fbpx
Photo: James Thew, YFS Magazine, Adobe Stock

An Entrepreneur’s Guide To Improving Mental Health

Mental resilience is critical for entrepreneurs and their employees to achieve peak performance — more so during unprecedented times.

Photo: Chintan Zalani, founder of Elite Content Marketer | Source: Courtesy Photo

Mental resilience is critical for entrepreneurs and their employees to achieve peak performance — more so during trying times when people are isolated and prone to feeling lonely.

Here are a few tips by fellow entrepreneurs and a few tools to ward off negativity from your workday and take care of your mental health.

 

Recalibrate work-life boundaries

With the onset of work from home (WFH) mandates during the pandemic, the boundaries between work and personal life have blurred.

The conversation around WFH on Twitter alone is up by 375 percent over the last year, and knowledge workers keep struggling with balancing between the two. They are stressed out, overwhelmed, and feel isolated. Pinterest even found a spike in searches for positivity.

Photo: Vlada Karpovich, Pexels
Photo: Vlada Karpovich, YFS Magazine

As the world battles mental health challenges, it’s more important now for you to take care of your emotional well-being and that of your employees. You need to act with empathy when dealing with your clients, co-workers, investors, and other stakeholders.

But where do you begin with taking care of your mental health?

 

Schedule “analog breaks” from your workday

Meditate, read, or walk, and encourage your employees to also schedule such mini-breaks. Use a habits app such as “Streaks” to remind yourself to take such breaks and facilitate the behavioral change. Remember: creating a balanced work from home culture calls for leading by example.

 

Move that body

A special aspect to ensure your health stays in good shape is ensuring you’re moving around “enough.” Sitting is touted as the new smoking––and that’s not without reason. A sedentary lifestyle increases your chance of heart disease, diabetes, and negatively affects your mental health.

But during the quarantine and even onwards, most professionals have led a sedentary lifestyle. While I’ve tried to work out in the evenings through the Nike training app, my digital activity tracker shows that I’ve taken 36% fewer steps per day as compared to my average last year. Now I try to walk at least 5,000 steps per day, and I recommend you pick up running, cycling, or some other form of working out.

Yoga is a robust mental, physical, and spiritual practice you can consider for the same. DoYogaWithMe is offering a free 2-month trial to its premium content, which is a great place to get started.

Track your overall physical activity every day and ensure you get some movement every day.

 

Get some sunshine

It’s also important to get some sunshine for about 30 minutes during the off-peak hours. Sunshine helps to detox, uplift your mood, prevent depression, and was even found to increase Covid-19 recovery rates in one study.

How about engaging in about half an hour of Yoga sessions during sunrise or sunset? Now that’s an efficient and effective match for busy entrepreneurs!

 

Get Upskilled

Once you’re keeping up fine, there’s no denying that the extra time at hand right now is perfect to pick up new skills. No wonder the conversations on “trying new things” are popular on Twitter.

Digital transformation for Small Business
© mavoimages, YFS Magazine

Besides the LinkedIn Learning courses I showed you, get yourself enrolled in programs offered by various other online learning platforms, and encourage your employees to do the same. Indeed I want to make a few recommendations of courses you can get started with:

 

Ahrefs Academy: Blogging for Business

This course is designed to help bloggers grow a blog past 100K monthly visitors and turn thousands of readers into paying customers. It covers how to start and grow a blog, conduct keyword research to find high-value opportunities, create high-quality content that satisfies search intent, build backlinks, and the like. The course could serve as a launchpad to start a content marketing program that adds compounding value to your business.

 

CXL Institute: Online Courses

If you want a quick introductory look at a slew of subjects including conversion rate optimization, product messaging, Excel, Google Analytics, user experience, landing page optimization, and neuromarketing, then CXL free online courses are great. They are led by industry experts and don’t last longer than an hour––perfect for someone just wanting to explore any of these topics.

CXL also offers mini-degree digital marketing programs that are exhaustive, on CRO, analytics, marketing, and more. While they are paid, the trial for these starts at $1 per week––well worth the investment if you want to learn a subject end-to-end.

 

The University of Queensland: Introduction To Social Psychology

Business owners need to understand why people behave the way they do, changing beliefs of others, persuasion, and other psychological traits that affect people’s behavior in public settings.

In this Introduction to Social Psychology course, Professors Roy Baumeister and Blake McKimmie, walk students through the basics of body language, influence, and the like. The course is free, however you’ll need to pay a fee to receive a verified certificate. The course runs for seven weeks with an average expected time commitment of a couple of hours every week.

 

Remember, there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

How you can turn a crisis into something that benefits the company and employees in the long run? “Since the pandemic, at our company, we have gone through our expenses and cut down on bloat which has resulted in not laying off employees,” says Chris from JookSMS, an SMS marketing platform for small businesses. “For example, we have been paying for the bandwidth we did not need and realizing since all employees have been working from home we do not need such a big office space.”

Focus on the light at the other end of the tunnel next year, he concludes. “We have been repeating the message to employees that we are not falling into a bottomless pit, but traveling through a tunnel, and to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel until you come out the other side.”

 

Chintan Zalani is a writer, B2B SaaS content marketer, and the founder of Elite Content Marketer. He loves helping creators build sustainable businesses.

 

© YFS Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Copying prohibited. All material is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this material is prohibited. Sharing of this material under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International terms, listed here, is permitted.

   

In this article