How to eliminate stress as a newbie business owner

Ok sure, maybe we can't "eliminate" it... But we sure can minimize it, by making some practical changes to your new business.

In this episode, I share how to chip away at the stress of running a business—bit by bit, like melting a big block of ice. I'll opens up about her early experiences in her 20s, juggling multiple jobs to fund a California adventure, and realizing that the relentless grind left me accustomed to high stress. 

You'll walk away from this episode with practical tips to reclaim your time and lower your stress levels without overhauling your entire life.

• Melt Stress Gradually: It’s not about a complete life overhaul. Focus on reducing stress little by little.
• Set Boundaries: Limit your calls to predetermined days (e.g., Tuesdays and Thursdays) to avoid constant interruptions.
• Eliminate Task Switching: Batch similar tasks together—ideating, filming, editing, and posting—to save precious time.
• Adopt a Morning Routine: A consistent routine (even if it’s as simple as watching a daily news recap with your breakfast) can help transition you from chaos to clarity.
• Choose Ideal Clients: Work with clients who energize you rather than drain you. Your ideal client should light you up, not burn you out.

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

It's time to eliminate some stress from your life, my friend, because running a business isn't always easy, but chipping away at stress piece by piece by piece, like it's a big ol block of ice and we are melting it and getting rid of stress bit by bit by bit, I think that's the way to do it. It's not about overhauling your entire life, it's about bit by bit limiting your stress.

 When I was in my 20s, I took myself to California for almost two months. I wanted to take a class and I wanted to see what it was like to live there, and I just wanted to do the thing that people always talk about. So I worked two jobs to pay for it. Saved, well, I mean, a hundred jobs.

I always had a hundred jobs, but I mean I took on another serving job at the time. I would bartend all night and then get up and serve brunch in the morning. It was very difficult. I'll tell you about it sometime. I did a lot of dumb things and really ran myself ragged. Anyway, so I saved up all this money so that I could go to California. 

  As I got there, I was having a great time, right? It was warm out, I was meeting people, I was having fun, and I was actually loosening up more than I even realized it. And as stress started leaving me, my new normal of being less stressed just became just that, became my new normal.

 But I distinctly remember the moment I realized I had let go of so much stress and really a lot of anger.  So I was walking down the sidewalk. I'm the only person on the sidewalk ever because I was the only person in LA who walked anywhere as far as I could tell.

So I'm walking down the sidewalk and I started thinking about work. I started thinking about serving people and having them be angry at me and just like fighting with people in my made up space. situation in my head. And as I thought about it, my shoulders went up and my teeth started grinding and I started pacing faster and like slightly leaning forward as I  motored down the sidewalk.

And I stopped and was like, Whoa,  Whoa,  what is this feeling? What is this stress and anger?  And why am I so comfortable here?  And so I realized that feeling, not only did I realize I hadn't been experiencing it up until this point of the trip, but also that once I found it, it was really comfortable. It was really familiar.

Because that's where I had been living. In my grind to try and save up money and make this dream come true,  I had gotten really used to being in this uncomfortable, stressed out, angry kind of energy.  A lot of that to do with also lack of sleep because I wasn't sleeping much. 

That moment was such a blessing, right? It's so nice when we can have a realization in the moment instead of in hindsight. But, of course, old habits die hard, and when I started running my business, the same thing happened, right? I got used to a very high level of stress. I probably still am used to a high level of stress, but in the early years of my business, those first five years especially, when you're just trying to make everything work and you want it so bad, It's really easy to get accustomed to another level of stress.

 I want to give you a few , really constructive things that I did to help lower my stress that I was experiencing while running my business. And if you want to hear more, let me know. Message me on Instagram or comment on this episode on Spotify because I put together actually quite a substantial list of things that have helped me over the years. 

The first one, and I will sing this from the mountaintops, this one is so important. Only taking calls on predetermined days of the week. So what was happening to me is I would book calls whenever anybody was available, right? I was always the one who would just make it work. And I do think, you know, there's definitely merit to being Easy to work with and easy to get in touch with you don't want to miss opportunities because you have such a constricted schedule but Not having any boundaries around my schedule Meant that at any given moment.

I was worried that I was missing a call If I ever tried to  sleep in and this was a Especially important when I was bartending and running my business, which is how I spent many years. Um, I would wake up worried that I'd missed a call and that just waking up with that stress or wake up and quickly look at my calendar to see if I have any calls or to see if anyone has booked calls with me or emailed and asked for a call at the last minute

, I worked like that for a really long time and then eventually limited my calls to just two days a week. And that helped so much because then it was like, alright, it's Tuesdays and it's Thursdays. If I wake up on a Monday, there is nowhere I need to be. There is no one waiting for me and I'm able to remind myself of that in my head.

Don't freak out, you've got nowhere to be. Since then, after years of that, I was able to open up my calendar a little more. But again, it's like all about spotting these habits and spotting the root of the problem, right? The problem wasn't that I don't like being on calls. I love meeting people. I love sitting on a call.

The problem was me always freaking out thinking I had missed one because my schedule was all over the place. I was doing different things every, every day. Also task switching a ton. When I teach small business owners how to make content faster and run their Instagram faster and get clients from it.

 There's a huge focus on eliminating as much task switching as possible. Sidebar, just for instance, cause this will help as well.   The slowest way to make a. piece of content for Instagram is one post at a time because you have to switch tasks over and over again. You have to come up with the idea.

You have to film it. You have to edit it. You have to write the copy. You have to add your hashtags and be strategic and figure out how you're going to get engagement and then post it. Like that's so many different tasks. So in the batching system that I teach, you're lumping tasks together to eliminate task switching.

Anyway, if you're letting people book calls with you whenever, and I've harped on this now for like 40 minutes, but if you're letting people book calls with you whenever, you're also risking them interrupting your flow when you're working on other things that you should be working on more so than taking the call.

Here's another one and this was in my, my business's infancy. If I, if I had a business, this would have been like the first year of it. , actually yeah, probably was. So I was working with , a naturopath, and one of the things that she had told me to do was have a morning routine and listen, listen, I am not the girl that's talking about.

You know, skincare, and free writing, and meditation minutes, and a yoga practice, and a healthy smoothie and the Vitamix. This is like, I was, a stressed out mess, and we needed just the slightest bit of routine. This was not something that was cute. But, And what we realized was I always worked in coffee shops and I always wanted to be like out and about, out meeting people, meeting clients, you know, working on my computer or whatever, like I was always out of the house.

And what would happen is I'd wake up in the morning and immediately leave the house. To go out and get a coffee and start working and so it felt like being like ripped from the womb You know, you're like in this nice cozy oasis you wake up you go. I haven't gotten enough work done today yet You know, I need to get to work.

I must and maybe that's not how everybody feels like maybe you don't relate to that That's the type of person I am and was like I always want to be working. I'm like really motivated all the time Um, but maybe you have something that looks kind of different. Maybe you wake up and the kids are like immediately jumping on top of you.

So it's still that energy of going from cozy and peaceful to immediate chaos. So we added a morning routine that just added something to let my brain wake up before I'm on the computer out of the house trying to run a business, right?  All mine was, was I'd make steel cutouts, and honestly, I'd watch Philip DeFranco recap the news.

He's just like a YouTuber, and he, it was really consistent, because I think he was posting like every day, so every day I would be like, okay, well, what happened in the news, have a YouTuber tell me about it, sit there, eat my steel cutouts, and then get on with my day. 

I really don't know if that one's going to be relatable for anybody, but for the one person out there listening who is like, yes, Jenna, relatable, perfect. This one's for you. 

This one I know a lot of people will resonate with because I hear this one from my clients all the time.  Choose an ideal client who doesn't stress you the heck out.  Choose an ideal client who doesn't stress you out. I'm going to give you an example. My mom works in natural health and she used to always say  she wanted to work with people who were pretty healthy and just had a couple of things that they wanted to fix or improve or whatever.

She wanted to work with people who Wanted  better energy, wanted to sleep better, maybe get rid of , eczema or a skin issue. But not cancer patients or  terminally ill people or really, really sick people with  mysterious diseases that nobody can figure out. That wasn't her ideal client.

She didn't want that stress. She was a stay at home mom, working from home, also an iridologist.  She didn't want these  really, really sick people. She didn't feel comfortable helping them, right? So that's not who she wanted as her ideal client.   And you get to choose that as well. I work with a lot of service based business owners, mostly women, and a lot of people that are givers.

They're healers, they're givers, they help people in some way or another, and that takes a lot of energy. So, just because you can help someone doesn't mean that that needs to be the ideal client that you choose. You can choose an ideal client that lights you up. Just because you can work with the sickest people doesn't mean that's who you need to choose and target your messaging at and attract into your business everyday.

If that's going to burn you out, you're not going to be much help to anybody. Right? So choose an ideal client who lights you up, who energizes you, who you can continue to work with without driving up your cortisol and stressing you the heck out. 

I hope you found this helpful. I hope it was relatable.  I have a bunch of really cool guests coming up on the show. Excited to get those out to you. We just launched an affiliate program inside Magic Marketing Machine, so I have an expert in affiliate programs who's going to come on here and give us some tips for  helping you run an affiliate program, helping you make money as an affiliate.

We're going to talk about all of that. I'm going to tell you about some hiring mistakes that I have made and the value of having diversity on your team, inside your business. And of course the show will always continue to deliver to you marketing tips, ways to get clients.

Support to help you love your business, love serving people and make all the money doing it. With that, I'll see you in the next episode.