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Like many women entrepreneurs globally, Gloria faces floods, droughts, hurricanes, and theft. She worries about low cash flow and health challenges. But she is innovative. She makes a plan for responding to these risks, saves her money, knows when she’s reached her debt limit, tweaks her prices to respond to market variations, builds a support network, works to manage her stress, and considers how she can build a business that is responsive to the climate around her. But Gloria is actually the fictional protagonist from Grameen Foundation’s Resilient Life and Business (RLB) curriculum, and her story is being used to support hundreds of entrepreneurs across Latin America.

Women entrepreneurs are intelligent, creative, and extremely hardworking. While many have access to financial and business education that supports them as they start and maintain their small businesses, it is less common for them to have access to tools that help them build resilience in the face of personal and business shocks. In the life of an entrepreneur, the question is not when, but if, a shock will occur – businesses simply do not exist in a perfect environment. In addition, given the intertwined nature of an entrepreneur’s personal and business life, stresses in one area often lead to poor outcomes in both.

Recognizing this reality, Grameen Foundation developed the RLB curriculum to help women entrepreneurs be prepared to face the inevitable shocks and stresses as they run their small businesses and, often, balance the bulk of household responsibilities in their personal lives. RLB uses the myriad natural disasters small business owners face to create scenarios and review strategies they can take as they respond to the threat of extreme heat, droughts, floods, and other such events.

In a recent activity with Grameen’s implementing partner in Argentina, Nuestras Huellas, participants gathered at a local municipal building to learn more about the RLB content, discuss themes, and relate the lessons learned back to their own lives. The participants were split into groups to discuss various sessions of the curriculum, and then shared what they learned with the larger group. During their report back to the plenary, the groups took turns discussing the issues that Gloria, the protagonist in the RLB session, faced. After several sessions, it became clear that it was the same protagonist, Gloria, in each video. “Poor Gloria,” the participants exclaimed. “Everything happens to her!”

The participants laughed and joked together because they all identified with “poor Gloria”, who had bad luck and near-constant stressors in her life. They, too, could identify shocks they faced in addition to the burden of expectations, duties, and responsibilities in both their businesses and personal lives. While entrepreneurs are often able to balance these demands and stressors, over the long term, they can compound and lead to “burnout”, diminished well-being, and decreased mental health, evidenced by an increase in anxiety and depression.

Around one in eight adults in Latin America will experience depression during their lifetime, and one in seven will experience symptoms associated with anxiety. Other research has further suggested that depression and anxiety are twice as prevalent in women in Latin America, though this varies by country and the diverse political, economic, and social environments in which individuals live. Despite these facts, and perhaps contributing to them, cultural norms often cite selflessness and sacrifice as core virtues of womanhood, leading many women to self-silence with guilt or shame when it comes to struggles with depression or anxiety, and avoid seeking the care they need. Other times, it is simply the lack of time to seek care, because women entrepreneurs and their families are busy putting out (sometimes literal) fires.

Whatever the cause, it’s easy to notice someone else’s difficult circumstances and the implications on mental health, like in Gloria’s case, and it can be much more difficult to identify it in one’s own life, particularly for women who have so many things on their plates already. It’s even more difficult to get help. But as we’ve continued implementing the RLB curriculum throughout Latin America, we’ve been reminded time and time again that resilience in life and business includes mental health and, despite the challenges just listed, it cannot be overlooked. Though Grameen’s RLB curriculum currently does not go deep into mental health topics, it does focus on stress management and building social networks and recommends the following:

A. Build social networks that can help women recognize symptoms of worsening mental health and get help. Women entrepreneurs are busy–they are balancing not only the books and their business demands, but often the demands of busy families and household responsibilities. In Grameen’s discussions with financial institutions throughout Latin America, it has become apparent that women often struggle to get the care they need because they put the needs of others before their own and find that they have little extra time. However, if women can build support into the connections they already have, they are more likely to both recognize symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression and seek help.

In the RLB curriculum, Gloria’s solutions often come as a result of conversations she has with friends and family: when she’s nervous about robberies in the area, her friend Ana talks her through strategies to protect herself and her business. When her health starts to decline, a conversation with her sister leads her to see her doctor and find ways to manage her stress. Building a support network like Gloria’s takes some effort, but it can be beneficial both for the entrepreneur and those within her network in the long run. Here are three steps to create a support network:

1. Identify needs: Does the entrepreneur need a support network for emotional, physical, or business needs? Who does she know who can fill those needs?

2. Get contacts: In addition to the friends and family members she already has access to, are there other support networks, groups, or services available to her? Are they saved in her phone for easy access?

3. Keep in touch with the network: Once the network is identified, it’s important to speak with those in the network often, asking for and giving support when necessary. In addition, an entrepreneur should leverage family and friends in her network to assist in some responsibilities, like child care, so that she can get formal help when needed.

B. Develop and use stress management skills and strategies. Often, women have symptoms of depression and anxiety, like headaches, sadness, and lack of appetite, but merely brush them off as normal or “part of life.” While it is true that all individuals will experience feelings and symptoms of sadness or stress at some point, there is an important distinction between those and diagnosable depression and anxiety. Recognizing negative thoughts and feelings, exhaustion, apathy, and other related symptoms as problematic and abnormal is one of the first steps in seeking help, healing, and improving one’s quality of life overall.

In Grameen’s RLB curriculum, Gloria begins to feel physical symptoms resulting from the acute stress she’s experiencing in her life. With the encouragement of family members, she sees her doctor and identifies ways that she can manage her stress so that her symptoms don’t deteriorate into something worse. To control stress, Gloria learns that she can do the following:

1. Exercise for at least 20 minutes each day. It’s as simple as dancing, walking, jumping, or stretching.

2. Eat healthy, focusing on lots of fruits and vegetables, supplemented with a little meat and grains.

3. Perform daily breathing exercises: inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and hold for four seconds.

4. Practice a relaxing activity like singing, drawing, writing, listening to music, or meditating.

These ideas to build mental health resilience are gaining traction throughout Latin America. In recent Grameen research across the region, several microfinance institutions noted that their delivery of mental health education, provided to help their clients cope with stress, often focused on providing ideas for positive coping strategies such as exercise, a good diet, and building support networks. While these early efforts show promise, they also highlight the opportunity and need for continued innovation and investment in mental health resilience for entrepreneurs (and really anyone!).

At Grameen Foundation, we recognize that a woman’s emotional and mental needs are just as important as her physical ones. As we continue to expand the reach of RLB to more entrepreneurs throughout Latin America, we hope that we can share the story of “poor Gloria” with even more women to help them talk about their own struggles, find community in their challenges, get help, and thrive in their businesses and personal lives.