by 4 years ago | 5 min read
Whether you are a new entrepreneur or you already have some business experience, odds are that you’re struggling to reach the level of success you envision. Through my own experiences, the wisdom of my coaches and countless situations with my own coaching clients, I’ve come to the realization that entrepreneurs tend to face and overcome a lot of the same hurdles on their path towards success. I wanted to share with you the 5 most common mistakes that I see entrepreneurs making and the ways that you can overcome these mistakes and move closer to accomplishing your entrepreneurial goals.
1. Limiting Beliefs
We all have limiting beliefs about our potential in life. These limiting beliefs can have a powerful effect on the way we go through life. You may have doubts, fears and anxieties about running your business. You might not think you’re smart enough or ambitious enough to accomplish a specific task. You might not think you can sell a specific amount or get across to a specific customer base. You might not think your product is good enough to beat out your competitors. Limiting beliefs can show up in many different ways.
These limiting beliefs are only as powerful as you let them be. We often become prisoners to our own thoughts and our perceptions of reality. It’s important to take an honest inventory of yourself, your business structure, your products/services and your performance. You may very well have a limiting belief that you can overcome, simply by looking at your situation with some objectivity. If you have trouble doing this on your own, it might be beneficial to confide in someone you trust for business advice. We are often our own toughest critics and we might not be able to look at ourselves in a rational and realistic way.
2. Lack Of A Strategic Plan
In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s important to have a specific vision and intention for your business. You need to know which direction to move in and the right steps to take along the way.
It all starts with having a big goal to work towards. That is the easiest part. Things get more challenging and confusing once you get to the smaller details. An effective way to become more strategic about your goals is to break them down into steps. Take your big goal and work backwards. What would be a good medium-sized goal for you to strive towards? Identify something that will tangibly help you reach your biggest goal. Once you’ve set your mid level goal, you should find the right short term goal to help you get to the mid level goal.
For example, it’s easy to say you want to make a million dollars this year but it will take a more detailed strategy to actually achieve that goal. You might want to identify the exact amount of clients you would need to have, in order to make that million dollars. Reaching that amount of clients will be your mid level goal. You would then figure out the success rate you have with cold calling potential clients. If you’re able to close deals with a quarter of the people you call, you will need to call 4 times the amount of people you need to become clients, in order to make that million dollars. The big goal is making a million dollars. The mid level goal is getting enough clients to make that million. The short term goal is to cold call 4 times the amount of people you need to become clients, in order to make the million dollars.
3. Not Taking Consistent Action
You can have a great mindset and strategic plan for success but if you don’t execute on those things, you won’t accomplish your goals. It’s easy to be trapped in paralysis through analysis. It’s great to strategize your plan but the most important part is to just start moving. Taking that first step on your journey is the most powerful thing you can do to build momentum for yourself. It’s great to have a map to the buried treasure but if you don’t follow that map and dig out the treasure, you’re just wasting your potential and squandering your chance at success.
4. A Lack Of Leverage
You need to have a reason why you’re trying to accomplish something. If you have a shallow reason why you’re doing something, such as money or vanity, you won’t have much motivation to keep grinding towards your goals when things get difficult. If you can dig deeper and find a more powerful reason why you’re working towards your goals, it will help you consistently drive forward on your plans. If your goal is to help people improve their lives with your product or service, it won’t be so easy for you to procrastinate or put in minimal effort.
5. A Lack Of Accountability
I mentioned up above that we are often our worst critics and that we have trouble looking at ourselves and our performances subjectively. The flip side of this is that we may also be less critical of ourselves than we should. If you’re making some success, it will be easy to pat yourself on the back and feel a sense of accomplishment. In reality, you may be selling yourself short and leaving extra success and money on the table. Having a coach, mentor, accountability partner or any other honest and knowledgeable person in your corner will help you see yourself in a more objective light. You might not be able to see for yourself that you still have so much room to improve your performance but if you have solid people in your corner, they can help you set more appropriate goals for you to reach your full potential.
I hope that you’ve found value in this blog post! If you’d like to hear more of my thoughts on this subject, you can check out my video here:
If you’d like to be even more effective as an entrepreneur, check out my blog post on my Top 3 Productivity Hacks here.
