Why Entrepreneurs Must Protect Themselves from Negativity through These Mindfulness Strategies

Isn’t this true that when launching a new business or keeping an existing one afloat, we are so mindful of the logistical aspects of our business, yet we don’t pay enough attention to what is happening inside our emotional landscape? Excessive exposure to uncertainty and prolonged stress often end up breeding a lot of negativity around us. This negativity keeps growing like a silent and benign growth, until one day, our fears and anxieties get the better of us and our business. According to one research work funded by the University of California Berkeley, the University of California San Francisco, as many as 49% of entrepreneurs admitted suffering from depression or other forms of psychological illnesses, such as ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse. Being creative, extremely passionate, goal-oriented, and driven and yet having to cope with pressures and isolation end up breeding negativity and contribute to pressures.  

Negativity or having a negative mindset is the tendency that contribute to these issues and yet, entrepreneurs don’t pay enough attention to these factors and don’t take enough care of their most important asset i.e., their minds. We often think that other people are generating negativity around us and for us, and yet we don’t suspect ourselves to be doing the same for ourselves. Negativity stems from our deeply held personal beliefs too. Since like attracts like, the negativity in us makes us attract more negative people, interactions, emotions, and experiences. Negativity is not just a feeling but a silent, destructive force that slowly sucks the creative, life energy from us and leave us barren.  

What happens when there is Negativity around you?  

Here are some of the things that happen when you are being negative or are around negative people:  

Your creativity stops flowing. In other words, you are unable to see the potential behind seemingly ordinary ideas.  

You become critical of everything.  

You become fearful and apprehensive, and you stop taking risks.  

You may continue working hard but your inner negativity starts blocking abundance.  

Your wealth vibration becomes low. You stop manifesting wealth in your life.  

Allowing negativity to fester in your life longer than it should has a detrimental affect on your productivity, relationships and your mental and physical health.  

How to Clear Negativity from Your Life Just like we clean our physical space, our mind needs to have a spring cleaning session from time to time. Here are three strategies I would suggest that would help you get rid of or at last start the process of getting rid of the negativity from your life and work:  

Be Conscious of your Thought Process and Guard It  

Like most extroverts, we are attentive to physical details and elements in our lives but most of us don’t pay much attention to how our minds and thought processes work. Often enough, negativity starts with a single negative thought popping in our mind, or a negative interaction, which when left unchecked turn into a hail of more unproductive thoughts, anxiety, fixations, worries, repetitive patterns, the tendency of playing and replaying worse case scenarios and past hurt and guilt in our mind over and over, until it all overwhelms and drown us. We start following the negative train of thought, just like naïve, enchanted children would follow the Pied Piper until we are hopelessly lost in labyrinth on negativity. One cannot simply “snap out” of a serious condition like depression and anxiety, yet you can and should snap out of the negative thought pattern, as soon as it starts. I recommend using a psychological hack and a certain visualizing techniques for this purpose:  

Use the famous psychological trick of the rubber band to deal with your negative thought. This means wearing a rubber band on your wrist and snapping it every time you have a negative thought as a bid to make yourself aware of the negative charge of your thought and ‘snap out’ of it literally.  

Imagine your negative thought is like a paper and you need to get rid of it just like you shred a paper by feeding it to paper shredder.  

You can also write down your negative thought on a piece of paper and then burn the paper in a safe manner to burn off the negative vibe from your life.  

Our minds cannot stay in a state of a vacuum, so every time you get rid of a negative thought, make it a point to replace it with a positive one and feel grateful for something, even if it is a thing as small as good weather or having some money in your account.  

It’s not easy to control your thoughts or eliminate them; however, managing and monitoring your thought process helps you streamline it into a more positive and productive one, as it helps you see the possibilities and solutions among problems and confusions.  

Create Healthy Boundaries  

When we are trying to set up a business, we end up committing a lot of personal and professional energies and forgoing our personal space, which has disastrous consequences. So, you have to be mindful of the external negative influences in your life, like negative feedback, criticism, unfair expectations, overwhelming conversations and meetings, tough negotiations, etc. In a realistic world, you certainly cannot avoid them but you can minimize their interferences and create a buffer between yourself and them. Now, this isn’t easy always when you are trying to build a small startup or medium-sized business from the ground, as you find yourself as having less options and space to negotiate with. However, making even seemingly small and insignificant adjustments would still have a huge impact on your stress and anxiety level, as it helps you exercise and regain some control over the personal and professional aspects of your life. Some of the things you can do to create healthy boundaries is to:  

Set up clear-cut and clearly communicated work hours.  

Post a sign outside your work office for your family not to disturb you during work.  

Letting the voicemail take messages when you are working on an important project.  

Excuse yourself from a meeting that has turn too long or a discussion that has gotten heated and request a reschedule.  

Reconnect with Nature When you are building a new business, hours, days and weeks become a blur. I have known so many entrepreneurs spending hours and hours in front of their computers and on their smartphones, testing ideas, building and launching a service, writing, designing, communicating, tweaking, perfecting, troubleshooting, etc, which happens to be an essential but overwhelming process. However, humans are not designed to be out of touch with nature for long. Yet this is what we have exactly become due to the demands of our personal and professional lives. Our urbanized, industrialized, and highly digitized lifestyle has created progress as well as professional possibilities for us but also a lot of stress and negativity at the same time. We are beginning to develop an unhealthy relationship with and reliance on technology. There is a lot of negativity in life and the internet takes it a notch further if you move in the wrong crowd.

This kind of excessive exposure and dependence also creates a lot of stress and negativity in your life and personal and professional relationships. However, one of the basic and most effective ways to fight negativity and replenish your physical, emotional, and creative energies is to take a break from work, go outside and connect with nature. This kind of break helps you fight off negativity, fatigue, stagnation, saturation, and anxiety, readjust and regain your focus, and give your creativity and productivity a boost. Some other negativity and stress lowering ideas for a workplace are to:  

Take a brief or complete break from work and go outside for 15 to 20 minutes.  

When outside, sit on the ground or grass cross-legged or relaxed pose and breathe in and out slowly.  

You can use your time outside with nature to meditate as well.  

Go for a quick walk around the block.  

Organize your desk around a window that gives a natural view that is, it can open into a garden.  

If you live in and work from an apartment, add nature to your office and desk in terms of small plants, a terracotta fountain, beautiful stones, etc.  

Some people are naturally wired to be more positive and tend to bring the same quality to their work and relationships. They are the ones blessed with a positive mindset. Meanwhile, others struggle a lot, as they suffer from a limited or negative mindset. Every person has the potential to be happier, saner, more productive, and positive but one needs a nudge along the way. If you have been suffering from a negative mindset then you can benefit a lot from mindset training from a life coach or a mystic healer. These highly perceptive individuals can help you recognize your negative emotions and replace them with positive thoughts as well as actions. In doing so, they help you reach your personal and professional goals more diligently and successfully.