15. I’m worried about not knowing what I’m worried about.
16 things keeping SME owners awake.
If this is how you’re feeling, I can empathise. Being someone who can be subject to a level of unspecified anxiety, I know that this can creep up on you and submerge you in unspecified dread. I’d like to share a few things that I know can make a difference and get you back in the driver’s seat.
Easier said than done, but actively concentrate on being calm. It might help if you let whatever the feeling you’re being overwhelmed by come to the surface and then as objectively as you can, categorise it as actually serious or just another distraction. By not trying to suppress things, you’ll be in a better space to identify the real from the not real.
Look at all the things that you can identify as real issues and then work out which ones you can actually impact. Put your energy into resolving those things. There is little more pointless than trying to solve problems that you have no ability to impact.
If you can’t quite surface what the “thing” is, focus on gaining clarity on what it looks like, the risk it poses and your ability to impact it. Just the act of seeking clarity will be good for your mental state.
There is almost never just one solution to a problem. Practice having the flexibility to do contingency planning. In other words, you’ve identified the problem or threat and have then come up with what looks like a good solution. Go further and have a backup plan so if the first one doesn’t work as expected, you’ve got a next action without being right back at the start.
Resilience is a word used a lot these days and in simple terms it just means having the inner strength to keep going even though you’re exhausted and close to finding it all hopeless. A big help here can be adopting adaptability as an approach. The ability to “pivot” when the situation requires it is potent and saves you from the desolation you can feel when you’ve tried something and it didn’t work.
Unspecified anxiety can be just a whole bunch of undifferentiated stuff that looks like a tangled mess. If you look at it long and hard enough, I can almost guarantee that you’ll be able to distinguish that the mass is actually made up of a series of issues, some linked to others and some standing independent. This is a good example of the old saying – how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I’m not advocating for eating elephants. I’m advocating for consciously working at making the complex simple.
Anxiety often comes with a powerful desire to “duvet dive”. In other words, you want to disconnect and hunker down where you’re as invisible as possible. Resist this urge. Get out in the world. Read, watch, listen. The more information you have, the more tools you’ll find you have to deal with whatever is going on.
This probably sounds a bit self-evident, but make financial security for your business a priority. I don’t mean this to sound easy, but if the primary goal is financial health, then you can look at all other issues as being things to address in the service of the primary goal.
It’s not often in life that everything is wrong at the same time. Sometimes it is and that’s likely to be a catastrophe, but unless you’re at that desperate stage I really urge you to have a good hard look and find the things that are actually going ok. Don’t just cling to those and ignore the problems, but use the stuff that is going well as a reassurance that you haven’t made a mess of everything. We all need something to make us feel better, no matter how dark you’re feeling.
Uncertainty and anxiety are exhausting. The trouble is we can tend to get obsessive about just keeping going as though constant and relentless action is the only way through. I’m here to disabuse you of that idea. You make poor decisions when you are exhausted. Take breaks and get completely away from the sources of the problem. That might be anything from going for a long walk before, during or after work, or it could be taking a weekend away with someone you love to just get some respite. I promise you will come back in some way refreshed and better able to cope.
We’ve talked about the inclination to duvet dive, but regrettably that’s a fail. My recommendation is that you include your team in the identification of what’s wrong and how to fix it. Under no circumstances reveal that you are freaked out and drag them into that anxiety. Construct a conversation with your most trusted people about what they observe about the performance of the business and what any of them might have thought about how improvements could be made. What you’ll get out of this is at worst – some new ideas to feed into your own deliberations. At best – you just might get a complete answer that you hadn’t even thought of.
In this state your thinking has probably narrowed to tactical stuff for right now and that is understandable. But, keep a space open for thinking about your vision or long term strategic goals because you have to be able to hold in your mind the reason you’re doing all this for in the first place, interspersed with the short term things that will serve the ultimate goal.
Another of the fabulous things anxiety can do to you is make you shitty and impatient. Despite all your best efforts and especially your fervent hopes, some things take as long as they take and being angry and impatient will only make it worse for you and your team. Model the behaviour you want to see in them.
You probably don’t want to, but be positive. Not laughing like some loon that frightens others, but keeping a calm and reasonable demeanour and encouraging others around you will pay real dividends.
If at any stage you would like to reach out and talk in more detail about any or all these issues, or even ones that aren’t mentioned, please call me on +64 275 665 682, email me at john.luxton@regenerationhq.co.nz or book a time to talk, either face to face or by Zoom. Any call will be free, confidential and with no obligation to do anything else.