Happy New Year! How stressed out are you about 2024?  Has worrying about your business or life at large become your primary creative venture? You might be feeling just as I was: Exhausted. Drained. Frozen — and not in the “let it go” or “let’s build a snowman” kind of way. Like me, you might have climbed the mountain of self-helpism only to find that the view from the top was actually really cloudy and that you didn’t feel any more confident about your business or any less worried, either. In reality, we as American entrepreneurs don’t have a lot to complain about. We have the freedom to pursue our dreams, and with that comes all the personal baggage. There truly is no differentiation between personal and professional life, and the spillover from one to the other is real (and can be a struggle). Today on the podcast, I’m taking things in a very personal direction. You guys know I’m a follower of God, and you also know that I don’t keep quiet about it in my brand. This episode is about sharing my very personal, vulnerable story with how I *finally* stopped being a control freak and a worrier in regard to my business. I felt the need to share this because I speak with many of you who seem to have the same sense of anxiety over your own businesses. You overanalyze every marketing decision you make, fearing that one wrong move will halt the growth of your business. Or you worry, as I have, that the success you’ve worked so hard to achieve could disappear. It’s not a fun way to live, let me tell you! Until recently, I considered myself a professional worrier. I thought of nearly every possible bad scenario and came up with a solution for it even though those bad things never actually happened. However, something else was happening at the same time and it was causing needless turmoil and preventing me from the full experience of a great business and a great life. Ironically, the better things became in my business and life in general, the more I worried. I worried about losing it all by some uncontrollable calamity or by my own poor choices. Was I being a good enough mom, or will my kids end up in therapy? Am I making the right business decisions, or am I going to self-destruct? How do I know if I’m actually being my best self? I had the constant feeling of impending doom, like I was walking the edge of a cliff and was always one or two wrong moves away from slipping.  Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? But I’m pretty sure this sort of thing is what our culture would classify as “anxiety.” While anxiety can be worsened by chemical factors, poor diet, or a lack of proper rest, anxiety is also an illness of the soul, an illness that impacts every choice we make. And that’s why today we’re today about worry, the solution for it, and what to do in our businesses when we feel completely bewildered about what to do next.It has taken me almost a decade to realize all the things that I’m going to share with you today. If you are a worrier, take heart. If there is hope for me, there is hope for you. Thank God that every day is a new beginning because there are still days that I have to go all the way back to the basics and remember why I don’t have to choose worry or anxiety anymore. That’s why I’m creating this episode, for myself as much as for you.