Becoming an entrepreneur – which means moving yourself from the left to the right quadrants in R. Kiyosaki’s cash flow chart – demands a lot of things. You will make decisions, analyze situations, put up with investment burdens, risks and even bear losses when they come. This is why many people don’t like being entrepreneurs; they prefer working for a company to get secured monthly salary and other “benefits”, as they call them, in return, like a pension plan and insurance paid by the company. Yes, becoming an entrepreneur demands a lot of traits of which one is the ability to handle and absorb adversities.
I gradually quit my corporate job in 2010 as I was thinking of launching my own small coupon business amid crisis in the insurance and banking market I was in for years. I finally went online in autumn of 2010 with a number of blogs and I totally abandoned my job 6 months later. As you have realized already, to move from employment to not just self-employment, but to entrepreneurship – yes, they are two different things – you have to abandon your old way of thinking and adopt a new one. Of course, in order to make a change on this scale I had to change not only my habits but primarily my whole mindset. During this period of swimming in deep unknown waters, the biggest hurdle I had to face was my self-doubt.
Self-Doubt
Going through ups and downs, the most challenging difficulty facing every entrepreneur is self-doubt. When it sets in, we all begin to question our intelligence and tend to believe we haven’t done everything we ought to do and therefore can’t make profitable decisions. We witness this at one point or another in our business life. You can succeed even if nobody believes in you, but you can’t succeed if you don’t believe in yourself. It takes self determination and commitment to move a business. But when self-doubt sets in, it wipes all these necessary qualities away and leaves the person vulnerable.
Many people find this stage unbearable and result to what Rebel Brown called “give power away”. By not trusting themselves, they tend to depend on other people’s personal opinions and directions. We must all understand that no matter how much we try to emulate others, we can’t duplicate their success. Blindly following people’s directions will not make us leaders. Plus we stand liable to unfortunate events because we can’t analyze the market and predict the future due to our self-doubt.
What Is The Cause Of Self-Doubt?
Virtually, every entrepreneur has a list of plans to follow and goals to achieve with them. We have all sketched that long sheet of paper containing a 2-year plan, 3-year plan, 6-year plan, etc. We live in the technology era and almost everything is now digitalized. It has also affected every other sector hence we are facing a very dynamic market which continuously evolves. What worked today might not work tomorrow and might not even work at all in years to come. The plans we drafted when we started our business cannot possibly carry us all the way to the end. Our goals may be intact with just a few touches but the techniques and marketing strategies surely have changed.
Sticking to a 2-year plan, 3-year plan, etc, despite the dynamic nature of the market, has been the major cause of self-doubt. Because when your plans no longer work, you start getting little or no results from your efforts; of course, your strategies are almost obsolete.
How Do You Curb Self-Doubt?
Self-doubt is a challenge that every entrepreneur must face at one point in his or her life. We should all be prepared and never allow it to take us by surprise. On your entrepreneurial journey, you should always look beyond your difficulties. Getting yourself locked up with your dreams and initial techniques without seeking new ideas, other people’s findings, and taking the advice of experts will get you sinking down the road quickly. Occasionally, ask yourself these questions: What is my belief? What do I intend to achieve? Where am I now? What am I not doing that would help me? If you are able to provide adequate answers to these questions, you can easily get yourself back on track.
Personally, I found Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, Tim Ferris books and podcasts extremely helpful. I recommend listening to inspiring business podcasts when in your car and reading a book every week.
Also, remember that you can run your business on your own. All you need is determination and courage. There are a lot of places to get help and the inspiration to move ahead, but never delegate the decision of your business to a third person. It is not a true quality of a leader and shows a sign of incapacitation.
