Becoming a successful entrepreneur is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires a lot of endurance to reach your goals. 

If you treat the process like a sprint or like you’re only in it for the short term, you may end up losing in the long run. Sprinting is a lot different from running a marathon. 

The process and experience of training and running a marathon is much longer. You do a sprint in 10, or 20 to 30 seconds. It’s much faster. You put all your energy and effort into that just that short timespan. 

With a marathon, there are potentially many pauses and breaks. You have to stop and rest. You have to hydrate–you actually stop or slow down for water. You may even slow down enough to eat something because you can’t run 26 miles without having a piece of nutrition to fuel your body. 

There are points when you speed up, and then there are points when you have to slow down or stop.  

Business has spurts of growth and endurance

As entrepreneurs, we will have spurts of excitement with projects that we push forward, to which we give all our energy. 

After each project or campaign is done, we slow down. We take a break because it’s not sustainable to be running all the time. 

It’s not sustainable for your physical health or your mental state.

Sometimes you have to slow down or stop

Sometimes you have to slow down or even stop.

This can be really hard to do sometimes, when you’re in the middle of a project or you have a big, demanding client. You want to accomplish everything or as much as you possibly can. 

But as the saying goes, “you have to take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward.”

And there are a number of ways on how you can slow down:

Yoga 

I’ve also been practicing restorative yoga. It’s more like stretching and holding poses for several minutes versus the regular Vinyasa yoga which we’re all familiar with. The stretching really helps me because I do a lot of running and outdoor activities. 

Meditation

I’ve also been trying to meditate every day for just 10 minutes. It allows me to think of my goals, to look at the big picture. Visualization is another piece of this practice. Where do I see myself? What do I want to accomplish?

Getting out in nature

I love hiking, biking, snowboarding and snowshoeing. Ever since moving to Colorado, it’s become a way for me to de-stress, re-energize, and get back into it!

These are just templates of what you can do. These tools have helped me center myself to be a better entrepreneur, a better manager, a better leader, and a better person, overall.