Confidence usually
comes easy with people who had a taste of success in their lives. This is true
because they believe in themselves, as well as in what they're doing. However,
it isn't their success that makes them confident; the confidence was there beforehand.
Confidence is a
crucial building block in a successful career, and embracing it fully will take
you places you never thought possible. With proper guidance and hard work,
anyone can become more confident. Once you pass a certain point, you’ll feel it
from the inside.
When it comes to
entrepreneurship, you need to possess qualities that will give you faith in
your own decisions and actions to execute on your ideas. Read on the strategies
below to help you give that boost you need.
1.
Embrace worst case scenarios
How bad could it be? Lack of confidence is often a fear of
failure. Overcoming it starts with figuring out what the problem is.
Identifying the possible negative consequences of our decisions and
entrepreneurial initiatives and then naming their potential solutions reduces
uncertainty and increases confidence.
As an entrepreneur, leveraging the available collegiate
resources such as professors’ advice, library, connections, and things as
little as a printer to pursue a startup venture was a great extracurricular
activity instead of looking for an internship or part-time job while at school.
It will not only help you figure out what it really meant to
build a business, but also to build a stronger resume in case you decide to
look for a job in the future. Even though you did not seek for a job after
college, building a business while in college certainly helped many of your
classmates on that front.
Things that might lead to the worst-case scenario: not earning a
degree, not finding a job, retaking classes, regret, and so on, turned out to
be a competitive advantage over other students who focused entirely and solely
on studies.
Spend time thinking about the worst that can happen. It’ll help
you be more at ease when you start your entrepreneurial endeavor because you’ll
have thought your decisions through completely.
2.
Keep a cash cow: Your monthly revenue goal
Successful entrepreneurs maintain multiple streams of
income—something easier said than done. Specify how much revenue you need to be
generating from your startup for you to let go of other responsibilities (such
as a part or full-time job) to be able to focus entirely on your new business.
Is it $2000, $3000, five, six, or seven clients per month? Identify the magic
number.
Setting a benchmark will help you quantify milestones so you’ll
know when you get there, but most importantly, it’ll help you clear all doubts
by proactively accounting for all your financial concerns about transitioning
to running your new venture full time.
Confidence is gained incrementally, and it’s the small successes
that take us from one increment to the next. So, quantify progress by
highlighting the small accomplishments on your way up to the bigger ones.
3.
Keep mentors in the loop
From every business dimension, the best mentors have
been shown to make a significant impact in entrepreneurial success whether by
boosting new business initiatives, increasing revenue, funding, acquisitions,
partnerships, and more.
When Steve Jobs was 12 years of age, he called the co-founder of
Hewlett Packard, Bill, to ask for spare parts to build a frequency counter.
Bill offered him an internship that summer. Jobs says, “Most people never
pick up the phone and call, most people never ask. And that’s what separates,
sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about
them.”
4.
Launch -- Don't wait for perfection
Groupon, the second fastest company to ever reach a billion
dollars in valuation, started with a WordPress blog. During a design
conference, Airbnb founders saw a need for lodging when all the hotels in the
city were booked so they approached attendees for bed and breakfast.
A product is never perfect so we might as well start with
nothing. Start selling as soon as you find a need, and don’t hesitate to get
paid for a mediocre or even a simulated product (like Groupon) in the
beginning. Starting with an MVP (minimum viable product), one that only
includes the core version of the product, can help you go to market quicker,
test faster and evaluate the potential of the idea without investing a lot of
capital.
Validating the need for your product as early as possible
removes a lot of the guesswork and consequently boosts your confidence about
the potential of the idea.
5.
Learn continuously
More specifically, learn what's relevant. Start by identifying
the areas you need to learn more about and then focus on reading or watching
videos from two to three of the top experts in your industry. Keep in mind that
the most educated are not necessarily the best people to learn from. Those who
got their hands dirty and lived the ups and downs of running, failing, scaling,
and successfully building a business can offer better advice.
It is true that most business decisions cannot wait weeks or
even days, however, investing as little as a couple of minutes to read a book
chapter, articles or even attend an online course or lecture, can tremendously
improve decision making, boost confidence and most importantly, make sense of
the acquired knowledge.
Ultimately, entrepreneurial confidence is about making calculated
choices and being proactive about reducing risk. Remember that taking small
steps—finding a mentor, launching an MVP, or reading a book on innovation in
your industry—can have a big impact over time.
