7 Healthy Ways to Handle Pressure as an Online Entrepreneur
A strong mental foundation will help you ride out any storm
Online entrepreneurship often starts with a muse project. You have a passion and you want to turn it into a business.
Most fail in their first year, but those who persevere gradually access the coveted world of location independence and entrepreneurial freedom.
The newly-found perks, however, come with a catch. Entrepreneurial freedom goes hand in hand with uncertainty, responsibility, and risk.
As an online entrepreneur, financial fluctuations are natural and managerial foresight is crucial to long-term prosperity.
No matter how well you do today, your money, momentum, and motivation are always at stake. This constant pressure can overwhelm you.
To avoid mental breakdowns, you have to build safeguards.
In this context, you need to nurture your mental resilience. As Robert H. Schuller once said: “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”
The following habits will create mental buffers to ensure your sanity and wellbeing throughout the hurdles of your entrepreneurial route.
On this basis, here are 7 healthy ways to handle pressure as an online entrepreneur.
1. Don’t compare yourself to others
Bar the revolutionizers, many of us start out with an idea and a model.
In most cases, our business ideas don’t emerge out of the blue — we have seen similar projects before.
This blog inspires me. The founder transformed it from a muse writing gig into a lucrative online business. Maybe I could add my angle to this particular niche and pursue a similar route.
This gives us dual assurance. First, we are convinced that our vision is not a naive idea but an achievable quest.
Secondly, we know that we’ll have little samples of guidance along the way.
This system, however, also creates the risk of fruitless comparisons.
To secure your mental resilience as an online entrepreneur, you need to comprehend the difference between instructive modeling and harmful comparisons.
In the beginning, modeling your journey on someone else’s path can be beneficial. Because you analyze their wins and missteps, you elude similar mistakes.
This saves you a couple of trial and error lessons right off the bat.
Nevertheless, there comes a point when your journey progresses beyond the modeling phase.
From that point on, looking at someone else’s stats will do more damage than good.
As an example, blogger X managed to get 10,000 monthly visitors by the end of his first year.
In his second year, he grew to 50,000 unique visitors a month. Your blog was largely inspired by X’s site and you employed similar growth tactics.
Expecting the same numbers, however, would be pointless and distressing. A simple emulation of an already existing strategy is no guarantee for success. Quite the opposite in fact.
In this context, you will adopt a “scarcity mindset”.
According to Entrepreneur.com, looking at other people’s wins and trying to copy them will shift your focus in the wrong direction.
By espousing this scarcity attitude, you will concentrate your efforts on what you don’t have, instead of utilizing what you do have.
Besides, loose comparisons will inevitably miss certain latent factors.
Blogger X might use better stock pictures. You might not be able to score as many guest posts. Blogger X might have a higher budget to secure ghostwriters.
In essence, all of these variables nullify comparisons.
Consequently, constant comparisons will produce mental strains and these will hamper your creativity and peace of mind over time.
So, how do we compare without creating additional stress factors?
The best course of action is to model the outset of your journey on other people to grasp their lessons and to avoid common mistakes.
Once your business is running, you need to fully focus on your venture and stop comparing yourself to others.
Unless you are running a data-driven competition analysis, comparisons will not bring about any advantages.
2. Celebrate small wins
Many digital entrepreneurs underestimate the power of celebrating small wins.
Online business veterans will know that any successful venture is an accumulation of small achievements.
This is why you need to reward yourself every time you break a seemingly insignificant barrier.
In this context, a combination of minor mental rewards will shield your mindset from succumbing to pressure when times get rough.
As an example, implement small rewards every time you secure a new client. These rewards don’t have to be material or monetary.
Taking a bit more time off and gifting yourself a “lazy day“ to recompense a specific win is often more effective than buying the latest Yeezy sneakers.
The shoes will spawn a brief moment of joy, but they will not reinforce your mental fortress in the long haul.
Allowing yourself time to recuperate will, on the other hand, nourish your mental wellbeing.
3. Take enough breaks
“He that can take rest is greater than he that can take cities.” — Benjamin Franklin
On par with the celebration of small wins, escaping the hustle from time to time is paramount to your mental resilience.
Many first-time online entrepreneurs start with unbreakable zeal, motivation, and drive. After their first scores, they feel invincible.
In 2018, I had my first taste of success with blogging, freelance writing, and dropshipping. I had worked tirelessly for 2 years and finally saw some tangible gains.
For a brief period, the feeling was intoxicating.
This feeling of conquest would, however, change, rather quickly. After the initial excitement had passed, the mental strain became untenable.
In 2019, I juggled a toilsome corporate job with 4 different online ventures. That year, I didn’t take a single day off. Not one.
By the end of the year, I was nearing a mental breakdown. My finances had improved dramatically and I had become debt-free. Mentally, though, I had reached a tipping point.
2019 became an eye-opening year. I realized that no business growth is worth your sanity. No bank statement will offset your burnouts.
I decided to take more breaks and to focus my energy on a few select passion projects.
This helped me tremendously when the world went bananas during the 2020 pandemic. I had already faced a crisis, and this helped me keep my cool when everything went haywire in early 2020.
Always try to balance your ardor with enough rest. Take a hiatus if you have to. Go on mini-retirements. Don’t let the venture you started as a passion project enslave you.
Sometimes, it is better to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term mental fortitude. The financial gains will come back as a byproduct of your strengthened mindset.
4. Automate
In the world in online business, automation is synonymous with relaxation.
As online entrepreneurs, we often manage a business all by ourselves or with a very small team. This amplifies the importance of automatizing small, monotonous tasks.
If you are a writer in the 21st century, there is simply no point in checking every single sentence for grammar mistakes. Let someone else — a software — do it for you.
I once had a roommate who didn’t believe in the concept of automatic payments. He ran a successful e-commerce site.
Every Sunday, he spent hours reviewing bills, settling tax payments, and paying his employees — all manually.
Needless to say, once the venture grew, his routine turned into a nightmare.
He became more and more obsessed with the financial side of the business and started to neglect the quality of his products.
Luckily, his friends and associates convinced him to hire a VA and to automate a couple of other tasks.
His love for manual payments is still alive and well but he understood the importance of automation. These newly-found tactics saved his business and his sanity.
If he had continued alone without listening to his peers, his business would have gone under.
This brings us to the importance of avoiding isolation.
5. Don’t isolate yourself
Don’t forget to surround yourself with the right people on your entrepreneurial odyssey.
Managing a business alone does not mean managing a business in isolation.
Especially in the early stages of their career, online entrepreneurs often grind incessantly without measurable support from their friends, family, or fellow dream chasers.
This can have drastic consequences. If you lack feedback — positive or negative — chances are you’ll drift around without spotting potential improvements and shortcuts.
For instance, a Youtuber might have lots of videos with great content and a powerful message. Certain videography elements are, however, invisible to newbies.
The rookie filmmaker might not see that his videos have great closeups but terrible background noise.
With the proper guidance from experienced Youtubers, he might be able to build on his strengths by doubling down on closeups all while enhancing the background imagery.
If he continues to work in isolation, his videos will not become better and his numbers will stagnate.
Sooner or later, this will impact his self-esteem and lead to a mental crunch. In many cases, the mental burden of stagnation heralds an online venture’s definitive end.
6. Delegate and outsource
Akin to automation, delegating and outsourcing are essential to your resilience as an online entrepreneur.
We’ve all been there. We believe that nobody can take over important tasks in our business.
After all, we’ve built it. We came up with the idea and designed its execution. We were the architects and builders of our fortress.
This thinking pattern may work in the beginning but sooner or later, it will lead you straight down a rabbit hole.
If you want to become successful in any type of online venture, you’ll have to delegate and outsource at some point.
I know, delegation can be a double-edged sword.
In this context, the challenge resides in finding the right tasks and the right assistants. As with many startup struggles, experience is the best teacher.
If you get it wrong once or twice, you’ll face short-term consequences. Nevertheless, the long-term gains are worth the short-term risk.
Chosen wisely, competent assistants, virtual helpers, and employees will ease pressure on your business in the long run.
This will, ultimately, outweigh the brief stress factors you might have when making mistakes during your first acts of delegation outsourcing.
7. Bolster your mental and physical health
“It’s what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate 10, 20, and 30 years from now.” — Warren Buffett
While pursuing your grand idea, don’t forget to hit the gym. Meditate from time to time. Express gratitude and spend time with the people you love.
Businesses come and go. Successes and failures are temporary. Your body and your mind, on the other hand, are permanent.
In many cases, 3 traits forge resilience: physical health, mental grit, and social harmony.
They won’t take your business through the storm by themselves, but they will form a strong mental backbone in conjunction.
Consequently, a healthy combination of physical fitness, mental strength, and social contentment will bring about vital safeguards to handle pressure as an online entrepreneur.
