Article contributed by Sandy Geyer.
When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. Franklin D. Roosevelt
To be a successful entrepreneur you need to have resilience! How often have you heard this?
I hear it all the time, and whilst I agree with the sentiment, where does “resilience” actually come from? It certainly doesn’t just appear out of thin air when we need it and isn’t just given to some people and not others at birth.
Resilience is not as readily attainable as we might like, and many of us are not always sure of its exact meaning or relevance to us.
In an entrepreneurial sense, resilience simply means hanging on through the tough times (or until sometime after everyone else has dropped off). Tying a knot as suggested above certainly helps—but what do we tie it with?
In EnQ, we tie the resilience knot with the following five dynamic forces:
1) Purpose: There has to be something that becoming a successful entrepreneur will give us, and we have to really, really want it. Although one seemingly obvious “thing” is money, acquisition of money is an unlikely motivator. Scores of unsuccessful entrepreneurs who embarked on a venture simply to make money have given up on their ventures when the going got tough and very happily accepted that “money isn’t everything”. Money might simply be the means to the end. What is your end? Purpose only works in the knot if it is really your own and no one else’s. If you have identified your own purpose and want it badly enough, that desire will function to strengthen your resilience when your entrepreneurial journey becomes very demanding. Very closely related to purpose and extremely helpful to those in the process of business building is vision, motivation, passion, and commitment. These are not listed separately because they are direct results of purpose and in my view cannot replace purpose or function independently of it.
2) Values and beliefs alignment: Have you ever reacted very strongly to something and wondered afterwards if your reaction was out of proportion and wondered why? When this happens it’s usually because one of your driving values was threatened, a similar feeling to a “hot button” being pushed. For many of us, our values are unconscious but strong drivers of our actions and behaviours. As such strong yet unconscious drivers, they might well get in the way of what we want. I have worked with a number of business owners who have had deep and completely unconscious issues about areas relating to successful entrepreneurship such as money, achievement, material wealth, and family time. Their unconscious attitudes have limited their actions, which have in turn limited their results. We need to be conscious of our values and have them aligned to our wants if we want to create resilience.
3) Feedback perspective: Learning how we are doing allows us to plan further actions based on that feedback. Imagine playing a game of soccer and not keeping score. Having no score makes it all feel as if there is no point; we really need the score to tell us how we are doing. But our perspective on that score (how we look at and react to that feedback) is a crucial factor in what action we take. We can go home and give up, or we can practice harder on the skills that need the practice the most. I often tell my audiences how only months after starting our business our accountant told us that we were officially bankrupt. I then go on to say that we reacted by changing accountants. This always gets a laugh, but the reasoning behind what was one of our most important business decisions was simply due to our perspective. Whilst our accountant at the time only saw two columns of numbers with a negative balance on the side that needed a positive one, I saw that our sales were doubling almost monthly and that to further increase our market we needed to invest more in expanding our services. We changed to an accountant whose perspective was similar to ours, and we have never looked back. My message is that getting solid information back as feedback to how you are doing is important, but how you look at that feedback and react to it is all about your perspective. Successful entrepreneurs tend to find resilience at desperate times through their unique perspectives.
4) Physical endurance: Whilst it’s common knowledge that we need to be physically healthy to work efficiently, there is a significant link between physical, mental, and entrepreneurial endurance. Attaining the first functions to foster the other two. I deliberately have not used the terms “physical health” as being directly related to “mental health” because I often think that being just a little bit “mad” helps greatly in achieving the impossible!
5) Experience: I have always loved the saying, “If you are not standing on the edge, then you are taking up too much space,” but the reality is that finding oneself out on the precipice, in an entrepreneurial sense, is incredibly frightening. It seems so much easier to move to a more secure place, even if doing that means giving up instead of hanging on indefinitely. What creates resilience in such a situation? The simple answer is—having been there before! And having not only survived, but having built a bridge that got not only us across the precipice onto safer ground but a whole host of other people after us. The above four traits are critical to attaining the resilience to get through the first time, but when we have done it once it becomes easier to do it again. Of course, there are no guarantees that we will be successful the second time or any of the times after that. Most entrepreneurs have the experience of many failures amongst the successes, but simply the experience of having been in such a situation before is very helpful to recognising the “road signs” and helping us to tough it out a second time.
I would highly recommend doing a “resilience knot check” and having a closer look at the contributing factors as listed above if you are feeling at all entrepreneurially weary and in need of a solid boost!
