What is stopping you from starting your new idea or business? (Continued)

Part 2 of 2 on the common hurdles new founders face (a lack of time, money, confidence and focus).

Nearly every new founder faces hurdles of a lack of time, money, confidence and focus.

As I said in the last edition of this newsletter these blocks are the biggest ones holding so many entrepreneurs back. Read about how you can navigate the hurdles of a lack of time and money.

Today: how your confidence and focus issues are blocking your progress.

Image Credit Boyd Work, close up of “Headache”

In sign-ups for the Talent to Money summit, attendees have shared their challenges starting their businesses such as:

• A lack of focused effort, confidence and clarity of purpose

• Finding it hard to take action on my ideas/putting myself out there

• Having tons of ideas but not making the jump action to actually start

Confidence and focus hurdles are intrinsically linked as they manifest as a cycle of inaction.

A cycle which begins with doubts about your business-building capabilities or the idea itself (which is normal until you have paying customers, which you won’t at the start).

The doubt that you have about yourself makes every single small decision seem insurmountable. You start to feel like you cannot trust yourself to get anything right and so will second-guess every action and decision. This second-guessing and indecision breeds a lack of action, which, equals a lack of progress. As you observe this lack of progress it does no favours to your confidence, and you think “Wow I must not be cut out for this, after all!”.

This post will offer suggestions for breaking this cycle — by interrogating both your lack of confidence and lack of focus.

1. A lack of confidence

When you first start your business, you are living in dream land.

Not because you are crazy (necessarily) but because you are managing the tension between your vision, and the reality. The reality you are in, often looks nothing like where you ultimately want to land.

To get to achieve your business’ vision you must dream of a future that could be, and create a plan to take you there.

Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality

― Robin Sharma

This week I’ve binged WeCrashed, the documentary showing the rise and fall of WeWork. CEO and Founder Adam Neumann spends a lot of time in his head, dreaming about the future. His imagination was the driving force behind WeWork, as he saw a future of work and community that did not exist back in 2010.

Years before WeWork, a mentor told Adam “you’re either going to become a billionaire or go to jail”. A pretty good judge of character, I’d say.

A strong vision will carve your trajectory towards the success you dream of for your business — but you ideally want to avoid crazy land. Most of this newsletters readers are logical, practical people who will naturally question the viability of our big dreams. Statistically, we won’t all be successful.

It is this gap between where we are now and where we want to land that creates confidence issues.

Few people have Adam Neumann’s rock-solid confidence to help them time travel from their reality to the future with such certainty.

Instead, we are plagued with doubts:

• Will this idea work?

• Am I really cut out for this?

• Will people pay for this?

• Can I truly rely on my efforts alone to pay the bills?

My clients have these doubts and that’s largely why they get my support in overcoming them. Not because I can provide guarantees but because I can help them ride out the storm and the confidence wobbles they bring.

Learning to ride this out is paramount because navigating the gap between where you are and where you want to go is what business building is about.

You cannot rely on the past or success in other life skills to be a great entrepreneur — these are not necessarily going to create the success you want.

Rather, you become a great entrepreneur through being an entrepreneur who takes the set backs along with the wins, who tolerates rejection and keeps on going.

You have to be OK with being a beginner at first and accepting that you do not have all the answers, and crucially, that the process of finding out those answers could be expose how little you know. When you realise how little you know, you feel pretty stupid. But if you can stay the course, you will pick it up again. I wrote about this confidence curve new founders go through at length in this post here.

I work with a lot of high-achievers, whose talent and intellect is in many ways a barrier to their progress as founders. They have a reputation for themselves they have built up over the years where their identity is now intrinsically tied to their work success. Expectation on themselves is sky-high.

A client once said to me, “I’m the smart and successful one in my group, not the pretty one”. AKA her business had to succeed because that is who she was at her core. The spoke to me a lot.

From school age until today my work has been core to my personality too. As a straight A student with a first class degree from a leading university, these credentials haven’t necessarily helped me in my startup building because (like I am sure many of you feel) the higher you’ve climbed, the further you have to fall.

With a fear that we will fail, comes a fear of the shame we will experience if we do. The shame of judgement from others and ourselves. This fear of getting it wrong is what leads to us waiting for our work to be perfect until we are ‘ready’, or to procrastinate and delay taking action.

Both of these are your focus issues (explored below).

Some of tried and tested tactics for building your confidence from The Ask® coaching toolbox:

• Learn how to quieten your inner critic Start by exploring those negative voices that are holding you back. Give the negative voice a name, acknowledge when you hear it, thank it for trying to protect you, but tell it that its your time not theirs. Keep a track of it and notice your awareness of it improve how you manage it.

• Work on your determination. As we’ve seen this is not about being the smartest, or the craziest, but about determination. Paul Graham said of YC portfolio companies that, “[Determination] has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily.”

• Keep a win log. In the early days progress will be slow, you will not have reached your potential yet, but you can track your early wins. Create a file in your inbox or digital tools (I use Notion) and make a note of positive feedback or experiences that show you you are making progress toward your dream.

• Try Fear-Setting. Often our biggest fears can be managed, by looking at them more objectively and what we would do were we faced with them. Made famous by Tim Ferriss, fear setting is the process of managing the chaos of doing something new or scary such as building a business from scratch.

• Holistic self-care practices. I owe a large part of my mental fortitude and confidence to self-care. The boring basics that bear repeating (that’s getting enough sleep, 3-4 workouts per week, journalling etc). I also have a solid support network, invest in personal and professional development and have fun outside of work. All of these staples are what I need and yours will be different but without looking out for yourself, you won’t feel yourself enough to believe in yourself.

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2. A lack of focus

As we just discussed, you don’t really know what you are doing when you start a business.

Precisely because you do not know, you will experience a level of fear surrounding your actions and decisions…. Fear of getting it wrong, wasting time or money or of looking stupid.

This fear is the reason that many founders tend to procrastinate and in business building there is a particular flavour of procrastination: Motion.

Motion is a type of activity that is related to building your business but activities that don’t really move the needle, unlike action tasks which do.

There is nothing inherently wrong with motion but if stay in motion for too long without the action to support it then you are stuck in stasis. Your business would remain only in dream land without moving closer to reality.

Check yourself on the table below — are you in more motion or action mode?

Motion land tends to be easier psychologically as it brings less scope for failure.

It is the client who spends a lot of their time reading between sessions but not doing the scarier tasks like speaking to someone in their network who could be a potential customer.

It is the hours tweaking documents that will never see the light of day.

Or getting inspiration about how businesses are built —rather than actually building ours and learning from experience.

Aside from the fear of failure and shame that we are avoiding, another reason many new founders stay stuck in motion is that they haven’t figured out a plan for what else they should be doing. Without clarity on what to do, procrastination is inevitable.

There is a pretence that being your own boss is all fun and games because no one is telling you what to do — but that is the double edged sword of entrepreneurship.

When no one is telling you what to do it is easy to remain in a perpetual state of confusion and avoid the tasks that feel scarier or harder (action) in favour of procrastination (motion). This lack of a plan of both what to do and how to spend our time is challenging when you’re used to a workplace with direction, clear performance metrics and other people needing things from you which then dictate how to spend your time.

Without customers or established business operations, you are literally making it up as you go along. You have many options of how you could be spending your time but no answers to the best use of it.

Time too becomes this hard concept to grasp without an employer quantifying your hourly or monthly rate. New founders can forget that time still equals money so the temptation to slip into meaningless tasks is real. My guilty pleasure? Re-ordering my Notion workspace.

Motion, procrastination, a lack of plan or incorrectly valuing your time are all hurdles to overcome in your business building.

The key to overcoming them is to work out a plan for how you should be spending your time and then sticking to it. A plan can come from a solid business strategy, or a plan built through your best judgement available.

Over the years I’ve seen that there is an order of proceedings that make sense for new business owners to follow.

i) Knowing your purpose + how that translates to a business offering
ii) Building confidence and conviction in yourself and idea
iii) Figuring out who your business is for
iv) Figuring out how you can reach them and scaling your efforts

The Talent to Money summit is designed to guide you through these four stages over two days of learning, keynote speeches and workshops. Tickets are free and only ticket holders get access to replays.

Try some of the frameworks I use in my coaching practice:

• Distinguish work ON vs. IN your business Set out dedicated times to work ON your business. This is the time spent being the ‘CEO who makes big decisions’ vs time IN your business when you are the ‘employee following those orders’. Separating out these two types of work helps you to recognise you do have a plan to follow and its your job to do so.

• Track your Motion v Action Now that you are aware of Motion v Action begin to notice time spent in each and set limits for the Motion tasks you are allowed to do each week.

• Set a vision + then quarterly goals Spend time defining your vision for where you are going. This could be through guided meditation, journaling, or with the help of someone else. Capture what you see for your future in terms of where you, what you are working on, how you are feeling and what that could bring about in terms of opportunities. Then work backwards to create some quarterly milestones and goals for each type of project in your vision. Then focus on these at all costs.

• Set up task management systems As a founder, systems for HOW you work as as important as what you do. So set up a task management system (AirTable, Notion, Monday.com) all do the trick and start allocating both projects and individual tasks that line up to your quarterly goals above.

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How to beat these hurdles once and for all.

My hope is that this two part series has helped you to feel less alone in your business building struggles of time, money, confidence and focus. We all experience extremely similar ones, the trick is in how you choose to overcome them.

These two newsletters sit at the cornerstone of the work I do in my coaching practice, where it is my key guiding principle to help people find clarity and confidence in their business decisions, so that they can take action and find momentum to go further, faster. I specifically coach high-achievers new to building their businesses (either full or part-time) to clarify what their business should stand for in the world and figure out the right steps to get them there.

Send me an email if this sounds like you and we will start with a complimentary consultation where I will give you some pointers regardless of if we end up working together. I have just 2 spaces open for June/July start dates and you can see examples of businesses my clients are starting here and some testimonials here.

Thank you for reading as always!

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Ellen Donnelly, Founder + Chief Coach, The Ask

I help ambitious, entrepreneurial professionals decide and plan their next career pivot or business idea so they can feel clear and excited about their future. Apply for coaching.