Years ago, when I first started thinking about leaving my corporate career and starting my own business, I was filled with doubt, insecurity, and a LOT of fear, and this is all very common. In fact, fear of failure in entrepreneurs has been studied for decades, and it very clearly has a negative impact on entrepreneurial activity and success.
This fear of failure is often tied to a deeper fear that we’ll be ashamed if we aren’t successful, that we’ll feel shame around our struggles and setbacks, and this can be paralyzing to the point that we never actually get started.
The most important thing, more than your knowledge or your actual product or service, is your mindset. It’s the willingness to take a leap of faith and stick with it, it’s perseverance, it’s belief in yourself.
And you need to think deeply about your own relationship with fear and how it impacts you, how you let it impact you. Research has shown that your brain perceives stress and excitement in very similar ways, and that it isn’t so much the stress but how you deal with the stress, how you interpret it and give meaning to it, that determines whether your body has greater adverse physiological reactions to it, and I share ways to re-envision stress and fear and shift it to the positive.
In starting your own business, you must be clear on your purpose, your passion, your “why” driving it all. I talk a lot about purpose, and purpose should be the driving force behind your new venture.
And you should dream BIG! Too often we think, “What if this goes nowhere, what if I fail, what if no one wants to buy what I have to offer?” Try balancing that out by going in the other direction. What if your venture is wildly successful, what if you end up on Shark Tank, what if your book becomes a best seller? For most people, the reality will be somewhere in between. And there is an enormous body of research supporting the importance of visualization to successful performance. Top athletes practice visualizing hitting home runs, or skiing down a particular slope in a particular way, or shooting free throws.
Finally, I talk about the importance of having a group of people around you who support and cherish your dream and will cheerlead you as you launch your venture, whether that’s friends, a coach that you hire, a mentor, or a mastermind you join.
And as I often do, I end with a few Purpose Power Tools.
At the end of this episode I offer free 30-minute discovery calls for those who would like to explore their dreams, who need help figuring out next steps. Email me at carin@carinrockind.com! If you’re not ready for a call and you’re not yet on my newsletter list, go to my website (carinrockind.com) and sign up to recevie my newsletter and my free Living On Purpose Guide, and that can help you get on your path.
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May you live purposefully, may you love yourself, and may you love life.
Bye for now!
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