Strategies: How to handle that adrenaline
— -- If you're like most small business owners, you pride yourself on your ability to thrive in difficult situations.
Deadlines? Dilemmas? Disasters? No problem. Your pulse races, your heart pounds, and you rise to the occasion.
But these may be tell-tale signs that you are a business adrenaline addict -- someone who feels truly energized only when handling challenges and problems.
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No wonder so many entrepreneurs suffer adrenaline addiction. We thrive on risk-taking and love challenges. We juggle many tasks at once. Heck, when things are really bad, we're able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
There's only one hitch: we may be so addicted to the rush we get from overcoming obstacles that we create them ourselves. Without consciously meaning to, we may provoke predicaments with employees or customers, launch big new projects without finishing current critical tasks, or revamp the company's entire organization structure yet again.
Without a crisis, when things go well, our business just seem boring.
Unlike other addictions, adrenaline addiction can contribute positively to success. After all, we adrenaline addicts (and I am a recovering one myself) often do our best work when things are tough.
So I'm not suggesting you try to conquer it completely. But some tricks allow you to channel your addiction so it contributes to success not stress.
1. Accept it positively. Face it, you're not suddenly going to be Zen-like.
Recognize that challenges motivate you, and structure your business so you can undertake positive new tasks while still taking care of routine business. Give yourself hard-to-reach goals, especially sales objectives.
Get energized -- and get your adrenaline going -- by giving yourself big audacious goals you have to reach and a reason to get up every morning.
2. Prioritize. It's true that squeaky wheels get the grease as well as getting your adrenaline wheels spinning, but sometimes the quiet engine requires the most tending.
Identify the most important ingredients for your success and make sure you're concentrating on those. Don't let urgent but unimportant matters keep you from the really important stuff.
Develop mechanisms for making the truly vital activities also the urgent ones, perhaps by manufacturing deadlines with consequences even if no external deadlines exist.
3. Redefine boredom. I once asked a former neighbor, a young emergency-room physician fresh from medical school, how work was that day.
He replied, "Awful. Everyone only had minor injuries; nothing was very interesting." What a dismal way to view one's work. Things had to be bad to be good.
Be careful you're not seeking the business equivalent. Concentrate on the big picture.
I used to feel bored if I wasn't really, really busy -- phones constantly ringing, huge to-do list, and one emergency after the other. It took a while to realize that all that busy-ness didn't add up to productivity.
I acknowledged that what really keeps me from being bored is constantly learning new things. And it doesn't take an emergency for that.
4. Add risk to your life. If you're really addicted to adrenaline, give yourself adrenaline rushes through appropriate nonbusiness risks.
