The Most Important Thing You Need as an Entrepreneur
In a previous blog post, I talked about why personal coaching is the key to clarifying your purpose as an entrepreneur so you can breathe again. I also talked about what personal coaching is and what it is not and how personal coaching differs from mentoring, therapy, or teaching. In today’s post, I want to share with you the most important thing you need as an entrepreneur and how personal coaching helped me get this thing and why you need that thing too.
I believe if you really want to accomplish your dreams and become who you want to be in business and in your life, personal coaching is what ultimately matters. Not the "technical rigor" of your skills. Not your credentials. Not your educational qualifications. Not your professional experience. Not your ideas.
You need something else, something that only a personal coach can give. You need hope. Hope helps you learn how to lead yourself in the face of uncertainty. It helps you envision a concrete path to a better situation which empowers you to set goals and make plans to reach those goals. It helps you take care of yourself. In his paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nir Halevy discovered that lacking hope may cost you and others around you. You need hope to succeed in business and win in life.
Your team needs hope too. In an article by Rick D. Hacket in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology titled Work Attitudes and Employee Absenteeism: A synthesis of the Literature, workers who describe feeling hopeless are more likely to miss work or disengage, leading to higher absenteeism and quit rates. And in another article by IIhan Yalcin and Asude Malkoc in the Journal of Happiness Studies titled The Relationship Between Meaning in Life and Subjective Well-Being: Forgiveness and Hope as Mediators, higher levels of hope are connected to improved well-being and can help people find meaning and purpose.
According to Snyder’s Theory of Hope, hope is defined as “the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.” The theory points out that higher hope consistently is related to better outcomes in academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, and psychotherapy.
I believe if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur and build resilience in the face of uncertainty, you need to operationalize hope in your life. I believe thriving in business and becoming who you want to be as an entrepreneur is about feeling good about you first before you can make anyone else feel good. And to feel good about you, you need hope. You probably are not feeling that good about yourself right now. You don’t need me to share another study with you to remind you that most entrepreneurs are not feeling hopeful about their future. I am not saying you are not taking care of yourself. I am saying you know you deserve better and you are capable of more.
And if you are hopeless, I know how it feels to be hopeless. I have been there. When I started working with my first personal coach, it helped me feel good about me and my future. I started believing in myself again. I started surrounding myself with people that believed in me. I finally had a team.
Personal coaching is how you take care of you before you take care of others. It’s how you build the best team around you. It’s how you grow as an entrepreneur. It’s how you make the most impact by impacting you first. Anthony M. Grant, author of a 2003 study titled The Impact of Life Coaching on Goal Attainment, Metacognition and Mental Health, discovered that life coaching enhanced mental health and satisfaction with life in individuals. Anthony Grant notes in his study that even though life coaching is not specifically focused on mental health, it improves mental health functioning. In a study with 20 post-graduate students, Grant found that not only did goal attainment increase after coaching, but depression, anxiety, and stress were notably reduced after the coaching.
Why is that important?
What a personal coach gave me was something I couldn’t give to myself at the time I was struggling to become who I wanted to be and take control of my life. But when I started coaching, I finally had someone who understood my problems. I had someone in my corner that believed in me and understood my desires. Not just what I was interested in doing with my life or what I wanted. But someone who understood my deep emotional needs.
The problem is I didn’t know who I was and I was busy trying to hold on to things that I thought could sustain me, but when I discovered who I really was, I was able to let those things go. There is a quote in Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility in the Workplace, that describes what happens when you don’t know who you are or when your team doesn’t know who they are.
“The problem is your people don’t know who they are,” … “Thus, they tend to identify themselves with their roles, their reputations, the company itself, and the current way of doing things. When the stability of any of these factors is threatened, their automatic response is to resist, and to resist as if they were protecting their own selves. Because they are protecting who they think they are, they do so with considerable force.”
While I was busy trying to hold on to these things that I thought were who I was, deep inside me was a deeply wounded little boy who needed someone to give him hope. I couldn’t find this hope in my profession, business or with friends. It came from a personal coach.
My coach became part of my team. Personal coaching gave me a team that believed I was the best person around to do what I needed to do with my life and to solve the problems I needed to solve with my goals and fulfill my own needs. Personal coaching taught me how to lick my own wounds. I want to help you lick your own wounds. That’s what great entrepreneurs do. They have an amazing ability to lick their own wounds and bounce back from failure and setbacks much quicker than most people. Anyone can learn this skill.
If you are ready for more in business and in your life and want help building the joyful, passionate, and profitable business you deserve, book a free consultation call with me. I’ll help you get clear on who you really are as an entrepreneur, be more confident about your unique brand voice, and empower you to expand the quality of your presence and influence in the global marketplace. You’ll know how it feels to build your business differently and pursue the right goals. You’ll stop wasting your time on people who don’t value you or people you can’t make a difference to.