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{*Did you know you can write on Elephant? Here’s how—big changes: How to Write & Make Money or at least Be of Benefit on Elephant. ~ Waylon}
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I’ve heard it said before that if you wait until the perfect time to launch your own business, you’ll end up waiting forever.
Entrepreneurship is a leap of faith. Sooner or later, you have to either take the plunge or admit that business ownership just isn’t for you.
But if there’s no perfect time to launch a business, my timing might have been especially adverse.
It was the summer of 2008. Maybe you remember it: financial markets were in full-blown meltdown, the fruit of what we retroactively call the Great Recession. People were losing their homes. People were losing their jobs. Politically, financially, and culturally it seemed like everything had plunged into chaos.
For reasons I still can’t fully articulate, it seemed like as good a time as any to start my own writing and editing agency.
A few months after setting up shop, I realized that I’d lucked into a pretty ideal scenario. With businesses downsizing and getting rid of internal copywriters and other creatives, there was significant demand for the services my team could offer on an outsourced basis. I’d like to say that I was confident in this strategy from the get-go, but in truth, launching the company was (and still is) a process of overcoming fear and anxiety.
But if that process is ongoing, business ownership has taught me much about what it means to put worry in its place—not necessarily banishing fear, but learning to keep moving forward in spite of it.
Here are four ways that starting my own business taught me how to keep fear in check:
Learning Acceptance
One of the first things you figure out as a business owner is that not everything is within your control.
There are countless aspects of business ownership—from market trends and interest rates to the varying processes and timelines for LLC approvals—that are beyond your control. You have no authority over them.
Relinquishing control is one of the toughest things you’ll ever do, but over time it can also become one of the most freeing. In the earliest days of running my company, I invested far too much time fretting about the things I couldn’t control.
In the crucible of entrepreneurship, I’ve learned a little bit each day about all the fruitlessness and wasted energy that come with worrying about things we can’t control. That’s helped me focus my attention not on fear, but on being a responsible steward of the things I can do to help my clients and equip my employees each day.
Building Confidence
When you run a business, you have to make a million decisions each and every day.
Not all of my decisions have worked out the way I wanted them to—but many of them have. And my batting average gets a little better with each passing year as my instincts are leavened with wisdom and experience.
Being able to make a decision, then either celebrate the outcome or at least take ownership of the misstep, has helped me to develop a real sense of confidence in what I do. And that’s a potent antidote to fear.
Cultivating Resilience
The truth is, I could write an entire article just recounting missteps and errors I’ve made. Accounts lost and accounts that never should have been taken on. Bad hires. Unwise partnerships. Huge marketing expenditures with nothing to show for it.
But failure can be a powerful tutor, and one thing it’s taught me is that you can always pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start moving forward again.
Simply put, surviving a lot of missteps has taught me that I don’t have to fear failure. Yeah, it sucks but it doesn’t have to be calamitous.
Embracing Creativity
My work is creative by its very nature. If a client hires me to write 50 articles on the same topic, but all of them have to be unique, well, that’s a real test of my imagination.
Engaging my creative side has been a powerful way to sidestep fear. It’s taught me that even when I’m met with rocky circumstances, there are usually some outside-the-box strategies I can use to sail through them, or at least shield myself and my company from undue damage.
Creativity, too, is an effective counterbalance to fear. And nothing will help you develop it like running a small business.
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It’s okay to feel a little bit afraid about launching your own business. Heck, it’s okay to feel terrified. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
Taking the leap may be the best thing you ever do to show your fears who’s boss, while also learning to be a more enterprising, creative, and resilient person.
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