How to Own Your Life In Three Steps
Leadership takes courage.
If you are not equipped to face the challenges of ownership, your business will quickly become an unrewarding chore, rather than a joyful expression of who you are and what you want to bring to the world.
How equipped are you to face these challenges?
Think about why you started your company in the first place. It was more than the desire to create a job for yourself. You wanted to build something that you owned! Whether it was ownership of your life, the desire to stand back and watch proudly as you brought value to the world with a business you built with your own hands, or even the adventure of breaking free from the 9-5 life, you wanted to be accountable to no one but yourself.
But that freedom comes at a price. It means that you can't push the blame on someone else when things aren't going according to plan. It means that you are the one who answers when a mistake is made. It means that the choices you make hold the greatest kind of weight because you own the consequences.
It's a difficult truth that the overwhelm so many business owners endure is actually a result of their desire to be free from that very thing! In a pursuit of absolute ownership, the business owner has created his or her own greatest obstacle – the obligation to know everything, when it's impossible for them to do so. Succumbing to this obligation in your business will leave you ineffective at best, and underwater at worst.
Be Courageous!
The word 'courage' comes from the Latin root 'cor,' meaning heart or innermost feelings. Somehow, over time, it has come to be associated with fearlessness.
Attempting to live without fear is often held as a virtue. This is ridiculous! It is futile. Fear is a part of being human.
The fear of making mistakes in your business.
The fear of not knowing all the answers.
The fear of what others think.
Courage is about feeling fear and not being stopped by it. Fear is a reason to act, not a reason to avoid what really needs to be done.
A Story of Courage
Here's an example of the kind of courage it takes to run a small business.
Jill, a client of mine, is a dentist who came to E-Myth because she was attracted to the idea of systemizing her practice and making the franchise prototype that would allow her to open up new offices throughout her state and across the country. She had worked hard as a dentist for over 10 years, but somehow - somewhere along the way - had lost enthusiasm for the practice and was getting seriously burned out.
She wanted transformation.
The Challenging Part
The first thing Jill had to realize was that her transformation had to start with her own mindset and point of view.
She was trained in school to be an expert technician, a highly-skilled dentist. But that expertise alone was not enough to sustain her passion for the work.
I knew that in order to reignite Jill's passion for the business, she would have to tear down the barriers that were removing the joy she originally felt. In order to do that, she had to recognize how she was actually contributing to the issues.
This was a struggle.
She was very outer-directed when we discussed what wasn't working with her business. Everything was always someone else's fault: her employees weren't committed or were incompetent; her patients wouldn't cooperate. For quite some time, she wasn't willing to look at how she was a part of the problem. She had to face the fear and feel the pain of recognizing where she was wrong before she could make the right changes in her business.
It wasn't until she gained the courage to question her long-held assumptions that things really started to shift. The more we talked about this from the E-Myth Point of View, the more Jill began to see the impact her distorted perspective was having on the business. She recalled times in the past when she'd had a different, more positive attitude, and when she'd had more energy, more enthusiasm, and was much more proactive about making things happen. Over time, Jill began to rekindle and re-awaken to a more productive point of view, and that started to open up a new world of possibility for herself and her people.
Whereas before she had seen only problems and frustrations in her business, she began to frame the same situations as opportunities for improvement and innovation.
One of the most courageous and productive things she did in her business was to take a look in the mirror and recognize where she needed help.
Rise to the Challenge: Own Your Choices
Jill's history was full of hurdles that could have held her back or kept her down.
When she was very young she went through a tough divorce and had to raise her child as a single-mother. What did she choose to do at that point? She chose to pursue her dreams and finish her schooling.
After she became a dentist she could have gone to work for someone else's company, but instead chose to create her own.
And of course, when she realized she was struggling and things needed to change, Jill made the choice to call E-Myth and get help!
Through all of these struggles, it was her dedication to push through the hardship, pain and embarrassment that finally caused her business to run the way she always dreamed.
Here are three steps you can take right now to become a more courageous business leader and take ownership of your life:
- Take a good, hard look at how your business is a reflection of you. Find one positive thing that you really like about your business that you can trace back to being a reflection of you, and find one way your business reflects something negative about you that you'd like to change.
- Try to identify what you might be fearful of and what you might be avoiding, and commit yourself to facing those fears and uncertainties in pursuit of your goals.
- Receive accountability. Get insight about yourself from someone else who can offer you an observer's point of view about what you do well and what you need to work on. This could be a trusted friend, a manager or employee in your business, or even a business coach. Don't shrink away from what they have to say. Be courageous and put yourself in their shoes to see what you might be missing.
What is your story? How have you had to show strength and courage to get where you are today? How will being courageous – facing the things that naturally cause you fear and pushing through them – get you to where you want to be? Isn't it worth it?
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