My parents spend time most days at a coffee shop with their group of friends.
Just about all of them are retired, some with great pensions, some with no pensions, some are widowers and some widows. All of them have had lives that were fruitful and worked for others or themselves until they felt it was time to make money no more.
Sometimes as business owners we think about those days. How will they look for us? Will we be able to retire? Will we sell our business, or will weariness just overcome us and one day we will fold up or drop dead?
We don't have to be old for weariness to set in. In one of my first business ventures, at the age of 21, I ran myself ragged doing everything from overseeing manufacturing, sales, marketing and accounting. I was dealing with vendors, customers, government and investors.
To top it all off, I wasn't making any money.
Like many entrepreneurs, I jumped on a "good idea" someone presented to me, and ran with it. Run with it, I did, until I almost dropped with exhaustion.
When we are faced with enormous amounts of stress, whether it is from the outside, or internally as is the case with many of us entrepreneurs that drive on, to satisfy to feed the fire within, our cortisol levels kick in.
Cortisol is our stress response hormone that works great if we are fighting off a bear.
But if we are just fighting for our business every day, the adrenal glands that produce cortisol get tired. We can end up with adrenal fatigue.
When this happens we start waking up at 2 or 3 a.m., our mind turning and we have trouble getting back to sleep. In the morning we wake tired, so we end up eating 30 per cent more carbohydrates, and drinking more caffeine, craving sugar and salt.
We put on weight, our blood sugar and blood pressure levels increase, our moods are all over the place, and our immune system gets run down so we get sick.
This is our body's way of saying no more!
If we take our stress home, our relationships get sick, and our spouses say no more!
According to a study by the University of Northern California, workaholics have a divorce rate of three times normal workers.
So what do we have to do to change?
We know that we are pushing too hard, but often times we think that our business will fail without us. We know we are burning the candle at both ends, but we think that no one else can do the job like we can.
The truth is, if we were gone tomorrow, it's probably only our family that would really miss us.
Our customers, well they would find another place to buy. Our suppliers would sell to the guy that's taking our spot. Our staff would get other jobs. Our investors and bankers, well they would try to get their money from us and if that failed, they would get it from someone else. To get healthy and have healthy companies, we need to stop and look at where our energy is going.
What are we chasing? Is there a better way of doing that?
The fact is, that owning or managing a business is stressful, this stress can impair our health and our relationships if we are not careful.
To heal our bodies we need to make time to rest, we need to learn to shut off our minds. We need to trust others will do the jobs we ask them. We also need to nourish our adrenal glands with foods and supplements that will allow us to re-energize.
In running our organizations we have to put things into perspective on a daily basis, we need to prioritize our tasks and to delegate as much as we can to ensure we are not run ragged.
Being human beings we are not invincible, and if we don't want to let the weariness overcome us, we need to find balance in our lives, our families and our business.
Dave Fuller, MBA, is the author of Profit Yourself Healthy. He can be reached at [email protected].
