The Single Most Important Skill Needed by All Entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur, learning how to cope with your critics is the single most important skill that you need, whatever stage of growth your business is at.

Not knowing how to do this affects your ability to charge and get what you’re worth and affects the success of your business in terms of your ability to deliver your best work.

For most of us, this challenge comes about at a very young age. At that age, many of us feared losing our parents’ love and approval…so we did everything we could to do “the right thing” in their eyes. Then when we went to school, that need to do “the right thing” was amplified through the schooling system. If you did as you were told and learned the syllabus that you were given, that was the right thing to do. But if you were a maverick, you were criticized and frowned upon.

A minority of people cope with this but most of us don’t, and over time, we hold other people’s opinions in higher esteem than our own. As a result, we began to pay more attention to our critics and then we learned how to do that for ourselves by developing our own inner critic.

Now, many years later, that behaviour is ingrained and impacts on your business in a way that you might not realize.

Listening to your critics – whether it’s other people or your inner critic – can actually be a powerful feedback mechanism, and for this to be the case, you MUST be able to discern what is genuinely important. As you become more successful, there will be more people who will potentially criticize you for the decisions you make and for being as successful as you are. They tend to want to “take you down” and “put you back in your place”.

And if you find that listening to your critics stops you in your tracks, causes you to doubt yourself and question your own value, then it is a sure thing that it’s stopping you from having the real success that you deserve in your business…because listening to your critics without discernment affects your self-esteem.

The word “esteem” means to regard highly or favourably, and comes from the French word, “estimer” – to fix the value of.

If we allow our self-esteem to be lowered because we doubt ourselves and listen to our critics, the value that we will ask for in terms of what we charge is directly impacted. It can show up as you not asking for the fee that you would really like, discounting your services, providing far more value than warranted by the level of service that you are being paid for, being afraid to raise your fees, continually comparing your fees to “the market”, feeling uncomfortable talking about your fees and feeling that you have to wait until you have more experience and knowledge before you can charge what you really want.

Therefore learning how to cope with your critics is the single most important skill that you need.

Here are some tips on how to cope with your critics.

• Stop comparing yourself
• Open up to receiving praise and positive feedback
• Buy yourself the best you can afford
• Pay yourself compliments without qualifying them
• Remember that it’s simply their opinion and it doesn’t make them right
• Deliberately choose to stop beating yourself up!
• Raise your fees and be more successful anyway
• Use it as an opportunity to revalue your worth rather than devalue it.

YOUR TURN

Learn to value your own opinion above anyone else’s. Learn to discern the feedback that you receive from others. Know yourself and know that what other people think of you has nothing to do with you. Your business results will thank you for it…and you’ll be pleased that you did.

Tagged as: mindset, money