by hcingram
Awhile ago* I came across these three SUREFIRE ways for overcoming your fears and doubts.
- Friends
- Facts
- Faith
Starting a new business venture is a risk and I’ve had far more gut clinching moments than expected. A lot of entrepreneurs gloss over how taking on new risks “feel” and I think that is a mistake.
It’s not just me
As I work to build a community of creatives, I have met so many people with enormous creativity and enthusiasm. Entrepreneurs with great ideas, but when I push them to take those ideas to the next level, they get scared. I get. We call this pushback, resistance and we all feel it. I remind folks that:
Success is only obvious in retrospect.
That’s why we make things, test, prototype, and manifest the vision for those that don’t “get it” (and yes that includes ourselves, on occasion). It’s part of the reason I created MATAGI. It’s a community and resource to help creatives find friends, facts, and faith.
True Story
Once I was selected as a new manager to help build a new internal site. I was three months into my job and part of the first wave of folks trained up on SharePoint. It was so new our IT professionals weren’t even up to speed on it. The microsite had 20+ difference permutations (with an ever expanding scope) and it was clear we needed a centralized database. Instead of puzzling out how to centralize the process, the project director was hell-bent on just getting it done. I knew that if we built it the “wrong way” it would be a logistical nightmare updating the content and reconciling the reports on the back-end for whoever was charged with maintaining the site, in addition to taking at least twenty times as long to set up, and likely longer given the scope creep. Fortunately, I had enough faith (and admin rights) to figure out how to architect the site, but even once I figure it out I had to “prove it” -demonstrating the efficiency of the solution to the director who still refused to accept the solution. It was only after I convinced the other site builders, and the IT project manager to confirm that the solution was a best practice that would be replicated throughout the firm – that the director agreed to the solution.
The moral
Even with facts (figuring out the technical solution), faith and friends (IT professional and teammates) backing me up, convincing leadership to accept the solution was still difficult. I pushed on because long term I knew it wouldn’t be the director who suffered from a poorly architected site. Sidenote: the eventual site admin came to me months later and confided that I had saved the project.
Anyway, I hope that story gives you a bit of courage.
Allons-y!
Heather
* I was doing a survey of a bunch of coaches on-line services and honest I can not remember which on said this, if you know, please tell me, I would to give it the proper attribution.