When I first started out making candles, it was just for fun and a way for me to occupy my free time after working my daytime job.
In the beginning, ordering supplies and making the product was all it pretty much entailed. Pretty simple.
But bit by bit, wanting to expand and grow the business, I realized my energies were pretty spread thin.
Any side hobby or entrepreneur business, particularly if you are one person, you are likely to put on all these hats:
- Brainstorm new ideas
- Create products or provide services
- Maintain eCommerce shop
- Fulfill, package, and ship orders
- Post consistently on social media platforms
Running a business as no surprise is A LOT of work.
How to deal with overwhelm?
There’s many different ways to deal with overwhelm, so no one answer is right or wrong way.
It really just depends on one’s personal comfort level and preference.
1. Be okay with overwhelm – Be kind to yourself. Overwhelm is what all people go through at some point in time. Our lives are busy and difficult, no reason to make oneself feel any worse.
2. Do what you enjoy most – Decide which part of the business you love doing the most. And then devote most of your time doing that. In my case, creating the candles and decorating them with crystal was what I enjoy most doing.
3. Outsource tasks you don’t like – Decide which part of the business you know you can’t do. In my case, I have the worst writers block and content writing is what I least like doing. Through recommendation of others, I was able to hire a copywriter who would help me build a email nurture sequence. It can be scary to outsource to someone when the service maybe expensive or you aren’t sure if the service rendered will actually benefit your business. But at the end, I realized trying to do something I don’t like doing still resulted in zero forward movement. So between taking a risk and not taking any action, the former is better.
4. Work on tasks in bite size chunks – As someone who wants to get it ALL done in one go, this is quite hard for me. However, with any business, it’s better to work on something bit by bit instead of trying to complete it all in one go. “Slow and steady wins the race” comes to mind here.
5. Launch/ put something out anyways – One of the major reasons for overwhelm is perfectionism. We want it to be perfectly complete. But that is also another reason things don’t get pushed out. Nothing wrong with having something perfect, but it’s better to have something launched than not out at all. When I make candles on the whim, I may not know exactly how it fits into the grand scheme of my business, but I put it out there anyways.
6. Have another entrepreneur buddy – Meet and make friends with other entrepreneurs and crafters. It can help with motivating you to get things done when you have an accountability person.
Those are my six personal tips on dealing with overwhelm. I’m sure there are MANY more ways to deal with overwhelm and I’m all ears to learn how others combat this.
