As an Entrepreneur – ARE YOU
- Willing to take ownership of your life and business?
- Self-directed, action-oriented and highly engaged?
- Highly resilient, resourceful and solution-oriented?
- Cultivating curiosity, creativity and critical thinking?
- Following through on simple solutions for unforeseen opportunity?
- Creating value for others?
- Capable of critical guidance?
If your answer to all these questions is in the Affirmative i.e. emphatic YES – then you possess all the ingredients for success as an Entrepreneur. You definitely deserve accolades for having an ENTREPRENEUR MINDSET.
In case of any deficiency in this regard, it’s time to correct your course. Then profitability path to success is no longer distant – may be within approximate proximity.
What is Mindset?
Our Mindset is the underlying mechanism that can expose opportunities.
It can ignite our ambition, engage our faculties in ways that enable us to flourish and thrive.
On the negative side, our Mindset can also blind us to opportunities and hinder our ability to learn and grow. It can even drag you to unproductive patterns of thought and action.
There are Multiple Versions of Mindset such as:
- A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretations of situations.
- A mental inclination, tendency, or habit.
- A person’s usual attitude or mental state is his or her mindset.
- A person’s way of thinking and his opinions.
What is the Connotation of Entrepreneurial Mindset?
An Entrepreneurial Mindset is a specific set of beliefs, knowledge, and thought processes that drive Entrepreneurial behaviour.
Entrepreneurial Mindset refers to a specific state of mind which orientates human conduct towards entrepreneurial activities and outcome.
Individuals with Entrepreneurial Mindsets are often drawn to opportunities, innovation, and new value creation. Incorporating an Entrepreneurial Mindset into your everyday life will help you to minimize the importance of failure and rejection in your life.
“An entrepreneurial mindset recognizes opportunities, explores them, and finds ways to create value. Value is adding value to the lives of others.”
Dr. Martijn Driessenry
8 Ps Of Entrepreneurial Mindset
Entrepreneurial Traits at a Glance
Characteristic or traits associated with typically successful entrepreneurs are:
- Good Leader
- Optimistic
- Confident
- Passionate
- Discipline
- Proactive
- Open-mindedness
- Competitive
- Compassionate
Significance of Entrepreneurial Mindset
An entrepreneurial Mindset is vital to the growth of the Entrepreneurial journey. It can:
- Aid creation of confidence.
- Enable capitalising on emerging opportunities.
- Encourage risk-taking ability.
- Facilitate setting of goals and milestones for self-improvement.
Entrepreneurs know they can improve a situation, and create new opportunities by adopting the concept of SMART.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-sensitive
Stages of Entrepreneurial Journey
Undoubtedly such a tedious Entrepreneurial Journey is made substantially easy with imbibing an Entrepreneurial Mindset.
Basic Ingredients of Entrepreneurial Mindset
The recipe for cultivating Entrepreneurial Mindset warrants a mix of basic ingredients:
- Vision
- Passion
- Experiment
- Value
- Innovation
- Balance in work in life
- Networking
- Marketing
How will you Cultivate an Entrepreneurial Mindset?
Being a successful entrepreneur requires:
- Out-of-box thinking.
- Larger-than-life ideas.
- Creative, communicative, and highly motivated to succeed.
- Open to risk and failure.
There is a certain amalgam of skills and traits which allows some entrepreneurs to become substantially successful.
A Positive Mental Attitude
A positive attitude and outlook are essential for successful entrepreneurs.
The mindset of the head of the company sets the tone for the rest of the company and influences corporate culture.
When you are the boss, a positive attitude influences others in a similar positive way.
How Can You Cultivate A Positive Attitude For Business?
- By relinquishing negativity.
- Being positive is one of the easiest ways to cultivate a positive attitude and to focus on the things you can control.
A Creative Mindset
The adage “Creativity is the mother of invention” is most relevant for the world of entrepreneurship.
Creativity is needed for entrepreneurial success.
The mind of an entrepreneur is always looking for novel ideas and innovations.
The basic life cycle of any entrepreneurial product stems from the conception of an idea followed by turning that idea into a viable product or service.
Persuasive Communication Ability
The best entrepreneurs are persuasive individuals.
The power of persuasion can help them to:
- Negotiate.
- Close a sale.
HOW CAN YOU CULTIVATE PERSUASIVENESS FOR BUSINESS?
Mastering persuasive tactics can mean the difference between financial success or ruin. Here’s how to make the art of persuasion work for you in business.
RECIPROCATE
When a person does you a favour, you must provide a favour in return.
Try to make your persuasive case by “giving” something to the person you’re trying to persuade. You may just close the deal or make the sale.
LOOK TO OTHERS
Social proof can be used as a persuasive tool in business. If you’re trying to sell one of your products, showing how the product has been successful for others can help make that sale.
USE LABELS
Appealing to one’s reputation is a powerful persuasive tool. You can use this mode of persuasion by indicating that they should act in a way that is consistent with a label.
Intrinsic Motivation and Drive?
One of the top entrepreneurial characteristics is intrinsic motivation meaning:
- One should be self-motivated.
- Having a lot at stake personally fuels the motivational drive.
HOW CAN YOU CULTIVATE INTRINSIC MOTIVATION FOR BUSINESS?
One way to stay motivated in the long-term is to keep the focus on the endgame, the big picture.
- Where is your company headed?
- What plans do you have in the future to grow and expand?
- Formulating long-range goals and plans keeps the motivational fires burning.
Tenacity and an Ability to Learn from Failure
The key to learning from failure is to actually learn and embrace your mistakes so they make you better, not break you.
Do not expect yourself to be perfect in the pursuit of your business dream. It is, by definition, impossible.
Failure is inevitable. Your reaction to failure is what you make of it. Here’s how to cultivate that and use your failure to come out even more successful in the long term.
Do not attach judgment or blame when you fail. Business failure should not make you feel ashamed or embarrassed. Do your best to remove the emotion from the mistakes you make as an entrepreneur. This is how you can logically explore ways to improve yourself and your company. Turn off your negative self-talk and learn to say “Now I know better for next time!” instead.
Use Tough Times To Learn From Adversity
Let times of adversity lead you to strength.
Failure can be your best chance to learn how to do something right.
Use these setbacks to develop ideas and tactics for how you want to run your business in the future.
Don’t Be Afraid To Change Course And Reset
Even the best-laid plans will sometimes go awry. That’s the nature of life, as well as business. There will come a time when you may realize that something simply is not working. You may have to adjust your planned course, reset, and start again.
NEVER GIVE UP!
The vitality of Entrepreneurial Mindset.
An Entrepreneurial Mindset offers an array of powerful benefits for business owners or entrepreneurs to thrive both personally and professionally.
- Improvement of entrepreneurial skills like confidence, resilience, and enthusiasm provides a springboard to success. It enhances happiness at work and at home.
- Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset allows the development of these skills so that it is possible to work better and feel happier whilst at work and at home.
- Bolsters the development of confidence.
- Encourages risk-taking ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
- Improves leadership style and benefit general social interaction with co-workers.
- Helps understanding how to manage personal skills and attitude.
- Setting goals and milestones for self-improvement is much easier if equipped with relevant entrepreneurial skills.
- Being able to use constructive criticism positively and not interpret the criticism personally is something that can be developed over time through a continuous entrepreneurial mindset.
- Resilience and strong will convert difficult situations from negative to positive. These difficult situations can frequently appear in both professional and personal life and can cause a decrease in motivation and a lower chance at success if the situation is handled incorrectly or without resilience.
- Drawing from past experiences, growing and improving through bad experiences impacts the level of success and happiness in life.
- Enthusiasm is another entrepreneurial skill that can be adopted with an entrepreneurial mindset.
How to Develop an Entrepreneurial Mindset
- Successful entrepreneurs never think that they know it all.
- Successful entrepreneurs choose their emotional battles carefully and avoid stressing about things that they can not change.
- Stay at the present moment.
- Value your network.
- Celebrate the success of others.
Benefits of Entrepreneurial Mindset
- Gives you a go-getter attitude.
- Helps fully understand importance of planning.
- Not afraid of experimentation.
- Creative mindset.
- Know importance of value creation.
In Retrospect
It is evident that the creation of an Entrepreneurial Mindset constitutes a sine qua non for the success of any enterprise under the stewardship of an entrepreneur. Especially so, in the backdrop of the fast-changing dynamics of modern business. It does yeoman’s service to personal and business growth for its survival and sustenance.
Never start a Business just to make money. START BUSINESS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
MARIE FORLEO
