Stabilize Your Business and Protect Your Mental Health

 

Tips for Struggling Small Businesses Faced with Looting during Pandemic 

Encouraging Small Business Owners to Protect Their Mental Health during Second Setback 

Many small businesses already struggling during the pandemic shutdown faced another setback with the looting and destruction from rioters who took advantage of peaceful George Floyd protests. While small business owners are cleaning up broken windows and boarding up destructed buildings, it is critical that small business owners take steps to protect their mental health. 

I understand this second blow comes at a vulnerable time for small business owners but encourages them to take important steps to get through this second or third storm. 

Starting a business is built on hopes and dreams and many entrepreneurs operate in a state of entrepreneurial burnout. Extreme stressors added on top of existing burnout place us at heightened risk for chronic health problems, as well as depression, anxiety, suicide and other severe mental and emotional problems. We have to practice exceptional self-care. 

Here are eight recommendations to small business owners to stabilize their business and protect their mental health: 

1) Give yourself the time and space to acknowledge what you have lost. 

2) Seek support from your business community. Talk to other entrepreneurs. Be intentional in connecting with others who approach challenges from a positive, growth oriented mindset. 

3) Acknowledge and experience gratitude for what you still have … your health, your family, and your ability to be resilient. 

4) Practice exceptional self-care. Get plenty of sleep each day (8 hours), exercise daily, eat healthy, practice mindfulness. At Tap the Potential, we call this Veggies First. It means taking care of yourself first and foremost so that you have the creative mental energy to identify the opportunities to go forward from here. 

5) Acknowledge the future is yours to create, even as you have experienced loss. What do you want the next 2 years to be like? How do you want to experience life? If you could start your business over from scratch, and have it be how you would like it to be, what does that look like? 

6) Identify your top customers/clients. Talk to them. What do they need? What opportunities exist for you to serve them from your strengths and your resources? This will be key to rebuilding and creating a more sustainable business going forward. 

7) Finally, be mindful that the intense reactions we are observing are in reaction to feelings of hate. Fear and hate are driving the unrest and the violent protests. LOVE is the opposite of fear and hate. Those emotions cannot co-exist. Every one of us has the opportunity to step up, lead with love, and ask the powerful questions: What’s possible? What is needed? What can we learn from this? How do we as a nation move forward to UNITE?

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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 Sept 15) 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!)

About The Author

Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist and international best-selling author of the How to Hire the Best series and The 4 Week Vacation™, is the founder of Tap the Potential and host of the Profit by Design podcast. 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. Clients in our Better Business, Better Life coaching program have more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than they’ve ever had. Next, we send them off on a 4 Week Vacation™ to celebrate their hard-earned journey to take their life back!

Dr. Sabrina and her team at Tap the Potential are on a mission to change the story of entrepreneurship from one of long hours, grinding it out, to one of sustainably profitable businesses that support and enhance life. The Tap the Potential Solution™ and our Tap the Potential Family of Business Owners are disrupting small business as usual. We are on our way to making the Tap the Potential Solution™ the mainstream model for growing business.

By 2023, 150 Tap the Potential clients will have taken 4 Week Vacations. These are the trailblazers, role modeling what’s possible for entrepreneurs. In many entrepreneurial circles, it is becoming more and more common for one entrepreneur to ask another, “Have you taken a 4 Week Vacation™?” (as opposed to asking “How many employees do you have?” or “What is your annual revenue?”). Taking a fully unplugged 4 Week Vacation is rapidly becoming the recognized symbol of entrepreneurial success.

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.

As The Business Psychologist, and with her years of driving profit in small businesses, Dr. Sabrina knows what it takes to find, keep, and motivate exceptional performance out of your biggest investment—team members.