Scale Up Your Business with a Mental Health Approach to the New Year
By: Tandi Orluk, LCSW, Set Free Counseling
We all strive to have a successful business. Sometimes we try and fail, and other times we try and succeed in our business goals for the year. All of which is good. Failure provides us with humility and resilience and success provides us with joy, hope, and excitement.
So how do we approach the new year from a mental health perspective regarding our business? First, reflect on your business accomplishments from 2024. Identify what made you proud, grateful, and excited. Then give yourself and your fellow colleagues praise for those accomplishments. Finally review and reflect on your daily systems that keep you operating at your best. I know that I feel my most inspired and creative when I am well rested, calm, not hungry, and do not have what seems like a million thoughts running in the background of my mind. As a Mental Health Professional here are 3 effective tools that can help you put in place daily systems to improve your mental health and scale up your business practices.
Body Scans: You can identify what is going on with your mental health by checking in with your body to see what it is doing. Our bodies are always communicating with us, and reacts well before our brains ever catch up. I have learned to identify this by doing daily body scans. To practice this start from the top of your head and scan down your body all the way to your toes. What do you notice? I notice, every single time, that my jaws, fingers, and toes are all clinched. As I am scanning those parts of my body, I intentionally unclench them. When I do this daily check-in with my body, I can stay ahead of days, weeks, months, and yes, even years of keeping my body in a tense state of fight or flight. Life happens to us every day. Stress piles up within us, our families, and businesses. If we are not listening daily to our body, then we are missing the signs it is trying to signal to us. We cannot operate our busy lives, and business, if we are crashing into the waves of life instead of surfing them.
Brain Dump: A brain dump is simply taking our thoughts and writing them out on paper. Write everything that is currently bothering you. I find this is best to do right before bed as this skill also helps ensure a better night’s rest. It really takes less than 10 minutes to implement this into your routine. Pay close attention to how you feel prior to doing this exercise versus when you have completed it, notice that you are calmer and more relaxed.
Practice Gratitude: Did you know that when we implement a daily practice of gratitude our mood improves drastically? In fact, research shows that a single act of thoughtful gratitude produces an immediate 10% increase in happiness, and a 35% reduction in depressive symptoms. 1 Here are ways you can implement gratitude in your daily systems. You can keep a gratitude journal, there are even apps that remind you to complete this exercise. A secondary boost of happiness comes from practicing gratitude when we are having a bad day. We can look back on what we wrote from that morning and remember that there are good things in our lives, and that whatever has stressed us out for today does not take away from the positive things that do exist in life.
In conclusion, as entrepreneurs we have much to reflect on and grow into for the new year in our businesses. Implement the mental health systems that set your future self and business up for success. Have an incredibly Happy New Year.
Disclaimer: This article is a whole health approach and not meant to treat any specific diagnosis.
References
- “The Importance of Practicing Gratitude and Celebrating Small Victories”. (November 17, 2022) Mental Health First Aid USA.
https://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org/2022/11/practicing-gratitude/.