Tweet

Make These Recession Survival Strategies Work For You: Courage and Entrepreneurship

Written by: Bill Templeman

Article Overview: Becoming a successful entrepreneur requires courage, faith, honesty, initiative trust in others and above all, the ability to take risks. Entrepreneurship cannot be learned from a book or from a seminar. It must be practiced. Know yourself, know your brand and focus on what you want to create.

Make These Recession Survival Strategies Work For You: Courage and Entrepreneurship

Whether you are a business owner, an employee or a solo entrepreneur, you will need to be at your best to survive this recession. Victim behaviour, blaming others, the bunker mentality and obsessive cynicism are all strategies for failure. Regardless of your own financial predicaments, the best person to get things moving is patiently waiting for you in the mirror.

There is more than enough gloomy news to discourage everyone. We all know the script: Bank failures, stock market crashes, credit crunches, job losses and an unprecedented collapse of consumer confidence. Not that you should hide from bad news. Instead, you need to confront it and try to understand it. But you should not wallow in this bad news. You need to move beyond passive news consumption and take action. Now perhaps more than any time in the past, you need to arouse your own inner entrepreneur .

The way of the entrepreneur is not easy. At a time when circumstances cry out for bold action, employees often shrink into a self-preserving shell of hyper-cautiousness. Business owners who need their staff to come up with new ways to compete and succeed instead are confronted with apathy, fear and hopelessness. How can you turn the corner?

What does it take to work like an entrepreneur?

Know Yourself: First you have to know your own strengths, be willing to believe in your own dreams, have faith in your ability to create the results you want, know what is most important in your life and know what you want to achieve.

Know Your Brand: What is your brand? Where do you stand? If you had 20 seconds in an elevator to describe your brand, what would you say? What stories of your life and accomplishments will you want people to talk about at your funeral?

Drive: Whether you are a leader or an employee, successful entrepreneurship requires great energy and drive. You have to get in touch with what you really want and why that is so important to you. You need to be able to paint a picture of your own success in your mind then be ready to put all of your energy behind the goal of converting your dream into a reality. You have to be hungry for success.

Values: You have to know what your core values are and what is most important to you. Why? Because these core values will leave their mark on everything you do. These values have to be aligned with whom you really are and what you really want to create. And others will have to find your values compelling.

People: Entrepreneurs need to attract and convince others. They have to understand how to motivate employees, attract investors, satisfy clients, sustain mutual trust and treat everyone with respect. Other people must want to get on board your bus and want to travel with you. So you have to know how to listen and how to motivate others.

Honesty: Successful entrepreneurs start from where they really are, not from where they would like to be. They are brutally honest with themselves and invite honest feedback from partners, employees and clients. An entrepreneur with a bad idea wants to know what is wrong.

Initiative: Great achievements in business do not happen without a strong willingness to get started, to take action, even if the action is not precisely the best action possible. We have all read the stories of legendary entrepreneurs who started as taxi drivers, bought their own cab, borrowed more money, bought a share in a small business then leveraged their success into a significant business empire. Are those entrepreneurs really all that different from the rest of us?

Courage: Can courage be learned, or is it something we are born with? Dr. Merom Klein of the Courage Institute maintains that courage is a choice we can all make about how we deal with the adversity around us. All of us face fears, but we need to learn what we should and should not be afraid of, then how we can face those fears constructively. Successful entrepreneurs are very skilled at separating useless fears from those they need to confront and overcome. Fear of bankruptcy is real; all entrepreneurs need to confront this fear and deal with it. Fear of market rejection in launching a new business can, on the other hand, keep a potentially successful entrepreneur frozen in a stultifying career that leads nowhere.

Taking Risks: Along with confronting fear, entrepreneurs need to know how to take the big risk, the risk that will either launch them on the road to success or cause them to fail and have to start all over again. Successful risk takers, whether in business or any other field, need to know how to manage risks and take control of as many of the variables as they can. Successful entrepreneurs who take risks are sometimes very cautious individuals. They leave as little as possible to chance. They conduct detailed risk-assessments, weigh all their options, do their research and design backup systems in case of trouble. But in the end they stand up and move. They take the risk.

If you are a business owner or a manager, how can you help your people become more entrepreneurial at work?

· Model all the entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours you want to see in your people

· Be radically honest with them

· Help your people to get in touch with their own higher purposes for coming to work

· If you expect them to share your risks, be prepared to also share your rewards

· Foster a sense of rigorous discipline

Demonstrate trust in others; for many, this is the biggest risk of all

Related Articles
  Sales Courage and Resilience
  Growing Under Pressure
  Mental Toughness=Profits and Success Today
  How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive During The Recession
  Why You Must Keep Marketing Through The Recession

Article Tags: ascii, bidi, endif, family auto, fareast, font definitions, font weight, gte, h3, level 3, mso, orphan, pitch, purple text, size 13, size 9, style definitions, style name, text decoration, times new roman



Related Forum Posts
Books for Women Entrepreneurs - There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here. It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new. In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment! 1. The Old Girl's Network 2. Mother's Work 3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women 4. Pitch Like A Girl 5. Workplace Warrior 6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer 7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery 8. She Wins, You Win 9. Napoleon On Project Management 10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do 11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years 12. The One Minute Millionaire 13. Talking From 9 to 5 14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions 15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success 16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded 17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful 18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End 19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide 20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen 21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business 22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker 23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business 24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises 25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy 26. The Promotable Woman 27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it 28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home 29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Re: Essential Leadership skills - Courage
Re: Ladies Who Launch Profiles - What a truly amazing lady! Thanks for posting this ideasuniverity, it had me hooked from beginning to end and then I had to go and look at the website. The words "Courage is not a gift, courage is a decision" really make you think. Take care, Carol
Re: Quote of the Day - "The only people witho - Thanks for sharing this Evan, there are some very powerful quotes in there, I particularly like this one:- You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don't think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully. regards, Mal.
Re: Hi there! I'm Shanuna Cortez - Welcome Shanuna to the club. We will like you to post and let us know more about British Entrepreneurship Society


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Designing Employee-Enhancing Training Programs

Leader's Success Secret: Celebration

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.