How to Beat the Anxiety of Starting your Own Business

Being afraid of entrepreneurship is no destiny! As long as you know a way out.

Sad story but true. First, let me tell you why this happens. As you grow up, your creativity and playfulness decline. This is as known as when spontaneity is replaced by anxiety in psychology. Instead of replacing it, I am inviting you to replaying it.

As a psychologist, here I listed how and why you can “replay” your authentic entrepreneur mindset playfully and creatively.

I am saying “replay” because you don’t need to learn it; your playful inner child already knows it.

Remember how you were doing things for the sake of joy you can get out of it. You were able to integrate and animate anything with your own “favorite toys/joys”. And, you were not analyzing your dreams but you were free to dream again and again. Day and night.

This is how a child with agency, autonomy, and competence for exploration can spend the days. Let’s dig deep into those features of a playful child. You will find out how replaying them will help you to unleash your desire to be an entrepreneur. At the same time, I invite you to realize how this desire pairs up with the fear of being an entrepreneur. By realizing this link, you will be equipped to befriend those fears.

It is ok that they are there, but you won’t need to base your actions on your fears. Fear is not bad, it will protect you in many ways. However, you need to learn how to feel the fear and do it anyway. This way, you can gamify your entrepreneurship journey.

Are you ready?

1. Your playful inner child knows it.

That child is curious, wide-eyed, takes interest pretty much in everything. Close your eyes for a couple of seconds and remember how you were initiating things without overthinking the results. Rather, you were just enjoying the process. Otherwise, you’d probably not be able to learn how to walk. You fell and stood up. Countless times. It was like a game.

Rely on that child and you will see things differently again. As we age, our brain is wired to develop stereotypes and prototypes of everything to make life easier. Yet, sometimes it makes life full and dull.

Rediscovering what is around you and what is not around you can let your brain re-wire again and again. Don’t be stuck with just one function of things. This is what we as psychologists call functional fixedness. That means, we assume that one thing can only have one function, one thing can be only done in one way, one thing is only possible when one condition is met, etc. Which is, not!

Yet what brought you here won’t bring you anywhere else. Sure! So, take some other roads, or do something else on the same road while enjoying curiously gazing things as if you never.

Yes, I totally mean that a curious playful child is indeed an entrepreneur. This child is behaving according to needs, desires, and pure joys. This child takes initiative in the world to explore what is what and how is how.

This was pure joy and meaning!

2. Do it for the sake of joy you can get out of it.

Would you do it anyway? If you are merely interested in the money you will make by stepping in this entrepreneurship idea, this is not sustainable.

You need a reason. This is the motivation that moves you.

Somewhere some point in your life, daily hassles might have prevented you to cultivate your passionate approach to novelty. Doing dull tasks over and over, relying on automatic pilot in-between daily roles, and underestimating your potential could be easily a factor that blocks your creativity and spontaneity.

This is why our greatest ideas can only come while we are showering, peeing, or pooping. Unless we are with our smartphones! Because we are indeed smarter than our smartphones :) Yet, leaving yourself an empty space to do nothing but just daydreaming is very rare for many people.

When you allow yourself, you can be able to notice the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Have you seen the moon? Why it is different every night? Have you smelled the strawberry? Does it smell similar to watermelon or mango? What about trying to touch your nose with your tongue?

I know these questions seem very unrelated to entrepreneurship. Yet these kinds of mindful exercises will revoke your inner child’s curiosity as a skill set, that you can apply to your entrepreneurship journey. You will remember how it was doing things not to gain a reward or escape from punishment, but for itself regardless of the outcomes.

3. Integrate it with your own “favorite toys/joys”.

Remember that this is the chance of your authorship in your adult life as you always dreamt about as a child. I hope you won’t ignore it and merely copy-paste your last paid-job where you were not happy enough obviously, so you are here and reading this piece.

It is very common to get lost while going over a business plan when thinking about the content and context of your dream business. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You already have a unique wheel that moves you: your authentic self! What is already in your basket? Think of what you like to play most.

I would like to be a belly dancer when I was a little child, for example. This year is the 10th anniversary of my psychology graduation. We were not wearing a cap at the graduation ceremonies of my university. It is a custom of my university that if you wear a cap, it sounds like you are closing your mind. Are we jars so our minds are closed? Of course, we would continue to learn for the rest of our life. But I still remember, how 10 years ago, on the ceremony day, I also took my robe off after some point. I threw it like a magician, tied my faculty colored belt to my head. I danced and danced with my class. Also, I brought a basket of tambourine and cymbal that is enough for half the class.

I did not become a belly dancer, of course, as I have said. And still great enough that I’ve been dancing with the human spirit for the past 10 years. I feel like I am dancing with emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. I keep the rhythm of life. I challenge and bind my life to human well-being.

This was a great indicator of how I was going to pursue my career as a psychologist. I need it to be fun, energetic, active, and collaborative. This does not mean the best for everyone; it means what fits me most and how I can bring my whole self to the table. Now I can tell how nontraditional routes I have taken so far that feels like shaking my belly! No need to say in detail here. You don’t need to know about what projects I have done; you need to focus on how you want to feel while pursuing your big projects.

But what I want to say is finding your joys and blending your toys will unleash your entrepreneur mindset in every sector, industry, and profession.

You just dream on!

4. Allow yourself to dream again rather than analyzing your dreams.

When working with individuals who are about to start up their own business, I go through their dreams. I put their worries and concerns about “How am I gonna..”s aside by role playings, active imaginations, make-believe type of action-oriented psychotherapy techniques.

The reason I am instructing not through their factual concerns but through creative hopes is that because creativity and anxiety are inversely related. The more creativity you are, the more of your true self will be put into action constructively. The less creative you are, the more pain in the back will your boundariless spontaneity become. You may still dare to act upon something, but without creativity, this is just an impulsive stupidity. You need your spontaneity, yet with creativity that shapes it within your authentic boundaries.

Nevertheless, my most frequent observation with the entrepreneur-to-be’s I work with is not that impulsive stupidity without any concern of anything realistic. Rather, the increased anxiety of “how am I gonna”s block your creativity. This leaves many people to get stuck with the ideation of “becoming” an entrepreneur one day, instead of letting themselves “being” an entrepreneur as they already were.

However, when going through their “dream business” as I’ve said, it is very ironic that many people dream about their dream. Which means there is no content.

For example, when I ask “Imagine you did it. Now it is a prototypical day of your business. Tell me what you are seeing when you enter the space. Show me how you are feeling. Go over your agenda from your morning till evening. Where do you sit? Whom do you work? What is your best type of customer?”

Generally, the answers come without content:

I am doing my dream business. “Everything falls properly. I am making good money. My loyal customers are very satisfied. I have a great team. My space is as I dream…”

And the story is generally that short.

Okay, my friend, I am intervening, but what is in your “dream”? What do you mean by “properly”, “satisfied”, or “great”? Aren’t they the output? Where is the input here? Show me for example what makes a team great for you and put some content into your dream.

Dreaming about perfection will never give content to you. There is nothing perfect. Dreaming about perfection is numbing the already-perfect-enough dreams you have. Making good money is of course a great outcome. Let’s create “the” process that can lead you to “that” product.

And a dream process is what makes you play as a happy child.

So, dream it!

What you call your dream business or job is something that you can change every week when you are a child or even in life science lessons when you are in primary school. One day, you were a nurse, the other day a firefighter, and the next and astronaut, followed by wanting to be a cook. Consider what was attracting you as characteristics, demands, and sources of that job.

The important thing is HOW you want to feel when you are doing what you chose to. This is the psychological meaning of working life. Whatever business you do, can you do in the way you want to do? Of course, not everything will go well all the time. Can you see these as a calling to yourself?

It’s hard to follow your dreams, of course; but not following your dreams is a tragedy!

The more you will allow yourself to dream and act upon this, the more fabulously you will witness your emerging potential as an entrepreneur.