Beverlee Rasmussen CEC PCC Anxiety vs. Excitement
I recently read that fear and anxiety are linked physiologically to excitement.
This makes sense. It’s easy to get hooked on the highs caused by the drama of running a dysfunctional company.
These highs are from fear and anxiety. They feel exciting.
When you remove the drama, you remove the excitement and life becomes boring. Boring is just that… boring. Being bored sucks.
Emotions show up differently for each individual. For many, when we are tired and bored, drama helps create new energy for action.
Fear and anxiety can work the same way as excitement, keeping you hooked on a dysfunctional company system. The frustration caused by a broken business system, or the drama of an upset customer or employee, can hook you into feeling highly involved in your “exciting” business drama.
Excitement gives us much-needed energy for our busy lives. But it’s a fine line between fear and anxiety vs. excitement.
Are you running your business driven by fear and anxiety?
Do you…
- React based on assumptions
- Get caught up in others people’s problems
- Make decisions because of what others might think
- Often bypass your own best practices in your company
- Intend to document how you want things done but don’t ever seem to get around to it
What I notice most often is that many small business owners live in this state of fear and anxiety fully meaning to get their systems in place. They imagine the worst that might happen — for some, this keeps them awake at night — causing even more fear and anxiety. This fear and anxiety cycle keeps them locked into a business that’s not rewarding them as well as it could be.
Busy-ness and stress in our day is inevitable. Fear however leads us to living our lives in reverse always planning for what might happen rather than what is. ~ Dr. Michael Sinclair and Jose Seydel
It’s possible to change if you can identify this is happening in your business. You can run a more rewarding, more predictable, systematized business. The shift requires creating stable systems in your business.
Stability and systems are boring BUT essential for gaining traction in producing predictable revenue. Solid systems reduce the drama, and in turn reduce the fear and anxiety. Taking the time to figure out how to best do things in your company and then writing it down is boring. Every single client has told me this. I get it.
How then can you create positive energy from doing boring work?
You can’t, you just have to do it. One boring system at a time. Once you figure out how to best do something, at the very least make sure everyone on the team knows it.
Writing processes and procedures down helps a lot. A couple of suggestions for getting this done:
- Keep a white board to write down missing and broken systems.
- Hire someone to follow you and your staff around for a couple of days to get things written down.
The fear and anxiety will diminish as you gain confidence that things are being done predictably , on time, as you want them to happen. Excitement will occur as your business begins to function well, and eventually, to thrive.
Start by running things well today — making notes of what and how you want things done, and then do the same thing tomorrow and you will begin to shift from being anxious to being super excited. For real.
