Being successful as an entrepreneur involves all sorts of different things, ranging from the best practical know-how for the job, to an in-depth sense of the developing trends within your industry.
While Sales Metrics and other empirical data can be crucially important when it comes to your ability to achieve your full professional potential and to turn your business into a household name, many of the challenges that entrepreneurs tend to face over the course of their careers fundamentally have to do with personal skills and traits such as good stress management.
Every entrepreneur out there is going to have to contend with more than their fair share of challenges, and the way that you respond to obstacles over the medium to long term can have a tremendous impact on the odds that a given business venture of yours will ultimately become a success.
Here are a handful of tips for building psychological resilience as an entrepreneur, since good resilience skills are crucial in so many different ways.
Always act in line with your values, and maintain integrity
One of the most important things in life is to act and live in line with your values, and to maintain a high degree of personal integrity – and this is no less true in a business context than with regards to anything else.
Not only does maintaining a high degree of integrity help to give you a sense of pride and purpose, while simultaneously helping to improve and safeguard your professional reputation, but it can also give you the grit, belief, and determination needed to stand firm against the challenges you face, without folding or second-guessing yourself.
If you know that you are always doing the best you can, and behaving with a high degree of personal and professional integrity, it will be far less likely that you will be willing to throw in the towel when things get tough.
Rely on daily systems and habits that can carry you forward despite uncertainty
Among the many different challenges that can arise over the course of your professional life, one of the most consistent sources of frustration and stress is likely to be the uncertainty that sometimes arises when you are just not sure where to turn next, or how to achieve a particular goal of yours.
One of the best ways of building resilience and keeping yourself moving forward in spite of this situation, is to rely on daily systems and habits that you can repeat and rely on regardless of what else is happening, and that can carry you forward consistently even when you don’t have a clear path before you.
The Japanese concept of “kaizen” is essentially based on this principle, and relies on businesses looking for ways to make iterative 1% improvements on a daily basis. The point is that you should always have some techniques and systems in place that can keep you moving in the right direction, even if just by small degrees at a time.
Take your sleep, nutrition, and stress management seriously
Psychological resilience, and overall stress management, have a lot to do with ensuring that your sleep, nutrition, and physical well-being are as well safeguarded as possible.
Many entrepreneurs completely burn themselves out through consistent sleep deprivation and an unsustainable and ultimately unhealthy approach to things like nutrition.
Understand, however, that getting enough rest and feeding yourself properly – not to mention getting enough exercise – is vitally important not only for your own health and sense of well-being, but also for your ability to perform effectively at your job, and to weather the storms that come your way.
Actively look for a grain of positivity in each challenge you face
There are many different professional challenges that you may be faced with as an entrepreneur which can seem – and may indeed be – very difficult and even outright detrimental, in a range of different ways.
A big part of developing resilience, however, depends on your ability to actively identify a grain of positivity in each challenge and hardship you face, so that you can focus more on the good than on the bad
Not only does this help to keep you proactive and solutions-focused, but it also significantly reduces the likelihood that you will be completely disheartened by anything that comes your way.
The “grain of positivity” in question will vary from situation to situation. It may be a tangential opportunity that arises, or it may be an insight into what you should change next time around.
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