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Growing Your Business - 7 Tips to Gracefully Manage the Awkward Stage

Written by: Monique MacKinnon

Article Overview: Although growing a business is not for the faint of heart, you can still enjoy the process. This article gives you 7 tips for gracefully moving through the awkwardness of financial uncertainty and personal vulnerability which business owners typically face. If you like dancing or sports, this is for you!

Growing Your Business - 7 Tips to Gracefully Manage the Awkward Stage

When you first learn a new skill, what does it feel like? Can you remember? Are you like a duck that on the surface of the water appears unruffled but who is paddling away furiously underwater? We will take a further look at this with a "human" example. When you are first learning a new dance - or move - your steps feel awkward, as if your brain is not in synch with your body. You use steps that are either too big or too small; you feel self-conscious and uncomfortable; and, you may even step on others'toes. It is like you have not yet grown into your bigger "feet"; you are still adjusting to the new dance moves.

Compare your dancing experience to getting known in your area of expertise, target market, or company that you work for. This process typically entails becoming (more) visible or assuming greater responsibility, and as a prerequisite, stretching who you are being and increasing your sphere of influence. While this change can expose you to a greater number and/or variety of professional opportunities, it also requires getting comfortable with being emotionally vulnerable. And being vulnerable is not easy, is it? Yet a stage of awkwardness - of uncertainty and vulnerability - must be passed by all of us before mastery sets in.



How can you effectively grow your business or into your desired position so that it is not too stressful? Take a look at the tips provided below, and Type A personalities, pay extra attention.

7 Tips for Easing into Awkwardness:

1. Make a commitment to go deeper into your area of expertise, target market, and relationship with yourself and others.
2. Every day, practice being in your Courage (not Comfort) Zone.
3. Be okay with the fact that your moves in the beginning will be more awkward than graceful.
4. Develop a sense of urgency with what needs to be done while ensuring that you stay focused on your intent and Less Effort, More Ease.
5. Build regular breaks of diversion into your schedule so that you can sustain your momentum.
6. Ask others to be supportive and gentle with you as you are moving into your new "place".
7. Trust that the knowledge, wisdom, tools and resources will come to you exactly when you need them if you ask for inspiration and focus your attention (lightly, so that your energy is still expansive instead of constricting) on this request.

Now, transform the above tips into habits and ground them into your everyday reality, for a minimum of 30 consecutive days. By then, a new neural pathway will have been created in your brain and the habit will become automatic - like the figure skater who does her figures or the basketball player who shoots hoops every day.

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Article Tags: business owners, financial uncertainty, growing a business, sports, vulnerability
Referred by: http://www.prostrategies.com



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Business Tips - How about: Tips for managers to handle employees more effectively? Tips on how to deal with difficult customers? Tips on how to deal more effectively with suppliers? The only three I have in mind right now, but will try to come up with something else. Chris
Re: What's 1 word to describe what your business will be in 2012 - Growing. MichelleJ
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Exclusive: Interview with Results - Hi Forum Members, I'm helping start up a Business Coaching and Consulting company here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (a Subsidiary of RSC Business in Los Angeles). As a Research and Development Intern I am required to practice my listening and interview skills by surveying Small and Medium Businesses on thier Business. This Survey is designed by RSC Business to also assist the Business being interviewed more insight into their own business. I am looking to interview about 30 businesses across North America over the span of 3 months. At the end of these interviews I will be publishing a report of the results and they will be made available for free to the Interviewees. The Report data will include responses from a minimum of 100 interviews. I would like to extend this opportunity to members of the Forum. If you would like to have this short 20-30 minute interview conducted on your Business and you reside in North America please send me an email or PM. Please contact me at andy[at]jvprosperity[dot]com to arrange our interview and to get free access to the results when they are published.
God's Diet - Very interesting, from both a health perspective and a marketing perspective. Growing up Mormon we were raised on The Word of Wisdom. No coffee, no tea, no junk food, no smoking, no drinking..etc. All good. But I think its harder and harder to find true, pure food these days. And lets face it, I'm not likely to start growing my own produce or keeping cattle..


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