There will be times in our business when we feel inexperienced.
It’s to be expected. We can’t know everything. No one does.
Yet, when we feel we lack the knowledge or skill in something we believe we need, it can have us coming to a screeching halt.
This is the quiet side of chaos.
When we quit moving toward our goals it actually ends up harder for us to get going again.
What I’ve learned over and over again, since the time I worked at Pizza Hut as a teenager and through every job since, is that anything new begins with not knowing. Then we have to take the necessary actions until we learn, become confident, and advance.
I had to learn how to make the pizzas correctly before I could just turn out dozens of them in an hour. It’s why my manager put me on slow afternoons in the beginning until I “graduated” to Friday nights and was able to crank out and keep up with the orders that were flying through the ticket machine.
Sure that first Friday night was hectic, but I at least knew how to make the pizzas by then and how to make them confidently. The new challenge was keeping up the pace.
Making the money we desire or achieving the impact we want can’t occur without progress. Progress – and the personal growth that comes with it – is the result of having done something we’ve never done before and learning how to do it confidently.
Instead of inexperience slowing us down, keeping us stuck, or stopping us altogether, let’s consider it the necessary factor to growing, gaining confidence, and establishing our long-term success.
Here’s the 3-2-1 on this aspect of the Attitude of Confidence.
3 TRUTHS
- Inexperience can make us feel like we don’t know where to go next and can even lead to us stopping altogether. When we stop, it can take twice as much energy to start again. Instead, we must focus on progress – taking small action steps to gain the experience we need to build our confidence.
- When we create procedures for our lives and follow them, we build confidence in our ability to accomplish whatever goals we set for ourselves. Again, focus on progress. This looks like taking action and then analyzing the results and the motivations for the actions themselves to determine if we are heading where we want to go. If we aren’t, we make the adjustment and take action again.
- Building our confidence through experience – the process and progress of learning, applying, adjusting, and growing – allows us to have failures that don’t stop us but teach us. Messing up one pizza doesn’t destroy my confidence in making pizza, neither should a mistake in business destroy your confidence in doing business. Learn. Adjust. Grow.
2 ACTIONS
- Identify where you’re lacking experience in your business and make a plan for filling that gap.
- Reflect on a recent mistake or failure. Instead of using it as evidence that you can’t do a thing, simply determine the adjustment you need to make to fix it for next time.
1 QUESTION
- What am I requiring myself to know before I take money-generating action in my business?
Here are my two latest guest podcast interviews that will bring more insight into this week’s money conversation. I had the privilege of speaking with Martin Piskoric on his 21st Century Entrepreneurship podcast and Kathy Goughenour of Dare to Leap podcast.
To your impact and legacy,
