Four tips to build your business confidence
Whether you’re preparing to launch your business, or have been working on it for a number of years, it can feel hard sometimes to maintain confidence in what you are doing.
Launching and running a business is like riding a rollercoaster. One day – or even one moment – you can be up, celebrating a win. And the next moment you can be plunged into fear, lack of faith or self-doubt as something doesn’t go the way you hoped.
To help you ride this rollercoaster, and boost your confidence, we’ve put together four tips that have worked for us and other entrepreneurs like you.
1) Have a clear goal
Not everything in business will go according to plan. But if you don’t have a plan to start with, you can be pretty sure nothing will!
Having a clear goal for your business all make it easier for you to make decisions, and give you direction. It can also help you to see what resources you need to make progress, and you can check that progress as you go along.
If things are working well then you’ll have the confidence that you’re getting it right. And if not, you have the opportunity to identify what’s not working, or what you need more help with, so you can make the changes needed to get you back on track.
So if you don’t already have a goal for your business, set one now. We recommend making it a SMART goal, and setting one for three years ahead, one year and six months. This gives you a ‘big’ goal to guide you, plus nearer points to work towards.
2) Invest in the right help
It’s understandable to want to save as much money as you can in your business, especially if you are just starting out or your business isn’t yet profitable. But not investing in the right areas could end up being a false economy.
Making the same mistakes over and over again, or learning the slow, painful way every time can be demoralising and time consuming. And it’s not always the wisest choice. Yes there are some lessons that are best experienced personally, but sometimes taking a ‘shortcut’ in the form of help will save you better.
Hiring someone like a Dallas business coach can help you to identify what is holding you back, and develop a strategy to overcome it. Investing in help in our own business enabled us to finally stop struggling and finally earn a healthy profit every month. And once we started making changes, we saw a difference quickly – and consistently.
Before you hand over your money to someone though, make sure you do due diligence. Are they experts in the kind of help you need? Do they have a proven track record (preferably with case studies of helping entrepreneurs or businesses like yours)? And do they share practical examples of how they help, rather than simply promising secrets to ‘seven figure businesses’?
3) Build a support team around you
Running a business can be lonely. When you work for a company you have managers and colleagues to share your ups and downs with and ask advice from. You’re also given deadlines and feedback on your work, so you have the confidence you are doing a good job.
But when you work for yourself, there’s no manager checking your progress. There’s no colleague on the next desk to moan to, or check you were in the right with. And there’s no HR department to support you.
So it’s important to build your own business support team. This can be a business coach or mentor, but it can also be a networking group, friends who run businesses, or a community on social media. If you are working alone at home, you can also find hiring a desk in a co-working space a couple of days a week helpful.
Having feedback and advice from people who know what it’s like to run a business can help boost your confidence. If you get a tricky client or customer, for example, they can offer advice on how to handle them. Or just reassure you that it’s normal and you’ve done nothing wrong.
This kind of advice and support can be invaluable when you are working alone – especially if you are used to working for someone else. So be proactive in building your business support community. And remember to give as much as you receive, and support your community back.
4) Get comfortable with failure
Running a business is not compatible with perfectionism. Part of business success is in experimenting and trying new things, and not all experiments will work out. So if you’re going to be crippled by self-doubt every time something goes wrong then you’re in for a painful time!
Accept that failing is an important step to trying something new, and succeeding. Don’t think, “That went wrong, I am clearly useless. I’ll never get it right.” Instead tell yourself, “It didn’t work that time, but I’ll try something different and keep going until I get it right.”
Thomas Edison famously failed 9,999 times until he finally successfully invented the lightbulb. And Michael Jordan is well known for claiming that the reason he succeeded was because ehe used his constant failure as motivation to shoot for success. (Michael lost almost 300 games – that’s more games than many NBA players have court time in – and missed over 9,000 shots at goal.)
So if you are nervous about trying something new in case you fail, or are struggling to pick yourself up after something goes wrong, recall Thomas Edison and Michael Jordan. They succeeded BECAUSE they failed, and they refused to let failure stop them. Instead, they reframed it as stepping stones that got them closer to getting things right.
And if failure is good enough for them, then it’s certainly good enough for us. And hopefully, if we try hard enough, have the courage to take risks and practice diligently we’ll reap impressive rewards from our businesses too.
How will you build your business confidence?
We hope these tips have given you some ideas for ways you can build your business confidence. Remember that like many things in life, running a business is a journey and not everything will go smoothly along the way.
But with the right approach, and help and support from someone like a business coach Dallas, you’ll come through the tough times and be able to celebrate your successes.
Photo by CoWomen
