How to Weather Entrepreneurial Storms

If you’re like most business owners, the first thing you do when you feel

your work isn’t paying off is to look around to see what you’re not accomplishing. What you probably don’t do is check in to see how you’re feeling about everything, which is a huge mistake. As entrepreneurs, we are particularly inclined to focus our energies on the doing part of our work, and assume problems arise because we’re not on top of our tasks.

However, the fact is that business success is as dependent on your inner game as it is on your external productivity—if not more so. So, it’s important for you to check in with your emotional state, especially when committing to taking huge actions like signing up for a new course, starting work with a mentor, or launching your own new projects.

A big trap a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is not planning for potential problems or uneasy emotions when they envision their ultimate goals. Instead of being realistic about how growth occurs, we set ourselves up with an idealized (and totally false) view of success that is all roses and rainbows with pots of gold at the end! As a mission-driven business owner, you’re extremely close to your work, which makes those inevitable pitfalls that much harder to take if you don’t mentally prepare for them ahead of time.

Being successful isn’t about being able to sail along on the calm sea; it’s about having the resilience to take the waves as they come, and swimming back to the surface after your inevitable wipeouts.

One way to help yourself bounce back after hitting a rough patch is to focus on increasing what I call, your attitude altitude. When things aren’t going well and you look at the physical evidence in front of you—your empty bank account, the dent in your car, your crashed website—you want to try to consciously shift your focus to create a different (better) story about your current situation.

Now, this isn’t some “don’t worry, be happy” thing (though there’s a lot of value to that), and it’s not about saying or focusing on things that aren’t true. What it is, is a way to feel better in those tough moments when your present circumstances don’t reflect your ideal of what you envision for your life or your biz.

On your entrepreneurial journey, you will absolutely experience overwhelm and stress and panic along the way, and from time to time, things are going to completely fall apart on you. That’s just the way it goes. If you want to be a successful business owner, it’s up to you to figure out how to batten down the hatches once the storm hits.

Rather than keeping your focus on your current circumstances, you can weather the storm by shifting your thoughts toward what you want to create, the vision of where you want to go, and on how you really want to be feeling. “This is just a short leg of the overall journey, and it’s all part of the process leading me to my ultimate goals.”

Of course, it takes some work to be able to step out of your day-to-day challenges and see them as part of the greater good, but the more you make a point to increase your attitude altitude, the easier it will become.

Lisa Cherney