Investing with Anxiety

I have lived with anxiety for much of my life. As a teenager, I had crippling social anxiety. I was bullied as a child and I felt that any social interaction could lead to my being victimized again. When you’re bullied at seemingly random times and after random actions, you start to look for patterns. When you don’t find a pattern, you develop the anxiety that at any given point, something terrible will happen to you. That’s a scary way to live your life and a very unpleasant one. It leads to avoidance and fear of many situations which are involved in having a simple quality of life.

My social anxiety I eventually dealt with. Mostly through positive reinforcement. I noticed that in college, the more effort I made to put myself out there, the more I was rewarded. I saw that networking solved many problems for me and made life more pleasant and more full. Those situations that used to scare me became the basis for many of my happiest memories. I saw that throwing myself at the things that caused my anxiety, eventually lowered it. Once you have enough positive social interactions, you see that negative social interactions are actually quite rare.

But my anxiety did not go away. That fear of loss. Fear of embarrassment. Fear of regret. Well, if you’re a typical small business owner, those first few years, those fears and anxieties may be all you know.

And what happens if you succeed? God help you. Because then you’ll be faced with an entire industry that markets to and plays on a small business owner’s most base fears. How many insurance policies do we own? I have no idea. But I do know that I am crippled with fear when I consider the consequences of filing a claim.

I know that when a tenant texts or calls, my blood pressure immediately increases. I can hear the pounding in my chest as they describe some new problem. And our properties are well-maintained. So I can only imagine that they’re calling because a tree has fallen through the property or there are five inches of water in the basement. I’ve been in this business long enough that I have seen the incredibly diverse collection of ways that homes can be destroyed…ALL of them. I have to remind myself that we can afford to take a hit here or there. None of these risks are truly existential.

Your success is in spite of your anxiety, not because of it.

I’ve imagined that the anxiety makes me a better business person. That perhaps it makes me anticipate all the things that can go wrong…see all the warning signs. But anyone with anxiety will tell you that’s patently false. Seeing all the warning signs isn’t helpful. It’s paralyzing, demoralizing, and terrifying. Constantly checking the cash-flows doesn’t increase them or protect them…booking business and building systems does that. I can’t do much about today’s cash-flows or today’s repair problems, they’re already happening. It’s triage. Being anxious about it is superfluous and counterproductive.

So how does a small business owner with anxiety move forward?

1. Acknowledge what gives you anxiety and why. It’s happening. It sucks. It’s not going to go away because you want it to. You haven’t failed because you’re anxious.

2. Accept that the anxiety is a barrier and a problem. It’s not here to help you. It’s not making you a better risk manager or business owner. It’s slowing you down. Leaning into your anxiety is bullshit. It’s total fucking nonsense. You’re enabling the monkey on your back. You don’t lean into alcoholism or diabetes, so don’t fucking lean into your anxiety.

3. Breathe. It helps.