Serenity Enemy: Recession Fears

If you read any portion of the news these days, you're hearing all about the iminent or current recession. It's enough to make anyone panic in their half-off shoes. And if you're self-employed, perhaps even moreso.

Yesterday, I posted to a freelance writers Web site seeking advice on how to cope with the recession, and here are the suggestions I got:

* Be choosy about which clients you take on: Stick with stable companies. Start-ups may not be the best option right now.
* Market yourself like crazy: Sales is always a numbers game, and even moreso now. Get those queries and marketing proposals out the door, and increase the number you do.
* Build relationships: You're more likely to get the jobs if you have a connection with the editor. Set aside time every week to meet with editors or other writers. Not only is this great support, but these are the folks who are going to offer you assignments.
* Don't be precious about assignments: Take what's offered. You can't always do your dream assignments.
* Build up your reserves: Now more than ever, it's important to have money saved to support yourself during down times that may be even more inevitable now. Some self-employed friends put 10 percent of every check into a prudent reserve. Can you afford that? I can't, not right now. But I am putting a smaller percentage aside.

And I would add to all of this:

* Be mindful of how *your* business is doing, not what the news says.

The last four months have been the most abundant of my short career as a freelancer. It's not hitting me yet. What is hitting me is the fear of recession and what it can do to me. There are lots of reasons for this but one of them is experiential.

My first memory of a recession affecting me was in 1987. Black Monday didn't just conjure images of the Depression, which I was studying in school, but brought real worries to bear: My dad owned his own business and it didn't take long for all his clients to dry up and for the business, funded by his retirement savings, to go under. It was a bleak moment in our family, but we recovered from it.

The important thing for me is to let go of that body memory and focus on my 1 percent: What can I control in this situation? How many queries I send, how much contact I make and how much money I save. The rest, unfortunately, isn't up to me. And the more I focus on what I can't control--the U.S. economy, my clients' freelance budngets, etc.--the less serenity I have and the less energy I have for doing my part.

What's your worry about the recession, and what's the one thing you can do today to help yourself?

Monday's Mantra: Struggling is Optional

In this blog, I've written about mantras before, but now I'm starting a new Monday-only feature that gives you a chance to start the week off right. Please let me know if this feature is helpful to you or for what issue youneed a mantra. Email me at Heather at heatherboerner.com--or post your thoughts below.

You've probably heard the old axiom, "Pain is mandatory; suffering is optional." It's usually uttered by those pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap drill sargeant types--the "quit yer whining" variety of motivational speaker.

Let's take this out of that context for a moment, though.

If you're a perfectionist, you probably have a tendency to put yourself down pretty harshly in an effort to meet your very high expectations. It can be effective: Maybe you wouldn't reach your unrealistic goals if you hadn't have pushed yourself out of your comfort zone. Maybe your business plan or income goals would have been an esoteric exercise if you weren't willing to push yourself hard to get there. There's something to be said for pushing.

But sometimes, if you use self-condemnation to motivate yourself, that pushing can turn into shoving and leave you feeling (pardon the extension of this analogy) beaten up.

In other words, your mantra, without realizing it, may be:

You're not doing enough. Nothing you do is enough.

How'd you like to meet that bully in a dark alley? I wouldn't.

How do you know if you're suffering for your work? The best barometer is self-pity: Why is this happening to me? Why is everything so hard? First of all, pushing yourself is hard, of course. It's a good sign that you're reaching and stretching yourself. But it may also be so hard because it has to be in that worldview. It can't be regularly fun and exciting. If it were, you might not feel like you're working hard enough.

So for this week, consider taking on the mantra that you can accomplish your goals without suffering for them. Work hard, feel that stretch and the fears associated with going after your dreams. But you don't need to pay a pound of flesh to have the life you want. What's more, if you do feel like you have to punish yourself to achieve your goals, you're unlikely to enjoy them anyway.

So take a moment when you're stressed this week, breath deeply into your stomach, imagine a golden light filling you. And then say to yourself:

I love my job and I don't have to suffer to achieve my dreams.

Serenity Tools: The Sounds of Serenity

Until I became self-employed, the sounds around me were irrrelevant. I had no control over them so mostly ignored them. It wasn't until I was in a quiet room that I realized the constant screaming across the newsroom, the static-y police scanner and the hum of the computer did nothing but make me tense. Add to that my general propensity at the time to overwork and not set boundaries and what you had was the sound of stress.

So I wondered: How can you create the sound of serenity in your office?

There's actual research behind this. For nurses, for instance, researchers have found that abnormal sound levels contribute to stress and may even impede healing in the sick.

Another study found that the opposite may also be true: Pleasant sounds may mimic positive experiences:

We suggest that music specifically induces an emotional response similar to a pleasant experience or happiness. Moreover, we demonstrated the typical asymmetrical pattern of stress responses in upper temporal cortex areas, and suggested that happiness/sadness emotional processing might be related to stress reduction by music.

Having said that, I'm not much of a classical music gal. I much more favor wacky girl rock or emo rock on a regular basis. But when I have to work, none of that is very helpful. And one of the joys of self-employment is the ability to listen to music while I work.

So here is some music that helps me concentrate, get today's work done and remain calm:

Essential Beethoven
The Essential Tchaikovsky
Relaxing Vibes, Slavic Kulpowicz

What music gets you in a productive frame of mind?

Preparing Yourself for a Hard Week

We all have them: We're staring down the barrel of a stressful, productivity-required week. What do you do?

* A massive to-do list?
* A flowchart of when to do everything?
* Plan on working nights and weekends until the stress is over?

Those are all good options, as they give you clarity about what's in front of you to do. But it's also the time to invite your Higher Power (whatever that looks like) into the situation. If you don't believe in one, consider your support network your higher power. The point is not to walk into the dark forest of your fears and stress alone.

Just like recovering from overwhelm, planning for a busy week can leave you feeling not good enough and compulsively overworking with the hope that that will solve your problems.

Hey, I've been there. As the charter member of of the workaholic's club, I've had more than a few obsessive weeks where I've done nothing but work and gone to sleep panicky and had bad dreams full of what I forgot to do.

Today, happily, we all have more choices. Ask yourself the following:

* What is absolutely necessary today?
* What's ONE thing I can do today to make tomorrow go smoother? (Limit yourself to one or two things. Making a list of 10 means you're trying to do today's work and tomorrow's work at the same time. It doesn't work.)
* What's one thing you can do to take care of yourself today so that you're calmer tomorrow?
* What will your work hours be today? Set them and then stick to them, except in an emergency (and by emergency I don't mean that worried feeling you have. I mean an emergency that's be verified as such by someone objective).
* What do you need to ask for help on?
* Where can you get this help?

Start your day with these simple questions and you'll be more likely to finish the day happy. I always try to remember this objective:

By the end of the week, the work will be done one way or another; how much do you want to suffer in the process?

This is a shift in thinking: It isn't just about the product; it's about the process. One of my favorite lines in the wonderful book Eat Pray Love comes from the Balinese medicine man. When asked to describe Hell and Heaven, he explains that both end up in the same spot; it's just that you go through hell to get to it or you go through bliss to get to it.

The choice is up to you, to some extent. You can't control others, but you can control how you treat yourself and others in the meantime.

Serenity Tip: Recovering from Overwhelm

It's Friday. Are you more relaxed, looking forward to the weekend? Or maybe you feel your throat closing ever so slightly as you stare down a long list of things to do, and recognize several as things you didn't get to yesterday, the day before or the day before that. And don't forget that deadline coming up today and early next week.

Welcome to overwhelm.

A friend of mine called me last night with the following symptoms:

* Obsessive worry about confrontations and projects he'll have to handle next month.
* Regret that he didn't get to some projects earlier this week and that they were building up.
* Sadness and shame around some stuff in his personal life.
* A general sense that it was impossible to catch up, that there was too much to do and it all needed to be done right now.

Sould familiar?

Yeah, me too.

I so know this feeling. I'm the queen of overwhelm, with a habit of being very dramatic about it. And since I also work hard at being productive and professional, I've also come up with some ways of coping with it. Here are my favorites:

* Focus on these 24 hours: That project due in a month? That confrontation you're dreading? If it's not happening today, shelve it. I don't know about you, but I often use worry as a replacement for planning, so I end up working myself into a tizzy because I think it's somehow protecting me from that thing I'm dreading doing next week or tomorrow. The truth is all it does is steal precious energy I need for today's looming deadlines and the hard work in front of me right now. Don't do it to yourself. Just focus on today.

* Trust the future: If you have a spiritual practice and believe in some kind of Higher Power, now's the time to focus on inviting that power into your life. I know it sounds hokey and/or frighteningly religious if you're not, but bear with me. The point is this: You don't need to worry about how you'll handle projects in the future. You can trust that the Higher Power of your choosing/tradition/understanding will help you make the right decisions when the time comes. It's not all in your hands and never was. Relaaaax.

* Get clear: Remember that worry-as-a-replacement-for-planning? Now that you've let go of the biggest weight of overwhelm, you can focus on just those things on your to-do list that are important today. These can be personal deadlines, client deadlines or anything else. Really take a look at your to-do list today and set some realistic priorities. You may find that you don't have all that much that absolutely positively has to be done today. Weed out the things you're doing out of pride instead of necessity and focus your considerable energy and skill towards those things that are helpful to your clients.

Do these tips work for you? What are the other things that overwhelm you in your business?

Dealing with a bad day

We all have them: A client strings you along and then drops a project he or she promised. You do a lot of work on a project and then the higher-ups decide to go a different direction, etc. It's enough to make a self-employed person tear her hair out.

The key is a few things:

1. Adapt the mantra: It's not personal.

It can feel very personal: It effects your work, sometimes it effects your wallet and often it effects your serenity. The only way to make it worse on yourself if you take that moment and use it to feed your monkey mind, the part of you that's always looking for a place to stash your most corrosive negative thoughts.

Now, of course it's normal for it to feel personal, but take good care of yourself by not wallowing in that thought. Every time it comes up again as a personal attack on you or your business, just repeat the mantra: "It's not personal."

2. Check in with yourself.

When I have a bad day, sometimes I'm not capable of checking in with myself until the end of the day, by which time I am so worked up and so reactionary that I'm no fun to be with, even for me. My brain is not a safe place to be in those instances.

The venerable yogi B.K.S. Iyengar in his seminal modern yoga book Light On Yoga writes about his two kinds of anger:

There are two types of anger (krodha), on of which debases the mind while the other leads to spiritual growth. The root of the first is pride, which makes one angry when slighted. The prevents the mind from seeing things in perspective and makes one's judgment defective. The yogi, on the other hand, is angry with himself when his mind stoops low or when all his learning an experience fail to stop him from folly. He is stern with himself when he deals with his own faults, but gentle witht eh faults of others. Gentleness of mind is an attribute of a yoga, whose heart melts at all suffering. In him gentleness for others and firmness for himself goes hand in hand, and in his presence all hostilities are given up.

Sound like a tall order?

It is, if you try to simply will yourself into that state of mind. I'm sure there are many ways of getting to that kind of clarity: prayer, yoga, meditation, etc. But one of the ways that work for me, because I'm a writer, is to write it all down.

The key in Mr. Iyengar's concept of yogic response to anger seems to me to be a few things:

* When you're reacting to others our of pride (i.e., taking things personally) you aren't seeing clearly. So any business decisions you make in the face of such a reactive mind are bound to need correcting later--and bound to send your serenity ricocheting all over the room.

* The yogi's heart "melts at all suffering." What that means to me is that it melts at *your* suffering as well. So his charge to you, I believe, is to find a way to be "firm" with yourself/take responsibility for your part without subjecting yourself to suffering. If you're prone to perfectionism, it's easy to take this edict as a sign that you need to beat yourself up. That's not yogic in my mind because it's full of pride. It's all about you.

So how do you separate pride from firmness? Write it all down: Your fears, your resentments, your beliefs about yourself, and what you can learn from the situation.

Then just sit with it for a bit. The thing about having a bad day is that you can't right it in an hour--at least not in my experience. If something rocks your core or your bottom line, it's going to take time to go through the feelings and feel steady again. Let it be, and continue to work on the work in front of you.

3. Reach out for support.

I write a lot about support in this blog--for good reason. There's nothing worse than gritting your teeth through a bad day and then vomitting all your fear and anxiety and resentments all over your mate when he or she returns home.

We've all been guilty of this, but here's a promise: You don't have to wait till the end of the day to get the support you need. If you set up a system of people who support the sane and serene operation of your business, you can call through that roster until you start to feel a little better. That way, if your partner gets home and he or she had had a bad day, too, you aren't adding to your own or anyone else's stress by forcing that person to be everything for you.

One warning about support, though: It's important to clear out what's your side of the street and what's out of your control before you pick up the phone. Otherwise, you run the risk of simply ramping yourself up and feeling more anxious, fearful and caught by the monkey mind.

Answer: The Letting Go Tool Kit

Recently someone asked a follow up question to my post on The 1 Percent Rule. Namely:

Aside from focusing on the 1%, how do you "hand over all that stuff to the
deity of my choice"?

First, I don't want to discount focusing on that 1 percent. Just like curbing cravings, don't underestimate the power of distraction. Just focusing your attention away from the maddening drone of Things You Can't Control can do wonders.

But once you've done that, I'll add that letting go of the uncontrollable 99 percent of my work and life isn't easy. It's one of the hardest things I do every day--harder even than marketing.

It takes vigilance and awareness, as well as clarity about what's my 1 percent and what's the rest. To wit, the things that help me most:

Meditation

It's often said and I experience regularly: Don't like what you're feeling? Don't worry. It'll pass. That aphorism becomes concrete in meditation or other mindful traditions, like prayer.

Anytime I notice my mind drifting in meditation, I note it and bring myself back, gently, to my breath or to the image on which I'm meditating.

That practice is priceless when I'm simply walking around my office and feeling that tight anxiety of things I can't control. Just like in meditation, I notice when my mind is back to asking Why hasn't that prospective client called/emailed?, for example. Then I notice it, practice detachment and remind myself, "None of my business. Let it go."

I've heard it said that "Why?" is not a spiritual question--but it's still a good one to ask if you're self-employed. If my question is, "Why hasn't that check arrived? It was supposed to be here last week," you better believe that my job is to call the client and inquire. But if the question is "Why isn't she calling me?" I have two choices: I can either call her myself, or I can let it go. I try to do both. I call, and then, no matter the outcome, I accept that I can't make things happen the way I always want and I let it go.

Support

Remember all those people I have in my life to support my business? This is one of the things I use them for. If meditation and mindfulness doesn't work, I call them so I can have someone outside my brain tell me to let it go. Sometimes just by talking to them, and by getting the reassurance that I'm doing everything I can (or by getting a new action step to take), I feel better. I'm back to my 1 percent.

Prayer

At some point, I have to say, those tenacious little worries just aren't going away on their own. That's when I call in the big guns. If I'm suffering something having to do with work--or my personal life--I try to interrupt my anxiety and my obsession by praying to whatever I believe in to have it removed. I will do this as many times as necessary throughout the day if it's really bothering me.

Yoga

It almost always helps if I can get myself out of my mind and into my body. When I'm worrying about something, or ruminating on that 99 percent, I'm almost always shrugging in my shoulders, holding my breath or breathing shallowly or contracting my chest wall. It helps me to go into a pose like legs-up-the-wall pose, fish pose supported by a bolster or blanket under my back, bridge pose or reclining bound angle pose.

Your mileage may vary. For you, it could just be a good run on a treadmill or some quality time with your elliptical machine. Clear your head. And then come back and see if it's any easier to focus on your 1 percent.

Serenity Tip: Put Yourself to Bed

One of the first symptoms of stress is sleep disturbance, and if you're self-employed, you're almost certainly stressed. There are clients to worry about, invoices to obsess about, marketing efforts to worry about and the future to order in your mind. It can tire a person out while robbing them of restorative sleep.

So how to cope with bedtime breakdowns?

Well, I won't be the first person to mention the idea of sleep hygiene--that is, the idea that maybe you shouldn't be drinking coffee right before bed or sleep in a room with a bright light right outside the room or try to sleep next to jack-hammering.

But I will share what's working for me. A few months ago, cognizant of my own tendancy to stay up till midnight and be unable to unwind from the day, I treated myself like a little kid and tucked myself in at a regular time every night. Here are the main changes I made:

No staring into monitors of any kind--TV or computer--after 10 PM

This was the hardest and most dramatic change. I love my 10 p.m. reality shows as much as anyone, and it's tempting to slink over to the desk and do a little work late at night when it's quiet. But I also know that both those things ramp me up. It takes about an hour for me to settle down after I turn off the TV or computer at night. So if I'm staring at it till 11 p.m.--or later, if I catch a bit of the Daily Show--it's almost impossible for me to fall asleep before midnight.

I will add that I'm naturally a night owl, but I actually do my best work first thing in the morning. So this routine works for me. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. I know there are many people who do their best work at night--after the kids are asleep, etc. But I know that I need at least 8 hours of sleep a night or I'm cranky. And since I don't drink caffeine, I don't have the option of giving myself a chemical boost. So, off with the TV and computer by 10 most nights.

I'm not perfect with this. Just last night, I was on the computer till 10:30. But by having that guideline I make it more likely that I'll get enough sleep.

Do a little yoga

I had been doing my yoga practice in the morning, but as the days got shorter, I found I needed more sleep and that I was having a harder time falling asleep. So I adjusted. Right now, I'm doing yoga poses for my shoulders, neck and back, as well as relaxing poses like child's pose. I light a few candles, and between that low light and the light of my bedside lamp, I go to bed with my body humming and relaxed.

Don't save up your worrying till the end of the day

Let's get back to the comment I made at the beginning of this post: Worry. Obsessive thoughts. Obsessive planning. Sometimes I hit the sack and lay there with a spool in my chest unwinding all the exciting and anxiety-producing events of the day. If I'm really on a role, that spool also includes events of the past week or upcoming events that hold a lot of charge for me.

So for my own sanity, I can't wait till the end of the day to think about and address those things. If our actions are our only possessions, then we need to address the things that worry us before they intrude on sleep hours. So I write and talk to fellow business owners throughout the day about my stresses and anxiety. I write them down before bed if they're still bothering me and end with this comment:

All these feelings will be here waiting for you when you get up. It's okay to let them go right now.

And if all else fails, I meditate just before bed. Then I can usually slip into sleep without much resistance from my overactive mind.