How to Build Your Resilience as an Entrepreneur
When psychologists and other professionals talk about resilience, they’re discussing an individual’s ability to cope with the traumas, stressors, and everyday problems they encounter in their life’s journey without letting it derail them from their goals. Entrepreneurship depends deeply on an individual’s resilience to work
If you’re looking to improve your success while building a business, you need to know how to build resilience and maintain it.
Self-Respect
The first key to building up resilience is developing a profound sense of self-respect. This doesn’t mean becoming arrogant or self-aggrandizing. Quite the opposite. If you respect yourself, you also want to hold yourself accountable when you do wrong so you can do better and keep moving forward. Most importantly, though, if you respect yourself you won’t be willing to take a bad deal or settle for a situation that won’t work for your new endeavor. That’s really the key to successful entrepreneurship.
Boundaries
Another key way to build resilience is to get good at building and maintaining boundaries. By defending your own borders and the borders of your scheduled time, you’re better able to make sure you have the resources to marshal when the next obstacle pops up. That way, you can keep moving from task to task without getting worn down.
Cultivate Your Drive
It takes a lot of psychological stamina to feel ambition when there isn’t any proof you’re succeeding, and setting up a business requires a lot of work on the front end before you start to see even a hint of reward. Cultivating your drive means learning how to keep yourself motivated, when to celebrate your little wins along the way, and what it means to step back and appreciate your progress even if you aren’t yet launched.
Focus on Others
One of the strongest shared traits of individuals known for high resilience is their focus on others. You need to be sure you’re not focusing on them to the point where you’re neglecting your own needs and tasks. That’s why boundaries and self-respect have to come first, before your focus on others. At the same time, though, if you are focused on providing your team with the resources and tools they need, then it’s easier for them to deliver a great performance that will help your whole company succeed.
Putting these tools together isn’t simple, but when you find you balance, you will be able to stay resilient through all the challenges of entrepreneurship. Keep working on it while you work on your next company, and learn how much stronger you can be as a negotiator and a manager.
