the experience of being an entrepreneur. And so that means I need 300 assessments to include in our research.
At this point, we have close to a hundred assessments, so we're about one third of the way there, but in the next month or two, we need to capture 200 assessments from entrepreneurs like yourself, letting us know what you are experiencing as an entrepreneur right now, this assessment takes about 20 minutes at the most to complete. And when you fill it out, you're going to get immediate feedback on your own level of entrepreneurial burnout, as well as the areas of your business that you can work on right now to strengthen, to improve not only your business, but also your quality of life. So it's going to be very valuable for you to go through our assessment. You will also get my three steps PDF, and the three steps PDF are the three steps to take your life back from your business. That is our thank you for taking the time to complete the assessment.
When you complete the assessment, you'll also have the opportunity to debrief it with Darren Hoffman on our team, who is our success team lead. So he can dig in with you personally about further with respect to what you're actually experiencing it as an entrepreneur and what can be done in your business to help you have a higher quality of life. So know that that's an opportunity you don't need to take advantage of if that's not relevant for you. The main ask that I have for you is please take the time and fill out our assessment. We will be able to use this as part of our research, and it will support us, helping entrepreneurs everywhere with building sustainably profitable businesses that allow you to have the lifestyle you desire. And I want to share with you some of the preliminary results that we're seeing in the research.
Gallup wellbeing index reveals that 45% of us entrepreneurs report benign levels of stress and 34% of us report being worried a lot when it comes to how many hours a week entrepreneurs are working from our research. We're seeing that we're working on average about 72 hours a week. We are putting time off until some unforeseeable time in the future. And meanwhile, the stress is taking its toll. What we're seeing from the results of our entrepreneurial burnout assessment is that 76% of small business owners are saying it's hard to switch off and not think about the business. 57% of us feel as though it takes increasing effort to accomplish simple tasks. And nearly 75% of our respondents are reporting fluctuating moods based on how the business is doing. So this is preliminary research from a fairly small sample. And by you taking our assessment, it will help us get a more accurate picture of what's going on with entrepreneurial burnout and the state of entrepreneurship right now in our country.
Take The Assessment
Finally, I want to comment on October being emotional health awareness month. With that in mind, I want to remind you as an entrepreneur, how important to your own self-care is. It's critical to take time to pause, take a temperature, check, know how you are doing and taking our assessment will help you in that regard. It's also critical though, that you allow for time away from the business. Even if that's short amounts of time walking out of your office at five, o'clock putting your phone down and saying I'm off until tomorrow, creates a short break that can do wonders for your mindset and for your ability to think creatively and deal with the challenges that are in front of you. The other thing that I want to encourage you to do is along the lines of veggies first, be doing really good. Self-care right now, working on increasing your sleep, getting plenty of exercise, eating well and taking the time to connect with family and loved ones. These are the most important things you can do to take care of yourself and to help strengthen your business right now.
#VeggiesFirst Challenge
In honor of emotional health awareness month, I would like to encourage you to add ONE THING to your daily routine for self-care. Share your success with our community with #veggiesfirst. Keep your chin up. Keep moving forward. You got this!
For tips on how to work through these problems and coach your team more effectively, please be sure to check out How To Hire the Best:The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members, releasing November 18, 2020.
Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist™ and author of the How to Hire the Best series is the founder of Tap the Potential. At Tap the Potential, we work to free business owners from the constant demands of a growing business. We believe work supports life, not the other way around. Through our proprietary Better Business, Better Life™ coaching program, we transform cash-sucking businesses into highly profitable, Great Places to Work, then send business owners on a 4 Week Vacation™ to celebrate that accomplishment. After the first year in our program, our clients have more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than ever before.
Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses — no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing — and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from strengths. Her latest book, How to Hire the Best: The Contractor’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Employees, is an International Best Seller on Amazon! In this powerful book, Dr. Sabrina shares crucial hiring strategies to transform your small business AND improve your personal life. With her background in psychology, and years of driving profit in small business, Dr. Starling knows what it takes to find, keep and get exceptional performance out of your biggest investment — your team members.
Dr. Sabrina is working on her next books: How to Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members (available November 18) and The 4 Week Vacation: Work Supports Life, Not the Other Way Around (available Dec 1; featuring many of our Trailblazing 4 Week Vacation™ Retreat Participants!)
