When considering starting your own company, there are a lot of financial, legal and business questions you need to ask yourself. "How am I going to raise money? Who are my competitors? Are there patents on similar products?" I’m not going to focus on those types of questions here. I’m going to focus on the intangibles. Here are nine questions that you need to ask yourself about your own capabilities and personality as an aspiring leader. 1. How much responsibility can I take on? You will be responsible for not only yourself and your business but everyone that has a vested interest in it. This includes employees and their families, investors, business partners, clients and the community in which you run your business. It’s one thing to put your own fortune and reputation on the line; it’s another when you get other people and their livelihoods involved. Being your own boss sounds nice, but you’ll realize quickly just how much weight your shoulders can hold. Make sure you know you can handle it, for your own sake and theirs. 2. What am I willing to sacrifice in order to make this work? There are tremendous sacrifices involved in starting up a business. Those sacrifices will include sleep, hobbies, exercise, relationships, vacations and your own personal freedom. A lot of these sacrifices are the result of realizing who you’re responsible to (see above). Be ready to sacrifice a lot in order to succeed and ask yourself if those sacrifices are worth the potential reward? More importantly, and more realistically, ask yourself if it would still be worth it if all of that sacrifice results in failure? 3. Can I remain calm amid constant chaos? Batton down the hatches! You’ll be dealing with a storm of confused emotions and organizational chaos. How you relieve stress is incredibly important. Make sure that you have the mental fortitude to deal with an incredibly stressful environment and that you know how to decompress. Whether it’s exercise, meditation, yoga or whatever else -- make sure that you know how to relieve stress. 4. Can I make a decision under pressure? When you start a company, you will be dealing with issues that you could have never imagined. You’re involved in every decision and every detail. This means everything from legal to hiring, accounting, marketing, sales, IT and design. You need to be able to calmly, rationally and quickly assess a situation and act. You’ll need to be decisive. As Brian Tracy says “decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all”. Be able to make the decision, move on, and deal with the results. We all make bad decisions at some point. 5. Am I able to back down when I realize I’m wrong? Leadership is as much about being able to accept when you’re wrong and listening to your team, as it is about being right. No one likes a boss who can’t admit when their wrong. If you’re leading the team in the wrong direction and people are pointing it out to you, as a leader you need to accept that fact and change course. Being able to listen to your team and heed their advice is a hallmark of a good leader. 8. Can I let someone go, including someone close to me? A lot of startups involve friends. Those friends may come from the neighborhood, university or a previous job. Sometimes those friendships get in the way of good business judgement. If anyone, including a friend, is dragging down the business despite repeated attempts to motivate them and having given them a fair chance, they need to go. This is part of your responsibility to everyone on the team who is executing, as well as all of the others mentioned in no. 1 above. 9. What are my reasons for starting this company? Is it to make money, change the world, disrupt an industry, work for yourself, passion, pride? There are a lot of reasons people start companies. Make sure you know why you’re starting your company and that the reason is sound. Be realistic if you’re setting out to change the world. Change doesn’t come easy. Make sure that change is wanted or necessary when trying to disrupt an industry. Be self-motivated if you want to work for yourself, and make sure that passion and pride are both in check. Once you’ve answered these nine questions, get ready for a whirlwind. You’ll feel extremes of every emotion from exhilaration to sorrow, success to failure, anxiety to serenity, doubt to certainty and anger to pleasure. You’ll feel many of those conflicting emotions at the same time and sometimes for the same reason. It’s a wild ride, and if you’re ready for it take the gloves off and come out swinging for the fences, it’s totally worth it. Lastly, don’t overthink it. If you ask yourself too many questions, you’ll never get them answered and wind up never starting anything at all. RYAN MCMUNN CONTRIBUTOR Founder & CEO BRIC Language Systems https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279070 7. Can I manage a diverse group of people? You are going to be responsible for putting a team together that will inevitably have different political, social and economic backgrounds. They will have different attitudes, personalities and viewpoints. These differences are to be celebrated, but they will also need to be managed and lead towards a common goal. Can you, as a leader, bring your team together when they don’t see eye-to-eye and are at each other’s throats? It will happen, you need to be able to help them forward as a team. Sometimes these differences are impossible to overcome and change needs to happen. 6. What are my own weaknesses?
Being self-aware isn’t a prerequisite for being a good leader, but it should be. You need to know how what you think, say and do are perceived by others. This is far different from being self-conscious. Being self-aware allows you to understand others and effectively motivate, discipline and lead them. It’s recognizing not only where you’re strong but also where you’re weak -- and using that to build a team that compliments those weaknesses with strength.
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T.S. Eliot was clearly onto something when he asked, “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” The very act of stepping outside of your comfort zone is critical to your success and well-being. Our brains are wired such that it’s difficult to take action until we feel at least some stress and discomfort. In fact, performance peaks when we’re well out of our comfort zone. If you’re too comfortable your performance suffers from inaction, and if you move too far outside of your comfort zone you melt down from stress. Peak performance and discomfort go hand in hand. Stepping outside of your comfort zone makes you better, and it doesn’t have to be something as extreme as climbing Mount Everest. It’s the everyday challenges that push your boundaries the most, none of which require a flight to Nepal. Step out of your comfort zone and embrace these challenges. 1. Get up early. Unless you’re a morning person, getting up earlier than usual can take you way out of your comfort zone. However, if you get up well before you have to start getting ready for work, it’s worth it. It gives you an opportunity to collect your thoughts and mentally prepare yourself for the day ahead, rather than just dashing from one activity to another. It also gives you the opportunity to eat a good breakfast and exercise, both of which have well-known health benefits. 2. Accomplish an “impossible” goal. Few things compare to the exhilaration of accomplishing something that you didn’t think you were capable of. These achievements fall so far outside of your comfort zone that they seem impossible. Maybe it’s running a marathon or giving a keynote speech at a convention. These accomplishments are worth every bit of suffering you endure to achieve them because once you finally do it, you feel invincible and carry that triumph with you forever. 3. Meditate. It’s easy to get stuck in your comfort zone when you’re so busy that you don’t slow down enough to really think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Meditation is a great way to break this cycle and also happens to be very good for your brain. Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar found that meditation creates important physical changes in your brain. It increases brain density in areas responsible for self-control, focus, problem-solving, flexibility and resilience. Best of all, these changes are lasting. 4. Focus on one thing at a time. Focusing completely on a single task is a big risk -- the risk of failing at something to which you’ve given your all. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable. The alternative -- multitasking -- is a real productivity killer. Research conducted at Stanford confirms that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully. When you spread yourself too thin and chase after every bright, shiny thing that catches your eye, you’re missing out on an important opportunity for personal growth. 5. Volunteer. It would be great if everyone volunteered for purely altruistic reasons, but we all have demands on our time and have to set priorities. The problem is that after a long workday, volunteering can get pushed down somewhere below watching “epic fail” videos on YouTube. Volunteering is a powerful experience that feels good and expands your network at the same time. Have you ever met anyone who made volunteering a priority and wasn’t changed for the better by the experience? Neither have I. 6. Practice public speaking. You’ve likely heard that the majority of people fear public speaking more than death. In fact, 74 percent of Americans have glossophobia (the fancy word for a fear of public speaking). So, yes, it’s a challenge. It’s also worth it. Whether you’re addressing five people around a table or an audience of five thousand, becoming a better public speaker can be a huge boon to your career. 7. Talk to someone you don’t know. Unless you’re an extreme extrovert -- or a politician -- talking to new people probably makes you at least somewhat uncomfortable. Do it anyway. Social interaction is good for your mood (even when you don’t like it), expands your network, exposes you to new ideas and boosts your self-confidence. 8. Bite your tongue. Sure, it can feel so good to unload on somebody and let them know what you really think, but that good feeling is temporary. What happens the next day, the next week or the next year? It’s human nature to want to prove that you’re right, but it’s rarely effective. In conflict, unchecked emotion makes you dig your heels in and fight the kind of battle that can leave you and the relationship severely damaged. When you read and respond to your emotions, you’re able to choose your battles wisely and only stand your ground when the time is right. The vast majority of the time, that means biting your tongue. 9. Say no. Research conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout and even depression. Saying no is indeed a major challenge for many people. No is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. When it’s time to say no, avoid phrases such as I don’t think I can or I’m not certain. Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them. When you learn to say no, you free yourself from unnecessary constraints and free up your time and energy for the important things in life. 10. Quit putting things off. Change is hard. Self-improvement is hard. Scrounging up the guts to go for what you want is hard, and so is the work to make it happen. When things are hard, it’s always easier to decide to tackle them tomorrow. The problem is that tomorrow never comes. Saying you’ll do it tomorrow is just an excuse, and it means that either you don’t really want to do it or that you want the results without the hard work that comes along with it. Bringing It All TogetherStaying in your comfort zone means stagnation. Just as an oyster only makes a pearl when it’s irritated by a grain of sand, no one has ever accomplished anything remarkable when comfortable. TRAVIS BRADBERRY CONTRIBUTOR Co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and President at TalentSmart https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/279114 1. create a blog about your brand 2. blog consistently create a case on what people can expect consistently2 3. create/build an email list 4. network consistently reach out and comment on peoples blog know the right people to get in 5. doing guest post on sites |
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