Managing anxiety when you run your own practice
On World Mental Health Day, the co-founder of Mazuma Accountants Lucy Cohen discusses her own experience coping with anxiety and how she deals with the negative side of it while fully embracing the positive.
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Can I suggest you go and get a puppy. Going for a walk 2 or 3 times a day gives you a break from the madness.
Also dogs are just so pleased to see you, any anxiety just disappears when you see that wagging tail. Best therapy I know of.
Thank you for the great read Lucy!
I'll show this article to my Wife this evening - hopefully we can both take on board your advice and overcome our anxiety issues one day at a time.
Of course I have great sympathy for anyone suffering from anxiety, however I do not think this is the forum to share these views. I thought this was an accounting forum.
If you are suffering from anxiety that effects your daily life you need go seek out a professional
This is not a very supportive comment to someone in our community who is sharing something others may be interested in or want to discuss. If you don't like the subject you don't have to read it let alone comment on it
This is not a very supportive comment to someone in our community who is sharing something others may be interested in or want to discuss. If you don't like the subject you don't have to read it let alone comment on it
And by the same token, if you don't like their comment you don't have to read it let alone comment on it.
If the comment was rude or offensive, then I could understand your objection.
I don't really understand this new social media phenomenon whereby it seems that only people in agreement with your position are allowed to comment.
Everyone suffers from anxiety. It's natural. You can't be completely free of it. It's a question of recognising when it's becoming an issue and taking over your life, and learning coping mechanisms to minimise those effects, and recognising that your level of anxiety isn't normal and you might need some form of treatment.
Professional golfers suffer from anxiety every time they step up on the first tee of a competition, they spend a lot of time learning to cope and how to recognise it and how to deal with it.
If it gets to the stage of severely affecting your eating, sleeping etc I'd suggest that isn't anxiety, that is a different mental illness combined with stress and you need to seek help to learn how to deal with it. It can also be something wrong with your system and if properly diagnosed and the right drugs proscribed that can go a long way towards dealing with the symptoms.
There are many different levels of anxiety and asking for help is usually the best step in dealing with it.
I deal with two people in my life who as part of a myriad of other issues also suffered from forms of severe anxiety, both have received treatment (over a long period of time) and drugs (about 5 goes before we found the one that works) and cope well with most challenges now.
One of the other posters suggested a puppy- doesn't work for everyone as some people get even more ill worrying about looking after the dog. Getting a dog can work for some disorders, such as eating disorders as it can shift the focus as well as giving the lesson that the dog needs to eat properly to be healthy. No one cure works for everyone.
It's worth remembering that most of us will have been mentally ill or will be at some point in our lives and articles like this help to highlight these issues which is only a good thing.
Great article, Accountants are human beings to. We all suffer from the stresses of running our own businesses at times. It's good to know that it doesn't just affect you especially when you run a business by yourself.
Brilliant article Lucy. If I had written an article on the same subject myself, it would have been pretty much word for word the same as you have written.
I run a small sole practice, for just the same reasons as you mention for running your own show. Mainly a lack of always feeling you always under the control and whim of a boss. (Although now I'm under the control of about a hundred bosses - the clients!) And freedom, even though that sometimes means the freedom of having no-one to stop you working 18 hours straight over the last weekend in January.
If you are an ICAEW member, you may not be aware that ICAEW has a Support Member service, whereby CAs can phone up one of around 70 SMs around the country, to talk over any sort of problem they have with their business or, in fact, life in general. (Big overlap there quite often.) These SMs are all working accountants, so with proper "hands on" experience of the problems that can occur in the life of a CA an all receive training via ICAEW before they become an SM. They are specifically exempted from the requirement to report misconduct, so callers can be candid about themselves or their clients. (This doesn't extend to criminal breaches - if the caller says he's just shot his client, you have to tell someone!)
I'm one the Support Members myself, and have been since their inception in 1995. However, despite being a usually confident and outgoing person, I came close to having a nervous breakdown about five years ago as a result of a combination of a pending Quality Assurance visit, and the simultaneous discovery that a client had been dipping into his client account. And me - a Support member? Physician heal thyself!
SMs do not pretend to be mental health professionals, (anyway most of the calls are not that dramatic, often we just need to be a "listening ear".
At the first sign of anything that sounds like a real case of depression or worse, we will refer the caller to the Chartered Accountants Benevolent Association ("CABA") where they will be hooked up to some proper professional attention.
Again, brilliant article Lucy. In my experience, just the simple knowledge that they are not the only one feeling that way is often all that is needed to make a considerable difference to how a person may be feeling
I suspect it can hit everyone and in different ways.
I have had two periods where external business factors have certainly caused stress, neither maybe going as far as anxiety but certainly making me slightly nervous, possibly more bad tempered and certainly more difficult towards those around me.
The first was 1994 and the retail downturn, in 1993 I had to close a shop and make the staff redundant, a sick feeling notwithstanding we managed to place most of them in other roles with the company, 1994 was when I knew that nothing I could do would keep us within covenants and we could not replace/rejig the covenants, I ended up redundant just as our second child was born and my wife was on maternity pay- not a good year though I scrambled back into practice later that year. The business I had left folded in 1995 which was really upsetting as I had been involved with it from day one in 1989.
The second was post 2008, we were fine until our facilities came up for renewal in 2010 but at that juncture the lenders were adamant they wanted stronger and faster amortisation of the debt, something our cashflows could not cover- I was juggling three entities with different lenders all clamoring for repayment and total debts of £13m with really no acceptable alternative lenders to go to, they had virtually all retreated from lending- we got out of it with the business surviving only because our starting LTV was circa 65% and we juggled property disposals to manage the process (though even getting cash from the sales out of our lender to meet the tax bills caused more stress), but it was the long years getting there that wore all of us down until we got the debt down to its current sub £3m level (I did not get the rebanking fully sorted until 2016) That long process , year after year, caused stress and dealing with the sale of 60 properties to achieve the plan , properties I had played a part in building, was pretty painful.
Whilst not so frantically driven by the outside world the most recent has been the ever changing compliance world of private practice leading me to give up my part time private practice eleven days ago, frankly having to remember to do x or y, review a and b, have on file re compliance loads of paper and checks etc and then MTD for vat and the way things were/are heading, had me age 59 deciding that I would keep on two day jobs , one 3 days every week the other about 2.5 days a month, and have a much easier lifestyle. (Helped that both children are now fully finished further education so I do not need to earn as much)
To me the secret is watch for even very small signs of stress and address them early, a basic 4 days away from work most weeks is certainly great for making one happier, I am more relaxed, I am sleeping better, I am even smoking less (cigars now given up and only very occasional pipe smoking now)
Next stage will be making everything in my life simpler (second house can maybe go next year) and maybe a bit of decluttering now I have the time.
The best lesson I have learned as I have got older is time is more important than anything else.
Step back from it all, why do we put so much pressure on our self's, it always makes me laugh when you look back on this that have made you anxious in the past and now they seem so minor.
I had Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) for over six years and I had two heart attacks in 2012. About three years ago I learnt about HERBAL HEALTHPOINT and their successful herbal protocol for Coronary Artery Disease and Heart Failure, the herbal protocol is a miracle. Go to their web page w w w. herbalhealthpoint. c om. Its been years since this herbal treatment, my artery is clear and no sign of a heart attack. I do lots of walking and lost some weight too
I really want to take care of myself and get healthy. A lot of people follow their sleep patterns through an app or some other kind of tool. I haven't made enough progress on my own yet.