I can count on me…
Dear Entrepreneur, are you one of your people?
Working in business highlights the truth that business is personal and interpersonal for that matter. The topic “You and your people” has quickly become a key pillar in my coaching practice, being a crucial point of reflection for many entrepreneurs seeking growth opportunities. If there is anything the last sixteen years have taught me about business, it is that the people who surround the entrepreneurs be they family, friends or employees, they are the fuel to their fire. However, in this support system or circle-of-influence, we often forget the most important person.
As a coach, I’m usually the one asking the questions on the comfortable side of the discussion. A few weeks ago, however, I found myself on the opposite side. In our fortnightly session, my counsellor asked me the question: whom do you trust? Slowly accepting the uncomfortable emotional rawness every counselling session brings, I proceeded to list all the people I could think of from my husband to my children to my inner circle of friends. I thought I had listed everyone, but my counsellor insisted that there was one person I was missing. This threw me off. I sat there, wondering how she knew some of my friends, racking my brain for whom I could have possibly left out. I couldn’t figure it out. At my resignation, she said, “You. You didn’t mention that you trust yourself”. That statement hit me hard, because of how simple it was yet I knew that even if she left me there for another 20 minutes, I would have never thought to put my name on that list.
That moment stayed with me in a way I was unable to reconcile until I realized that the ability to trust yourself is the innate boost of confidence any entrepreneur needs regardless of the support systems they have built on the outside.
Last month we explored the idea of “being” versus “doing” and one wonderful result of “being” is trusting yourself, your beliefs, your decisions, strengths and abilities. Trusting yourself means buying into your own dream not only with words and thoughts but with sweat and tears. You have to sell your vision to the mirror before you can ask anyone else to join your team or buy your product or invest in your idea. The truth of the matter is that as an entrepreneur you are the bridge between the present reality and the imagined one and when people cannot see the end product they must be able to follow your faith. That is all a product of how much you believe in yourself and in your business.
When my husband Ken started his first company 3mice, he struggled to make ends meet because all his money, effort, time and energy were fully committed to building this dream. He tells the story of going out to look for clients in his best and well-loved white shirt and the only pair of cufflinks he had, all while he was living in a shack marked for demolition. No one knew, and yet they didn’t even think twice when he started selling them his vision. Why? Because if he was going to bet on any horse in the race, his name was the first. Sometimes trusting yourself shows up in those small things like putting on those cufflinks or that dress that speak more to the dream than the current reality.
That level of belief sets the pace for your business, your team and also for your friends and family to support you as an entrepreneur. Last year, I worked with an entrepreneur who expressed that her only regret was that she never took the business or herself seriously. This stunted the growth of the company because the same attitude spilled over to her staff who were never putting out their best work and even her family who didn’t even understand what she did or what kind of support she needed.
As an entrepreneur, you are the pacesetter, and your people only reflect that back.
You are the heart and soul of your business, and the buy-in starts from you. Once you dream that dream and work hard enough at it, it becomes much bigger than you.
Eventually, you’re not the CEO, the vision is, and just like any other employee, you as the entrepreneur must work towards and believe in that vision.
