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- [00:06]
Maya Shankar
Pushkin. Hey, everyone. In honor of Small Business Month, I sat down with Ben Walter, the host of the Unshakeables podcast and the CEO of Chase for Business. Ben came to us for advice on how small business owners can improve their mental health and build resilience over the long run. And I wanted to hear in return the stories he's gathered over the years of small business owners who've had their own slight change of plans. I hope the takeaways from this conversation are helpful for anyone who's looking to cultivate a bit more resilience when it comes to the changes we all face at work. Thanks. Ben and I started by talking about some of the unique challenges that small business owners face.
- [01:02]
Ben Walter
The most important thing to keep in mind is that when you're a small business owner, you are the everything. You are the custodian, you are the CEO, you are the floor manager, you are the customer relations professional. If there's a hat you can wear, you wear it. You know, if you work for a big company and something comes up in your personal life, you can say, can someone cover that for me? And in this case, there's often no one to cover that for me. So that's one angle is just how broad your responsibilities are relative to a bigger business. And then the second way is the amount of accountability and responsibility you take for everything that happens in that business because it's yours. If you make a bad decision in a small business and it goes poorly, it can put that business out of business. And that's a worry that you carry all the time. I can't tell you how many small business owners I meet who feel. Who feel deeply, personally responsible for their employees livelihoods and how fundamental that obligation is to their personality and their character. And that doesn't mean that people like me who work for big companies don't take their job seriously and don't feel any level of stress or accountability in life. Of course they do. But if you think about the CEO of a public company, that CEO is responsible for a lot, but with a whole bunch of infrastructure to go along with it and shareholders and governance. And a lot of that just doesn't exist in a small business. It all ends, starts and ends with you.
- [02:32]
Maya Shankar
Sure. Ben, you host a podcast called the Unshakables where you actually talk to small business owners about how they have navigated some of the most difficult moments they faced when it came to building their businesses. Can you think of an example of someone who found a way through a difficult challenge, maybe related to one of the constraints you just mentioned.
- [02:56]
Ben Walter
On our very first episode, we had a coffee company who. Their entire warehouse burned down. Most of their inventory gone overnight. And they had to figure out what to do. They had built a strong support system that was not only the traditional centers of influence that a small business would have. An accountant, a lawyer, an insurance agent, all those kinds of things. They'd also built built deep connections into their coffee community, including with competitors. And it's not the way you would normally think that this would go, but because they had built such deep mutual respect, they were actually storing some of their coffee supplies with a competitor.
- [03:31]
Maya Shankar
Oh, wow.
- [03:31]
Ben Walter
And the competitor let them use their equipment at night until they could get their factory rebuilt. That's an example of something where a little bit of foresight and a little bit of networking and a lot of goodwill was able to pull them through.
- [03:46]
Maya Shankar
I love that story. And what a beautiful example of humanity shining through in a difficult time. What lessons do you think we should learn from that example?
- [03:55]
Ben Walter
We should learn a couple of things. One is we build our networks that matter when things are fine, not when things aren't fine. Invest in those things when you are not asking for anything because nobody likes to be asked for the first time when they've never seen you and they've never met you and you need help. So that's one is build those networks then, and two is really do some contingency planning. I talked about the many responsibilities of a small business owner. One of them is to think through what could go wrong and think about what could go wrong that you could survive and what could go wrong that you might not survive. And what am I going to do to manage that risk?
- [04:30]
Maya Shankar
That's such an excellent point. It's what you're doing when things are going right.
- [04:34]
Ben Walter
I tell my kids that all the time. I'm like, you make friends when things are good, you don't make friends when things are bad.
- [04:39]
Maya Shankar
Yeah. There are so many stories of small business owners making huge personal sacrifices in order to guarantee that their staff and their company thrive. For example, CEOs, shop owners going an entire year or two without a proper salary to ensure that their staff gets paid. Just chatting with you now about the incredible demands that are placed on small business owners. Should we revere this trait as much as we do? And is there an alternative path to success in which business owners are able to more effectively balance caring about their staff and caring about themselves?
- [05:18]
Ben Walter
Yeah. And I think the ones Maya who do it really well sort of have a mental line drawn in Their mind. And they try as much as they can, despite the fact that the business is you and you are the business, to separate them. I Talked about Quinetta McNeil, the woman we had on our show, who she built a business called House of Logistics, really interesting business distributing goods for a large E commerce retailer. She lost her marriage during the business, and she did a great job, I think, managing the two things in as separate a way as you can. Because she knew deep down that keeping her employees happy, satisfied, and productive was the key to her business thriving. And that if her business was doing well, she would be able to deal with the things she needed to deal with in her personal life. And I have a lot of respect for that.
- [06:02]
Maya Shankar
You mentioned earlier that one reason small business owners mental health might be compromised is because they really do feel a huge responsibility to care for their employees. Right. That it rests on their shoulders. And one scientist I spoke with on the show, a professor from Stanford named Jamil Zaki, he actually studies the science of empathy. And there are three kinds of empathy. The first type is called emotional empathy. The kind of visceral experience we have when we literally feel someone else's emotions, right, Our facial expressions change. We might have a tear form in our eyes. The second is cognitive empathy, which is simply recognizing what it is that might make the other person feel better. And then the third type of empathy is empathic concern. So the ability to want to help the other person to actually care. What Jamil says is that emotional empathy is the kind of empathy that's most associated with burnout. And so sometimes people feel like, well, I don't want to do away with my empathy altogether because I want to be the type of CEO that cares about my employees. And he offers an alternative, which is maybe you just switch the kind of empathy that you feel in that moment. So rather than channeling it towards that visceral physical feeling in your body, you channel it towards actually coming up with constructive solutions. And so they found that with, for example, healthcare workers, when they focus more on empathic concern and more on cognitive empathy, they're much less likely to experience burnout.
- [07:26]
Ben Walter
And how, how actively can someone make that decision? Can. Can someone make a conscious choice? I. I feel so awful. I want to cry for this person. The tear is going down my cheek, but I'm not gonna cry. That tear. I'm gonna focus on, you know, is that a real thing people can do?
- [07:38]
Maya Shankar
Different types of empathy are things that we can cultivate. So in the person that can't resist the tears, we're not saying stifle them. We're saying, then try to channel your effort and attention on the cognitive empathy side of things. Right. So it's not necessarily one empathy displacing another one as much as grabbing the bulk of your attention in that moment, which we think can help prevent burnout. Or for people who are accused by their staff of not being empathetic enough. Right. They might say, like, look, I can't force tears when they're not there. But you're allowing people to understand there's actually a richer landscape of possibility when it comes to empathy. And so, yes, maybe that kind of visceral empathy doesn't come to you naturally, but that doesn't mean you're not an empathetic person or that you're not capable of cultivating other kinds of empathy. So I think it's like in the same way that people have different love languages, they have different empathic languages, and that kind of diversity can help people thrive.
- [08:36]
Ben Walter
That's really interesting. I've never heard that framework.
- [08:39]
Maya Shankar
I want to know whether you have advice for people, for listeners of the show who are just struggling with their well being generally at work, whether they work for a small business or not, they're just like, ben, work is hard. Give me some techniques to help me get through this challenging time.
- [08:54]
Ben Walter
Yeah, I would say, you know, having done a lot of stressful jobs myself, if I'm honest, I think there are two or three things that can really help. The first one I would say is understanding the purpose and being really clear in your own mind about why you do what you do. Because when you lose your why, it gets exponentially harder to cope with whatever things throw at you. It's like for anybody who's listening, who has kids, you know, the minute you have that child, you're very clear on why that child matters to you. And when you're up late at night doing what you know, you cope because you see the bigger picture. Maintaining that bigger picture and that why, so that it's always there in the front of your mind, I think is really helpful. The second is, and I have had to learn this the hard way, is that organization will set you free. There is the rare bird who can flit from thing to thing in a completely disorganized way and hold it all together. Most people can't.
- [09:47]
Maya Shankar
Right.
- [09:48]
Ben Walter
So being incredibly intentional about how you spend your time, what you spend your time on, and critically what, what you won't spend your time on. And so you're okay if it doesn't get done because you are choosing not to spend your time on it. You own your calendar or it will own you no matter what you do. And then the third is whether you work for a company or you are a small business owner or you're a CEO or what, it doesn't matter. You need trusted outlets. You need people who you can talk to and tell anything to. And most importantly, you need truth tellers. You need people who will be brutally honest with you and who will tell you well. The reason that you're not coping well is because you're focused on the wrong things or you're chasing something down a rabbit hole that you shouldn't. It's okay to go to people for comfort, but I think having one or two people in your life who you go to, who you know will just let you have it in all honesty, good or bad, in a completely trusting scenario, I think is super helpful for people trying to cope at work.
- [10:51]
Maya Shankar
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're a fan of A Slight Change of Plans, I'd so appreciate if you could follow our show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps get the word out about the show so we can keep making more episodes for you. And join me next time when world renowned rock climber Beth Rawden tells her side of the story, the one that put her name in headlines all over the world. That's next time on A Slight Change of Plans. See you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written and executive produced by me, Maya Shankar. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner, Tyler Greene, our senior editor, Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producers Brittany Cronin and Megan Lubin, and our sound engineer, Erica Huang. Louise Guerra wrote our delightful theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries. So big thanks to everyone there, and of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of plans on Instagram Dr. MayaShanker. See you next week.
- [12:13]
Ben Walter
Ra.