Facing fear as an entrepreneur
By Stanley Gabriel
We hardly need to tell you which challenges you face as an entrepreneur.
It’s unreliable income, more complex taxes, invoicing and following up on incomplete invoice payments, financial literacy, financial management and financial planning.
You generally also don’t have employee benefits and need to create structures ensuring that you are sufficiently protected and building wealth.
Plus, we won’t even mention time, there’s never enough of it…
There may be solutions out there, and we’ll mention them, but we think an entrepreneurial mindset will help a lot of people go a lot further.
Apart from entrepreneurs, even people who work in more steady jobs can learn from being intrapreneurial.
Our environment is a crazy economy robbing us of our disposable income, and fears are solid and valid.
We cannot avoid them. We need them to protect our bodies and minds for our survival. However, we must also avoid being debilitated by fear and letting it stunt our growth and our ability to take on opportunities. Yes, we don’t want to be reckless, but we must overcome what holds us back.
One of the biggest challenges is how to let sensibility overrule fear. You won’t overcome fear by being a bully, and you won’t overcome it by rolling over and showing the white belly of being a victim either. You will overcome it by embracing other people to help you, and by thinking about how you think, and about your past wins and losses, and your unique experiences.
Let’s get practical. After a few years of work, I knew I didn’t want to be an actuary in the true sense of the word. That’s why I’ve often changed careers in my life, and have worked in East and West Africa too. You start conquering your fears of failure one at a time. I won’t call myself a successful entrepreneur: for that I’ve made too many mistakes, but I’ve learnt from what I’ve done wrong.
I’ve learnt that even while there are things you need to face and go through, you should ensure your beliefs don’t hamstring you. You will rob yourself of growth by not embracing fear. It shows us something is at stake, but you can rise and conquer the demon if you want to and avoid the feeling of betraying yourself.
In a way it’s like public speaking. People often think someone who can speak into a microphone has lots of confidence. The truth is that you should just tell yourself in that situation as in many others, “I’m not anxious about this, I’m excited about this.”
In an article, “Conquering fear”, The Wall Street Journal (January 2, 2011) wrote that accepting fears can loosen their grip. This means instead of changing our behaviours of challenging our underlying thoughts, simply observing fears may be more effective in taming them. It will “diffuse their emotional power”. In fact, Professor Zindel Segal at the University of Toronto believes this creates additional brain circuits beyond problem-solving. Rather than being paralysed by negative thoughts, we can work with a clearer set of options based on what really matters.
And this is where your tools will help you: a budget tool, a tax dashboard too, an emergency savings tool, mobile invoicing, and a time tracker. Just sitting down to do the financial planning and management, and some retirement planning for yourself is a great way to gain control.
I’ve heard the quote that fear doesn’t stop death, it stops life… But Marie Curie, the great scientist said, “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
As an entrepreneur, you can do yourself no greater favour. Learn as much as you can about your world, and about the world of finance. And then you can embrace yet another great quote from the American writer Suzy Kassem: “Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.”
Stanley Gabriel is Momentum Investo’s CEO.
BUSINESS REPORT