The Impact Interviews

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Pablo Munoz developed the Mind Your Business programme to help small business owners create mental wellbeing whilst running their business.

https://mindyourbusiness.uk/

A team of researchers from Durham University, led by Professor Pablo Munoz, engaged in a collaborative research journey with a group of business owners to study a complicated problem: the deterioration of self-worth amongst business owners.

After 18 months, they found mismatches between expectations and experiences at three levels - purpose, autonomy and achievement - which surface as business owners reflect on execution, performance and fulfilment experiences.

So, it is not the stressful experiences or heavy workload themselves that trigger negative emotions, rather it is the compounding of incongruences between expectations of ideal states and actual experiences at the level of purpose, autonomy, and achievement.

Tackling issues of self-worth in new business creation is extremely important, because its deterioration has implications not only for their psychological functioning, but for the performance of the business. New business owners with diminished self-worth engage in rumination, frequently criticizing themselves and their abilities. They rarely welcome compliments and tend to focus on mistakes, leading to negative judgments and overly critical evaluations of their performance, and their value as business owners and human beings.

Existing support programmes are ill-equipped to tackle these problems, as they tend to focus on self-confidence and self-esteem.

The MYB programmes help business owners navigate through these incongruences and their effects and equip them with tools to rethink their businesses. We help them form more positive and stable conceptualizations of themselves and rebuild their businesses around them. Mixing wellbeing and business performance is now possible.

Our research was funded by UKRI and received the 2023 Best paper award for Excellence in Research on the General Topic in Entrepreneurship, presented by the National Federation of Independent Business in the USA.

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The Impact InterviewsBy Superspree