Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 317 | Entrepreneurship Section | 1

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 317 | September October 6-12 , 2023

4 Ways to Avoid Founder Burnout

By Sharon Poczter and Yael Benjamin | Inc Magazine | October 4, 2023

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In the latest Startup Snapshot report, The Untold Toll: The Impact of Stress on the Well-Being of Startup Founders and CEOs, 72 percent of founders reported the entrepreneurial journey had a negative impact on their mental health; 44 percent reported very high levels of stress, 37 percent anxiety, 36 percent burnout, and 13 percent depression. 

Despite the prevalence of mental health issues among founders, very little work has been done to better understand the mental state of entrepreneurs, with the goal of highlighting how they can develop resilience and take care of their mental health in an attempt to improve the financial outcome of their venture.   The authors spoke with three industry experts to better understand what founders can do to manage their own mental health: 

1. Work with your stress, not against it.  Stress can actually be harnessed to improve performance, and it comes down to how you view stress, not how much of it you have. Research with Navy Seals shows that those who viewed stress as a challenge, whether as an opportunity to demonstrate a strength or learn a new skill, ended up performing better over the long-term than those who viewed stress as something they needed to will their way through.
2. Prioritize recovery.  Burnout actually comes not from stress itself but from the lack of recovery from it. Entrepreneurs, therefore, should prioritize thinking through how best to recover from stressful periods, and carving out time for this recovery when a stressful period can be anticipated. 
3. Find group support.  Small groups of like-minded founders could convene regularly in an atmosphere of confidentiality and respect to engage in open discussions about personal and professional issues. By finding such groups, entrepreneurs can mitigate feelings of loneliness as they begin to understand their experience is not solitary, but rather shared by most founders.
4. Foster your non-entrepreneur identity.  A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of confusing their business identity with their personal identity, and that can lead to big problems, ones that become evident if the business succeeds or if it fails.  In order to ensure your identity does not become unidimensional, it is important to have other things and other people in your life. Entrepreneurs can have one interest that doesn’t have anything to do with their business.  Another way to make sure your founder identity doesn’t subsume you is to maintain friendships from outside the venture ecosystem.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. In a study 72 percent of founders reported the entrepreneurial journey had a negative impact on their mental health; 44 percent reported very high levels of stress, 37 percent anxiety, 36 percent burnout, and 13 percent depression. 
2. Despite the prevalence of mental health issues among founders, very little work has been done to better understand the mental state of entrepreneurs, with the goal of highlighting how they can develop resilience and take care of their mental health in an attempt to improve the financial outcome of their venture.   
3. Three advices from three industry experts to better understand what founders can do to manage their own mental health are: work with your stress, not against it; prioritize recovery; find group support; and foster your non-entrepreneur identity.

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Topics:  Entrepreneurship, Startup, Stresses