Entrepreneurs have many qualities which make them different to the average person. Their brains are, seemingly, wired a bit differently. They don’t hear ‘no’, they just hear an invitation to try again. An entrepreneur is someone who knows they can achieve what they set out to do, i.e. solve a consumer need. An entrepreneur is also someone who is not afraid to challenge the norm.
However, having all these characteristics and all the determination in the world means nothing if you cannot plan effectively. If you are an entrepreneur, you need to be able to always see the positives instead of the negatives and to see a failure as something you can learn from, as opposed to something which means you have to give up.
Ultimately, you need to make sure that your thinking is optimised – but how can you do this? Here are three useful strategies to help you along:
1. Set yourself goals
When you are first starting out, it is important to identify what scares you most about your situation; what challenges are most likely to get in your way and cause you the most problems? Once you have identified these, then you can set yourself goals as to how you might overcome these situations and challenges.
2. What does success look like to you?
Once you have identified some goals as to how you might overcome challenges, you must start working on them. For example, you might be scared of public speaking, which would be a huge obstacle to you if you needed to present or pitch your business idea to potential investors.
If this is the case, set yourself a goal of running through your pitch/ presentation every day in front of the mirror, or just in your mind. You’ll no doubt feel anxious, sick etc. but the key thing is to visualise what you delivering a successful pitch/ presentation would look like. Keep doing this and focusing on the positives and eventually your brain will associate the positives and success with what you originally feared.
If you’re feeling confident why not move on to presenting in front of a real person, whether that person is your partner, sibling, parent or friend. Ultimately, you want to be comfortable enough to run through it in front of multiple people without feeling the fear.
Repeat until you’ve lost the fear and can really see your success!
3. Measure and learn as you go
Whatever you do in business, it is always really important to measure your progress. This is not only so you can see how far you have come but also so you can learn from any mistakes that you have made. You need to focus on thinking positively, but make sure that you regularly optimise your planning by identifying the things that cause you most anxiety and then working through the stages above to get you successfully through the situation.
As you go through the process of identifying problems, setting goals and working through them for success, you should be able to measure how well you are doing and soon, you’ll find you have worked through the majority of situations which cause you the most anxiety.