How to Develop Resilience In Business
Do you ever wonder what allows some people to sail through entrepreneurial challenges while others to lose sleep, freak out and break down?
Is it that some people never have huge problems, while others experience unlucky setbacks?
Probably not.
As you grow as an entrepreneur, things that freaked you out years ago may now seem like no big deal. You’ve developed the confidence to handle what comes your way, and you know that behind every really stressful thing is usually an opportunity to figure out something even better.
I think about this with my own children – every time my first born made a peep or fell down I’d nervously jump to make sure he hadn’t broken a bone. By the time my second came along, my response was a consistent, nonchalant, “he’s fine.”
In the early stages of growing a business it’s very easy to react to stress in that first child way. You haven’t had any experience doing this before! You lack confidence in bouncing back from a setback. Little bumps and bruises feel like huge disastrous situations. You watch your business’s tiny details, just like worrying about every little aspect of your first child’s life.
This hyper-attentive tendency can be draining. And this Performance Mindset can really cause more trouble and worry than necessary. When you adopt a Performance Mindset, you may find yourself avoiding challenges, getting frustrated easily, and feeling threatened by the success of others.
A Growth Mindset, on the other hand, allows you to adopt a belief that bumps and curves are a certainty. It’s all part of growing a business! You’ll embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, and find lessons and inspiration in the success of others.
See, it’s not that some entrepreneurs shoot from ground zero to the top without challenges while you’re left facing issue after issue. It’s that their mindset and attitude toward the lessons those obstacles provide is different.
WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF GETTING TRAPPED BY A PERFORMANCE MINDSET, CONSIDER THREE STEPS:
1. Get back to your why: why you started in the first place. why would you let this little blip keep you from your dreams and passions?
2. Consider what you can learn from it and move forward with it as a opportunity to grow.
3. Take note of your ability recover faster each time as you develop confidence in your resilience muscle. Keep a journal and be grateful for each piece of progress you make.
We want to model this for not just ourselves, but for our teams as well. What we want is for them to realize it’s ok for things to not go perfectly, and with each setback we become better with the right mindset. This helps them to develop and learn from every experience – creating an organization of thoughtful leaders.
