How to build mental resilience for entrepreneurial success
The business world is like running an obstacle course: inevitable struggles form a never-ending path of potential roadblocks, setbacks, and challenges. Although you can’t always change them, how you react to setbacks depends on you. Will you quit? No way. But you’re going to need mental resilience.
Mental resilience is the ability to cope and adapt to adversity, hardship, and significant sources of stress. Here’s how you can build your mental resilience and set yourself up for success in business.
Take care of your mental health
Although it doesn’t look like it, the state of your body and health determines quite a lot of whether you can pick yourself up when the going gets tough and repeat the process.
The physical systems of your body process all mental efforts you make in your business. Therefore, physical and mental self-care is vital. For example, not eating healthy, not getting enough sleep, and using mental substances that affect your mind will break your resolution.
You must take care of your body to build mental resilience for the tough days ahead. When you reduce stress on your physical body, you increase the resources available to you to tackle challenges.
Below are some self-care tips to follow:
- Eat a balanced diet and exercise to stay healthy
- Create a budget and manage your money so that you aren’t stressing financial details
- Spend time with friends and families
- Keep your space and your schedule organized
- Create a routine
- Have a hobby
- Practice mindful meditation
Focus on your resilience and mental health
Do you know that, per current research, roughly 50% of new ventures fail within the first 5 years? While most people focus on the negative, it’s important to remember that this means that 50% of new ventures succeed past the 5th year.
So, how to build mental resilience and why is resilience important for mental health?
In an ever-challenging landscape as an entrepreneur, you must believe in your abilities and personality and be passionate about your business while still accounting for life events and preparing for setbacks.
Entrepreneurs must cultivate a growth and learning mindset. Instead of looking for short-term performances, experiment with new ideas and seek out challenges. Leverage the qualities that make you special and dive passionately into what you’re building.
Anticipate failure and use setbacks as key performance indicators
Wise entrepreneurs expect failure and learn from it. We know some people prefer to pretend nothing can ever go wrong with their plans, but such pretense is counter-productive. Instead of ignoring the bad sides, think through what can go wrong so that you can account for it.
Think of it like you are climbing a mountain. Once you reach the top, what will be on the other side? Preparing in advance can help you adjust promptly. In other words, you can mitigate your risks.
As the popular adage goes, you can’t improve what you don’t track. When you experience setbacks, review and use them as key metrics for your business. This will help you draw up solutions you can use in the future.
Build strong social connections
Humans are social creatures. Building strong social relationships are the comprehensive test of mental and psychological resilience. As an entrepreneur, people are your greatest assets. They will form a supportive social network you can reach out to when things go wrong. The support you will find from friends, and loved ones will prove valuable when you need to weather storms and come back stronger.
Find a professional group of people like you
Networking and connections are mental strength resilience symbol. Building new network opens different doors of opportunities in the business world. Relationships that foster trust provide encouragement that can help improve a person’s resilience.
Even if everything is going smoothly, your support team can help you stay productive, whether they’re a network of entrepreneurs or a mentor with whom you can bounce ideas, share frustrations, get advice, and ask questions. Think of a professional group like a board of advisors who will hold you accountable and help you create a sustainable lifestyle.
Unlike family, a professional group knows what you are going through. They have also endured an entrepreneur's lonely and uncertain life and can give tips on how to get out of ugly situations.
Limit your consumption of social media
Social media allows a business to build a brand and generate global sales at the touch of a few buttons. However, more reliance on social media is needed for an entrepreneur. You might easily be awed by coming across mental resilience quotes on social media but don't let that distract you from the fact that you need to limit your social media consumption for the better.
Social media is a very unforgiving atmosphere where it is easy to err too easily. Even if you’re trying to do everything right, one or two missteps can put you in a touchy situation with trolls and competition. According to research, there is a negative relationship between self-image and social media usage. For an entrepreneur that wants to build resilience, self-identity is everything.
To get the best out of social media use, curate your feeds to include personalities and information that helps build resilience, self-esteem, self-image, and branding. More importantly, spend less time on the space and swap it for real-life relationships.
Join online groups for mental health resilience
There are helpful online groups where you can be held accountable and improve your resilience—for example, Reddit boards, Facebook groups, Twitter communities, etc. The groups are just online versions of your physical support groups. They can provide you with a wider range of ideas, as well as more immediate access to feedback, critique, and empathy when you need it most.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurs ride a mental rollercoaster of ups and down daily. However, most don’t show it since a positive appearance is crucial to business success. Sadly, constantly working under pressure can become overwhelming. Nonetheless, let hard work be one of the factors of your entrepreneurial success stories.
If you don’t want to harm your business in the long run, you must learn how to build mental resilience for entrepreneurship success and recover from inevitable setbacks. Use the tips above to achieve a mental balance and become a better business leader.