No entrepreneur was able to achieve triumph without experiencing failure. In every success story, there will always be some chapters filled with disappointments and frustration. But while this is natural, what you’ve done to recover from the fall and move forward matters even more. If you’re an up-and-coming business owner, you’ll want to prepare yourself for what’s to come to ensure not only the success of your venture but also your own.
Practical advice on how to become an entrepreneur is readily available online, but there are plenty more things you need to prepare for. Aside from investing in yourself and acquiring new skills, you also need to prepare for success mentally and emotionally. This article covers six motivational tips and techniques to help you be ready for ordeals and high-pressure situations that will help you achieve your ultimate goal.
1. Get to Know Yourself Better
Before you can say that you’re ready for victory, you must first fully understand who you are. Get to know yourself better not only by determining what you truly desire, but by identifying your weak points as well. Once you do, you would be one step closer to figuring out how you can improve them.
To understand yourself fully, you have to identify the things you have done to cause failures in the past. By doing so, you can plan to do things differently and avoid making similar mistakes over and over. This will allow you to get a clear picture of what’s holding you back from achieving your goals.
2. Consider Both the Big and Small Picture
The quality of success is not only measured by reaching the finish line, but also what you did on your journey to get there. Nobody gets anywhere worthwhile by just winging it. Many people who attempt to do so end up wasting their energy because they have no clear direction. This is where setting an ultimate goal and a structured plan to achieve it is most beneficial.
To ensure that you’re motivated up until the end of your journey, you have to come up with a big goal that can be broken down into several smaller ones. Create both long-term and short-term targets, and take your quest towards success one step at a time. Essentially, this means you must make sure you get two sets of goals: your outcome goals and process goals.
Outcome goals
The outcome goal is the primary target of your venture that can be achieved in the long term. For athletes, it can come in the form of a better marathon time record. For businessmen, this can be making a brand into a household name or establishing the company as an authority figure in the industry.
Process goals
Process goals, on the other hand, serve as stepping stones for you to achieve the outcome goal. They are mostly small steps that can be achieved within a shorter span of time, like achieving a certain amount of revenue or reaching a specific number of likes or followers on social media. Both of these goals are interrelated; you can’t have one and ignore the other.
When choosing an outcome goal, you have to consider what smaller targets you can set as process goals to help you get there. Alternatively, you should have an ultimate end-goal to keep you going even after you achieve your short-term targets.
3. Feel the Fear But Proceed Anyway
Many people know how fear affects self-confidence. But while it is considered one of the biggest barriers to achieving one’s ambitions, fear also yields courage and boldness – both of which could serve as your greatest strengths in reaching your goals. Take sports journalist and cyclist Andy Waterman, for example. He set an ambitious goal for his first marathon and was able to achieve it. According to him, he’s not entirely sure how it was possible, but he believes that being ambitious also keeps him fired up and motivated during the months of training that awaited him.
4. Take Responsibility
Running a business affects not just your life, but those of other people as well. This means you have to take responsibility and be accountable for your mistakes.
You see, people often end up blaming others to avoid feeling bad for their shortcomings when things don’t go as planned. This is a self-destructive characteristic – not to mention an emotionally draining activity – that needs to be corrected. To be more accountable for your actions, you have to take the time to understand the situation and determine what you did that contributed to the failure. Only then can you move forward, feel empowered, and lead your company to become more productive in achieving your goals.
5. Visualize Your Success
Imagery is an important part of overcoming obstacles. People who end up failing often visualize themselves in worst-case scenarios before the journey even begins. You know why? Because they have set themselves up to fail.
So instead of thinking how things can go wrong, visualize your own success. To do so, try recreating the successes you experienced in the past or rehearse possible scenarios in your mind. Make these as realistic as possible and include sounds, sights, smells, and feelings. Positive imagery helps instill confidence in you. This also allows you to exert your best possible effort and, ultimately, lead you to the very same successful scenario you envisioned for yourself.
6. Give Yourself a Pep Talk
Aside from imagining yourself succeeding in your endeavors, you can also give yourself a pep talk to prepare for the big game. Having internal conversations is a healthy way to pump yourself up and help you perform better.
You see, a person who tells himself that he’s going to fail, usually ends up doing so. This is because the anxiety he feels from the negative statements can cause his body to respond accordingly.
To improve your performance, you must structure your self-talk in a way that will promote positivity. This is the very reason why athletes use the phrases “be strong,” “focus on winning,” and other similar phrases before a competition – because they’re setting themselves up for success.
Prepping for Success
Success doesn’t just fall on your lap – it’s something that you have to work hard for. While it is true that it won’t happen overnight, you can prepare yourself for success by being emotionally and mentally ready. Consider the tips listed in this article, and get one step closer to achieving your goals.
Article Contributed By Salma El-Shurafa
