You left corporate work to come out and start your own business because your day job is no longer inspiring. You dread hearing the alarm clock in the morning, and look forward to enjoying more time with your loved ones when you want and experiencing less stress.

But hold it right there. Working from home may not necessarily have less stress. And initially will involve a lot more work than you think. Certainly you may not necessarily be working shorter hours. In fact many solo entrepreneurs and small business owners very soon find out that they work longer hours than those who trudge to the office. And it is not hard to imagine that these business owners are plagued with work stress without even realising it.

In this article we want to look at the importance and need to address the issue of work stress faced by small business owners, independent coaches, consultants, speakers, authors who start their own businesses.

Work stress manifest itself in so many ways, and if you are not careful it will start affecting not only your business acumen and decision makings, but your relationships and networking with your prospects, your clients, your partners, your family, and even your own health.  In prolong and serious cases can lead to extreme exhaustion and depression, it can cost you your health and your life. And you will not be functioning at your peal performance.

One thing I highlight recommend is to take preventative measures.

No I do not mean regularly monitoring and checking your stress level. I mean going one step further beyond that. I suggest you spend some time understand and putting in place structures and methods that you can set up as your start or run your home business so you are able to minimise the effect of work stress.

Much like taking care of your personal health, merely doing medical checkups yearly will only tell you if you have reached the unhealthy threshold so you can begin taking corrective actions.  Taking preventative measure is like taking in the right nutrients, supplementing your diet with minerals and vitamins,  consuming enough water and oxygen, taking good rest and keeping an exercise routine.

When you do this, you are truly preventing yourself from going in the wrong direction and not just noticing that you have come close enough to danger that you should switch course.

Applying this to your home business, to prevent yourself from burn out and exhaustion, start on the right foot. Make sure you have a well thought through business plan with focused, measureable and achievable goals. You want to minimise mistakes and shorten the learning curve and cut out the unnecessary stress due to overload or work and unrealistic goals or attempting too many ventures all at once. You also want to put in place best practices, systems and processes to help you organise and automate as much manual work as possible.

Therefore you need to be constantly learning from those who have succeeded. You need healthy input of strategy, processes and systems of best practices and continual improving. You do that either by continually immersing yourself with trainings and self development in the area of your business with master mind groups and by having a trusted mentor or business coach to guide you through the many dangers of a start up business.

Statistics shows that 80% or business fails within the first year and of the 20% that survives, 80% more fail in the next 5 years.

You also need prior communication and understanding from your family on your work and time demands when you work from home. They need to know what you are doing and why you cannot be disturbed at certain hours of the day. You will chart in plans for work life balance as well as time for exercises and regularly spread out breaks and a yearly vacation.

And then on a regular basis, monitor your stress level to see how you fare and make immediate adjustments before you to too far into the wrong direction. A stress free work life is achievable but does not just happen, you need to plan for it and work towards it. You need to lay a firm foundations, and cultivate habits of sticking to your routines that works to eliminate wastes and errors.  That will put you in a much better position of reducing work related stress and experience work life balance.

If you want to consider starting your own business, I recommend you get into a mastermind group so you can bounce off ideas with others, network and integrate with others as well as tap into some collective intelligence.  Just sign up for a free mastermind report here.  If you like to experience what masterminding is, just send me a mail at Contact@AbundantLivesCoaching.com before 23rd Nov.