Out where I live, the end of October is quiet, just the crunch of leaves underfoot, no doorbell with trick-or-treaters. Halloween has never been my holiday. I am a Thanksgiving and Christmas person, not a Skeleton and Skittles person. But the season does get me thinking about fear and about how easily we hand it the keys. 

Here is what decades of running businesses have taught me. Fear is a lousy CEO. When a stressor sets your agenda, you react instead of decide, and one worry hands off to the next until a whole day runs on adrenaline you never chose. The answer is not to feel less afraid. It is to anchor yourself to something steady so you are still in the current but no longer dragged by it. For many owners, the steadiest anchor is also the scariest to drop: finally handing off the work you have been carrying alone. 

Why does fear make such bad decisions? 

Fear is fast, and it is built to get you away from a threat, not to weigh a smart choice. It narrows your view to the downside. Alone with a decision, the worst case always shouts the loudest, so you clutch tighter to control and call it prudence. 

Your team feels that same current. When the pressure never lets up, the fight-or-flight instinct takes over, and good people start eyeing the exits. Stress at that level is not rare, either. Gallup found that 45 percent of managers reported significant daily stress, the highest of any job level they measured. A leader running on that much cortisol is not making their best calls, and everyone downstream can tell. 

What does an anchor actually look like? 

An anchor is something fixed that the water cannot move. Mine are mostly small and daily. Mark and I have said our affirmations in the present tense for years, “I am” rather than “I will be,” because the mind grows into whatever you keep feeding it. I protect the country quietly on purpose. Putting the phone down and standing outside for a few minutes does more for me than pushing harder ever has. 

Gratitude belongs on that list too. It is hard to get pulled under by what might go wrong while you are busy naming what is already right. When the smaller anchors are not enough, my faith is the one that holds. I do not bring that into business writing often. I mention it here only because it is the truth about what steadies me. 

Isn’t letting go the scariest anchor of all?

Letting go is the scariest anchor of all, and I am a recovering control freak, so I understand the grip. But the freedom is in the letting go. I had to accept that my zone of genius, the few things only I do best, is not the same as my zone of excellence, the many things I happen to be good at. Done by someone else beats perfect by me. When you build real depth on your bench, a resignation or a vacation stops being a crisis. You can step away. 

At HireSmart, we hear the relief once owners feel it. One client, a CEO, marketing services agency, told us a virtual team member “freed up time for me to focus on sharing the vision with the employees rather than the tasks.” The founder of a law firm said that “when I was off-grid for two weeks, she behaved confidently with clients and gave impeccable support.” That is what an anchor buys you. Room to breathe, and a business that does not tip over the moment you look away. 

If you are carrying everything yourself, you are in good company, and that is exactly the problem. More than 30 million U.S. businesses have no employees at all. Plenty of those owners stay stuck in the day-to-day operational work when they should be steering. The way out is not heroics. At HireSmart, we build trained help you can trust, so you can reclaim hours in your week and finally reckon with the cost of doing everything yourself. 

How does a business owner start delegating? 

• Name the fear that is actually driving the decision. Say it out loud. Named fears shrink. 

• List the handful of tasks only you can do. Everything else is a candidate to hand off. 

• Pick one anchor, small or large, and return to it every single day. 

None of this happens overnight. It took me a couple of years to build a team-run company, and I probably should have started sooner. But the day you stop letting fear drive is the day the work gets lighter. 

So no, Halloween is not my holiday. I will be out in the country calm, grateful for a quieter kind of evening, and steadier for knowing what I am anchored to. I wish that same steadiness for you, wherever you find it. 

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Frequently Asked Questions 

What does it mean to run a business on fear? It means letting stress and worry set your agenda instead of your priorities. You react to whatever feels most urgent, defend against worst-case scenarios, and hold tighter to control, rather than making calm, deliberate decisions about where the business should go. 

How do I stop making business decisions out of overwhelm? Anchor yourself to something steady before you decide. Name the specific fear behind the decision, separate it from the actual facts, and give yourself a small reset, like stepping away from the screen for a few minutes, so you are choosing from a calm place rather than a reactive one. 

What is a personal “anchor,” and how do I find mine? An anchor is a fixed daily practice that keeps you grounded when everything is pulling at once. It can be gratitude, a short walk without your phone, affirmations, faith, or time with people you love. The point is consistency, so you return to it every day, not only in a crisis. 

Why is delegating so hard for business owners? Most owners built their success by handling the details themselves, so handing work off can feel like losing control or lowering the bar. The discomfort is real, but holding every task yourself caps how far the business can grow and keeps you stuck in low-value work. 

How do I know it’s time to hand off work or get help? A few signals: you cannot fully unplug at the end of the day, one departure or vacation would throw the business into chaos, and you spend your hours on tasks someone else could do. Any of those means you have outgrown doing it all yourself. 

Which tasks should a business owner delegate first? Start with the work that is necessary but does not require your specific expertise, follows a repeatable process, and pulls you away from higher-value decisions. Scheduling, data entry, inbox management, and routine customer follow-up are common first handoffs.