4 Ways To Overcome Loneliness As An Entrepreneur With Michael Bauman, CEO of Success Engineering

Have you ever wondered why it can feel so lonely when you're building an online business?  And whether there were ways to overcome loneliness as an entrepreneur?  I certainly have. 

Recently, I interviewed Michael Bauman on my Online Business Launchpad podcast.  Not only is Michael a Tony Robbins certified coach, but he lives in Hongzhou, China with his family and is still learning the local language (Mandarin).  So he has lived experience in finding ways to overcome loneliness as an entrepreneur.  The following is a condensed version of what he had to say on the subject during the interview.

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Loneliness works a lot like happiness does.  It’s subjective, not objective.

You can be alone and not actually feel lonely.

Or you can be in a room of people and feel incredibly lonely. 

The subjective feelings of loneliness are actually the ones that produce all the negative health effects. There's an important distinction. 

But there's a 50% genetic predisposition to a sensitivity of social disconnection. 

Some people feel more sensitive, and need their family close by.  Others can move all the way across the ocean, and it doesn't matter as much to them. 

Knowing there is a genetic predisposition towards loneliness allows us to have compassion for those people who are more sensitive in terms of their genes to other aspects that affect our feeling of knowingness. 

So how can we regulate our emotions so we feel less lonely?

We can't change the genetic predisposition, but we can change our perceptions of loneliness. 

There's two ways to do this, through internal thought and external action

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Use Your Love Shield

One way to overcome loneliness as an entrepreneur is to use your “Love Shield”.

Your love shield basically protects you from all the craziness that's going around. Here’s what you do to activate it.

1. Sit somewhere comfortable.

2. Focus on your breathing or whatever you do to relax. 

3. Picture all of the people that you love that care about you in your life

4. Picture them giving you hugs, or maybe they're giving you high fives, or patting you on the back, whatever it is, and picture that in your mind. 

5. Listen to them tell you that you're doing a good job.  

6. Pull up positive experiences, positive memories that you have had, for example, wonderful holidays you’ve had and receive that feeling into your body. 

7. Pull all those wonderful feelings into your body, and you can change the perception of you being alone, just in your mind. 

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Turn On The Power Of Your Mind

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy teaches that we can use our thoughts to dictate our emotions and our behaviors. 

So if you’ve had a breakup, or you're alone, or things are just challenging, and you find yourself thinking or asking, “am I just going to be alone forever?” ask yourself these questions:

1. Is that a true statement

2. Is it realistic? 

3. Is it healthy for me? 

4. What’s the hard evidence for this that suggests this is true? 

5. Is there hard evidence that suggests it might not be true? 

6. Were there times where I wasn't alone?  

So you can use your brain to analyze the negative effects of the beliefs that we have, and to change those beliefs to fit the facts.

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Reach Out To Someone Else Who Might Be Feeling Alone

Start by looking across the board at all of your social interactions.  Then do this one simple thing … do one tiny step more towards establishing a connection than you normally would. 

1. If you usually give a like on a social media post you’ve seen, leave a comment. 

2. If you usually leave a comment, maybe send a message.

3. If you usually send a text message, maybe do a call. 

The goal is to ask yourself … “how can I upgrade, just very slightly, the connections that I have?” 

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Loneliness Turns Everything Inward

That’s because it's a fundamental need, like hunger.  When you're hungry, you're like, I need to get fed, I need to have food in my belly!  I can’t think about anything else.

Loneliness is the same thing. You want somebody to acknowledge that you’re feeling alone, that you matter, that you belong. 

The secret is … sometimes you have to feed other people's need for belonging and acceptance before you get fed yourself.  

So as you go about your normal everyday life, ask yourself … “how can I be curious about the person that's in front of me”? Like … what is going on with them? 

Right? What are they going through, maybe what are the challenges are they facing?

Just that little shift can produce a reciprocal action of them being curious about you, and you feeling like the quality of your connections are higher. 

So those are some of the internal and external things Michael says he does on a consistent basis as ways of overcoming loneliness as an entrepreneur. 

Because, yes, it’s challenging.  And it’s something that he says he struggles with being so far away from home. 

And these are the little things that he does to help with reducing the feelings of being both lonely and alone.

This article is based on a podcast interview with Michael Bauman, CEO of Success Engineering (successengineering.org) and host of the Success Engineering podcast (https://successengineering.org/podcast/).

You can listen to the whole podcast episode by going to Episode 81:  The Most Powerful Way To Stop Feeling Lonely When No One Gets What You’re Doing (as an entrepreneur).