Summary
What has you most worried or concerned about starting your own business? Are there risks you consider that you just can’t imagine stomaching?
A fear of risk is common for many of us. It’s what keeps so many potential investors out of the stock market, content to park their retirement prospects in cash or bonds. They just can’t handle the sight of seeing those returns fluctuate. But an outright fear of any risk whatsoever will almost certainly ensure that they never see big returns. The same goes for your career: no risk, no returns. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t strategies and tools you can leverage to manage your risk levels and still chase your dreams.
Read on to learn more about how you can cope with the inevitable uncertainty of launching your own business or enterprise.
Transcript
I’ve seen it time and again. Fear of the unknown can be simply crippling for people.
This fear comes in all shapes and forms. It could be the fear of failure when starting a business; I’ve certainly had my share of busts in the business world when I was starting out as an entrepreneur and I know exactly what they are so afraid of.
It could be a fear of public speaking. As Jerry Seinfeld famously observed, many people rank a fear of speaking ahead of a fear of death, meaning that at a funeral, they would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.
The upside of age is experience, and the wisdom that comes along with it. I’ve learned in time that one of the central keys to overcoming crippling fear is to minimize the amount of risk you are placing on yourself when you are going into a situation. You need to learn to be okay with experiencing some degree of fear and accept that it’s only natural to be a bit apprehensive about entering into an unknown situation.
Strategies
One strategy that I have used to help me cope with my own fear is to go through a visualization exercise, in which I paint a picture for myself of what is the worst thing that could possibly happen. How often do we really trace the roots of our fears down to the animating element of our anxiety? We dwell on all of the negatives: I’m going to be late, I’m going to sound foolish, I am not going to get the job. But we need to follow these fears to their next logical conclusions. We need to ask ourselves, what will actually happen if I’m late? If I sound foolish? If I don’t get the job?
In almost every circumstance, the sun is going to keep shining, the Earth is going to keep spinning, and we will live to fight another day, almost always afforded with greater wisdom and self-knowledge than we had before we went through this terrible crucible of an experience. To let go of fear of less than optimal outcomes is to help free yourself. Once you are no longer fretting about the implications of every worst-case scenario, you are in a greater place to take action.
Mitigating Risk As An Entrepreneur
That said, there are some typical stumbling points where I have seen so many make mistakes and get themselves in trouble when they are wading into the world of entrepreneurship. Just as you bring an umbrella into a storm or buy insurance for a house, you need to actively take steps in your business dealings to minimize the chance that you will be confronted with a problem. Avoiding these mistakes will help you lower the risk that you have a bad outcome to fear at all.
A common mistake is to quit one’s job too early when starting a venture. It is very easy to get caught up in the excitement and romance of starting up a new business. You might decide to cut your ties to your job and go “all in” so that you can concentrate your energies and not be distracted. Many people tend to see a safety gig or day job as something that will hold them back from truly pledging to go all out on their new venture.
But you need to remember the first key to investing success, which is don’t lose you money and the second key is some form of diversification is needed. You don’t need to be Warren Buffet to know that you can better protect your earnings by spreading them across a few key asset classes. The same should apply to income sources. When you think about it, depending upon any single source of revenue should be suspect and considered reckless, whether it is your own enterprise or a salary from an employer. The longer that you keep your day job while still building out your business, the greatest self-insurance policy you’ve made for yourself in the form of a cushion to keep you from completely flaming out when you strike out on your own.
On the same token, I’ve seen many new entrepreneurs investing far too much money in their business when starting out when they could have waited longer to scale up. Sometimes they just can’t wait to move into office space or purchase top-of-the-line equipment and quickly find themselves hemorrhaging cash. You’re far better off trying out your business on a micro-level with a few clients and succeeding on a smaller scale before you get too far in over your head.
A surefire method to avoid being left out to dry on your own is to identify a mentor who has been in your same position of launching a new business. Entrepreneurs come from proud stock. We tend to want to do everything on our own and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. But you need to have the humility to recognize how much you can gain from time spent from someone who has been through what you are going through and can help point you in the right direction. Resist that nagging temptation to do everything on your own and teach yourself everything. You can leverage their experience and knowledge to minimize the risks that you will fall into similar errors along the way.
So what steps will you take to ease your own entry into entrepreneurship and lower the chances that you will face a roadblock?
I would advise you to begin by taking steps each day that ensure you are making progress, even if it is a weekend or day off. You need to begin to sample a taste of the start-up life, which comes along with the realization that there are really no days fully off. Initially at least. By acclimating yourself to this early, you will begin to be able to better assess whether this really is for you. (Entrepreneurship is certainly not for everyone and that is by no means a bad thing, despite what some magazine covers may have you thinking.)
Identify It
On a more fundamental level, I would suggest you also take the time to actually list out in writing just what it is exactly that has you most nervous or apprehensive about launching a business. What thought catches in your mind? What causes you to wake up in the night with a pang of anxiety? Is it looking like a fool to friends who don’t think you should be taking a risk? Is it putting your family in financial jeopardy? Is it the fear that you are wasting time on a fool-hardy venture? Continue to dig in deeper at the root. Once you have identified causes that are worth worrying about, the kind that could dramatically affect your health or retirement prospects or the opportunities for your loved ones, spend time writing the solutions; the strategies you will take to mitigate those risks. Maybe it’s a mentor, maybe it’s an agreement from your employer to take you back if things go south, maybe it’s more realistic assumptions for your timeline. Keeping these strategies in mind will allow you to head into your business with a firmer idea of how you will manage the inevitable bumps in the road along the way.
When you measure and assume personal responsibility for the risks you decide to take, you can handle them head-on, in a manner that has inner power. So be sure to assess the risks in any new endeavor, while at the same time, mitigating them and embracing them as a challenge.
Learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books at https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
