How to Push Past Your Doubts into Entrepreneurial Success
Do you ever feel doubts about your role as an entrepreneur?
When you are building a business, there are so many challenges in your way. There are tight budgets, competition, and infrastructure you have to build. But one of the biggest obstacles can often be your own self-doubts. To build the future you want, you need to learn how to push past your doubts and throw yourself full-force into creating the business you’ve always dreamed of creating.
What is Doubt?
To an entrepreneur, doubt can be deadly. It will get in the way of everything that you’re trying to achieve, preventing you from taking the necessary big steps towards making your business a success.
Some self-doubting thoughts that might creep into your brain when you lay in bed at night are:
- What if my ideas aren’t any good?
- What if someone steals my ideas?
- What if I can’t compete against the big brands?
- What if I lose all of my money?
- What if I am wasting years of my life on a business that won’t go anywhere?
- What if I fail?
As someone who has started up dozens of businesses, let me tell you that all of these thoughts are completely normal. If there is an entrepreneur out there who says that they never had a single self-doubt in their entrepreneurial career, then you’re either dealing with a liar or a complete nut.
Self-doubt is an evolutionary defense mechanism that protects us from things that might harm us. It’s like an automatic “double-check” to make sure that we are confident about our actions. For example, a caveman might instinctively think that he can survive jumping from a great height. However, his automatic sense of self-doubt might cause him to double-check, maybe reconsider leaping without a guarantee of survival.
This works fantastic when you’re trying to survive in the wild, but as an entrepreneur, self-doubt does little but hold you back.
How to Fight Against Doubts
Thankfully, there are ways that you can fight against your self-doubt, training yourself to move forward instead when you’re having a personal crisis of faith.
One of the best ways to push past doubts is to be a huge research nerd. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur moving into a particular market, then you need to know everything about that market. When confronted with a question that you don’t know the answer to, you’re likely going to start to doubt your own judgment. So, make sure that you’ve done your homework to minimize the number of times when you don’t know the answer! It will happen now and then, but the more you know, the better prepared you will be to move forward in any situation.
Another way to beat self-doubt is experience. Many times, self-doubt is born out of uncertainty. If you’ve never done something before, then you’re going to worry that you’ll do it wrong. That’s why starting your first business is almost always the most challenging and nerve-wracking. After you’ve made it through surviving the creation of your first business, you know for a fact that you’ll be able to do it again.
A counter-intuitive way to deal with self-doubt is to USE them to make your business stronger. Essentially, your doubts are going to be playing devil’s advocate. Rather than dismiss them, analyze them with a dispassionate eye. Your instincts might be telling you something. The only way to be sure is to see if there are any inherent failure points in your ideas. If there are, then rather than run away from them, embrace this opportunity to fix them! Use your doubts as a guide to adapt and change.
Personally, I believe that the most powerful way to deal with your doubts is a decision that you make from the moment you become an entrepreneur. You must accept the risks right from the start. Rather than worry about the future, know that you can’t control everything that will happen throughout your business’ life. Market shifts, increased competition, downturns in the economy, these are all factors that are beyond you. By genuinely accepting those risks right from the start, you will be putting yourself in a position where you can acknowledge the doubts that come and go along the way, but trust that you’re doing everything you can to make your business succeed. This mindset can be tricky and becomes easier with experience. But once you’ve learned to accept the risks from the start, they become much simpler to process when you run into them later in the life of your business.
Becoming an entrepreneur means that you’re dedicating yourself to a life of self-improvement. We all feel doubts, every minute of every day. It’s all part of being a human bring. An entrepreneur, you need to learn to push past doubts and do what MUST be done. The only way that you’re going to be able to go forward is to push those doubts aside and step forward into your destiny as an entrepreneur! Trust me, if I can do you, you can do it!
