Two essentials tools for defending your startup from bad advice
It’s all part of becoming a strong and savvy founder
It is easy when you are building your startup to want to ask anyone and everyone for advice.
In a startup, you have to make many tough decisions every week just to keep your company afloat, much less to grow and be successful.
Particularly if this is your first go, some of these decisions can feel overwhelming. You tend to think there must be a “right” answer, but you can’t see it.
When you seek advice, you will quickly learn that most people have a different take on your situation.
So what do you do when you get conflicting advice?
How do you know who to trust, or whose advice outranks whose?
You can often find yourself more confused than ever once you start asking around for some input.
First of all, there is no magic ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ most of the time. There will be lots of room for “it depends” when it comes to your startup. Some of it will be a matter of choice rather than being a binary good or bad decision.
Secondly, each advice-giver will have a different track record and point of view. This means that what was right for them was indeed right for them. But it may not be right for you. They will be giving their advice based on their own experience.
No ones knows the ins and outs of your business like you do. Someone offering advice will be doing their best to be helpful, but may miss an essential element that could make one decision more effective than another.
Only you will know that.
This isn’t to say that advice isn’t worth getting.
By all means seek out different points of view, speak to people with different backgrounds, and be sure to speak to those who have made mistakes and failed as well as the very successful.
Often the ones who learned lessons the hard way have the most valuable advice to share.
Two essential tools for getting the most out of advice
This is where the two essential tools of receiving advice come in. You must practice discernment and critical thinking to get the most out of any advice you receive, as well as avoiding the trap of bad advice.
Discernment can be described as that good old gut instinct, or listening to what’s in your heart. Discernment is that sharp perception that comes to you as soon as you get a few more pieces of information that sets off either alarm bells when you know something is wrong or that feeling of calm when all seems right with the world.
When you are receiving advice, information is being added to your “data set” of all the things you are perceiving as variables in your decision making process.
Whether the advice is good or bad, it will resonate with what you know already. It can throw into sharp relief what you suddenly realise is the right decision for you. It can provide just enough information for you to figure out the answer to a tough problem, like someone turning on the light.
To use discernment you need simply need to tune in to that feeling that forms in the pit of your stomach when you consider the information you have. Without advice, that information will be narrow and coloured by your own biases and limitations of experience.
The value of advice is that it gives not only more information but a different angle, filter, or perception. It is this additional slant that can help you see something you couldn’t before.
Critical thinking is of course where your head comes in.
Advice is offered to you; it doesn’t have to be taken.
No one knows your business like you do, and your advice-giver, with all the best intentions, may miss a crucial element that should be impacting the decision you are making.
This isn’t to say that what they offer won’t be helpful.
But you must add what you know with what they are offering. Using your critical thinking, this advice can still help you reach a decision or find your answer because it can shine a light into the gaps between what you know and what you don’t. Or it will show you that perhaps you knew the answer all along.
Getting advice from reliable sources is essential for any startup.
It’s important to get a few different points of view when making tough decisions or when looking for answers.
But you must bring both discernment and critical thinking, or your head and your gut, to any advice you receive.
Not only will this help prevent you from taking bad advice when you really know better (when you tune in and listen to yourself), but it also helps you learn more, faster, when you combine your own ‘data set’ with another.
We often get advice because we don’t trust our own knowledge or instincts.
Combining external advice with discernment and critical thinking is how we learn as we go.
We begin to realise just how much we know and how much we can rely on our own judgement. We become strong and savvy founders who can get the most out of advice, and make more decisions ourselves.
My first book, Becoming a Fearless Leader: A simple guide to taking control and building happy, productive, highly-performing teams is out now. You can find access to a free pdf workbook that accompanies it on my website. If you do read my book, I would love to hear your comments.
I write about how I became the founder of a tech startup as a non-techie, over-40 female with no entrepreneurial experience, and all I am learning along the way. You can see more here. If you think this might be helpful for others on their entrepreneurial journey, please recommend and share.
