What Are You Not Doing FOR Your Business Because of Your Own Anxiety?

What are you NOT doing for your business because you’ve never done it before?

Starting a business isn’t for the faint of heart.  You know that… The journey is full of frustration, upset, highs, and lows.  We all make mistakes, learn from the experience, refine our skills, and get advice from our friends and mentors.

Often there are actions we could be taking but aren’t.  Some of them we set aside because we just don’t have the time to do everything – and prioritizing is critical to being an entrepreneur.

But what about the actions we don’t take because they’re WAY outside our comfort zone.

I often say to myself that I don’t have to do stuff I find unappealing.  After all, this is MY business and I get to choose how to spend my time.  If it doesn’t feel good, then I can skip it.  Do you do this too?

And in large part those thoughts are true.  We choose the type of business we want to create – from our passion, inspiration, our favorite activities, or because we’re really good at something.  So, making sure we enjoy the time we spend is pretty important in the grand scheme of things.

Doing the scary stuff

Sometimes, though, our business needs us to do something that is scary, new, unknown, difficult, and feels personally risky.  Not necessarily risky for the business, just risky for our sense of who we are.  And when those moments arrive, it’s time to put the big girl panties on and talk a leap into the unknown.

The whole project of starting a business is a leap into the unknown – a gigantic one.  And that leap will reach the end goal by taking many little leaps requiring us to leave behind our fears and vulnerabilities.

Our fears may be about speaking at a pitch competition, or networking using our elevator pitch, or learning about some technology we’ll need to use, or talking to potential customers we’ve never met, or writing some code, or building our own website.

Just doing it

One of mine was both being on video and shooting it myself.  And what I discovered about 6 months ago is that my fear was way out of proportion to actually doing what needed to be done.  My anxiety about being in front of the camera had moved into my life and I spent a lot of mental energy ignoring it, justifying myself, and not doing the work I really needed to get done.  When I finally leapt into the world of video, I discovered that being in action and just getting it done was a million times easier than what I had been doing.As entrepreneurs, we’re powerful people and capable of getting a lot done.  Sometimes we forget that – and it’s at those times we just need to jump in because the water is just fine.

Your Challenge:

1. Ask yourself what you’re putting off doing for your business because you just don’t feel comfortable with the task required.
2. Ask yourself if there’s something you haven’t considered doing for your business because it’s just not something you do.
3. Ask yourself if there’s something your business needs that you’re not capable of providing personally.  Then figure out whether it’s because you can’t or you won’t or if you need to get another team member for that particular piece of the project.