No one prepared me for starting my own business.
Read: I began my own business woefully underprepared.
I grew up with two small business owners as parents. I understood how hungrily this endeavor can eat up evenings, weekends, bank accounts and peace of mind. I floated through the process of registering my sole proprietorship blissfully unaware of how much I had to learn, despite my conviction that I knew nothing and would certainly fail – my personal twist on goal setting. More about that in a future blog post.
What I believed my parents were pouring their time into back then was the actual work. When I quietly crept up the stairs to their home office late at night, most of what I saw them work on was creating graphics. To this day, I don’t know when they actively marketed or where they found the time for bookkeeping.
I, too, labor in a creative field and I wish most of my time were spent creating. Quite often, it looks more like rereading the information from the bank. I speak four languages, but bank is not one of them. So I read and reread and read again to make sure I have it right before I click on anything. The minutes tick by.
Neither am I a computer expert. After a detour through motherhood, I found myself forced to relearn many of the programs I had previously used with confidence. You want me to look at your document in program XYZ? Of course I can work with that file format… and of course I won’t charge you for the 45 extra minutes I need to read up on how to use that file format!
I communicate most often these days either in a foreign language or in my native language to non-native speakers. That brings a completely different set of challenges. I can snap off a quick email to an English-speaking colleague while doing several other things. To be sure I have the tonal nuance and the verb endings correct in a foreign language, I need to pay more attention.
Am I being too real here? No one can anticipate every question to ask and prepare for before stepping into a journey of entrepreneurship. Just like parenting and so many other ventures, it’s impossible to know what you’re in for until you take the plunge. Then why am I still happily working at building a business, despite never having set and followed a five-year plan and still not earning six figures, like so many online coachfluencers promise?
I have learned to see each one of these small moments – banking, computering, communicating – as a triumph, actually. There was a time I would have disqualified myself for NOT knowing the answer to every question and the solution to every problem. The growth mindset I have embraced, and which my friend and coach Lisa continually encourages me in, pushes me forward. Maybe I took a long time on a task, but I did it well, I learned something and I added value to myself and my business by accomplishing it.
This attitude proves difficult to maintain when under internal pressure to perform or external pressure to earn. Let’s consider, then, how useful the alternative is. I’m stupid because I don’t speak bank? I’m incapable of learning new computer skills? I’m bad at communicating? None of those things is true. Neither will they motivate anyone to success.
Let’s hold space for two things to be true simultaneously.
We are queens, because we’re doing all the hard things.
AND
This is going to take a lot of work!
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