Remember the adage, This too shall pass. None of us are immune to periods of stress. We cannot control the curveballs that life throws at us, but we can control how we react to them. Being unsure of our livelihood can be extremely stressful. The biggest mistake I see people make is not adding constraints into whatever system they’ve formulated to get through the transition.
The remedy is to create a system (that moves you forward) and incorporate fun as a reward when tasks in your system are complete. Let’s say you are searching for client opportunities. This is a task that could potentially be never-ending—when you are hunting for something there are always more “things” to find—but certainly spending your entire day trying to find opportunities will have diminishing returns.
A better way is to define what success looks like in any given day. For our example, let’s say success is finding ten really good prospects (in one day). Once you’ve decided you have landed on ten really good leads, reward yourself with something you consider fun. This will create an engaging habit loop that will keep you coming back to the task, provide some rewarding experiences that mitigate your existing stress (through fun), and ensure that the prospects that you are mining are of quality (by shifting the focus on 10 quality leads over the highest quantity you can get it in one day).