What does it mean to have courage as a business owner?
It’s all well and good me telling you to ‘have courage in your business’ but what does that actually mean? What do you have to do, think and believe in order for you to be able to finally label yourself as courageous?
As spiritual entrepreneurs, we have to be more courageous than most. We’re building a business from the ground up after all and we’re putting our hopes and dreams on the line. There’s a level of vulnerability that comes with building a soul purpose business and with that comes a need to go against our most basic human instincts.
We have to learn to ignore anxiety, gamble with finances, take responsibility for our successes and our failures. We have to put ourselves into positions where heartbreak and disappointment are a possibility and rely only on our own intuition and knowledge when deciding if risks outweigh the rewards. Our courage is an anchor for us and without it, it can be easy to feel lost, alone or without direction.
What does courage mean to you?
The first thing we need to get clear about is what courage means to us as individuals. Having courage can mean something different to everyone, depending on a number of different factors.
The overall definition of courage is:
The ability to do something that frightens one & strength in the face of pain or grief
and what frightens you is completely unique to you. Our fears or sources of grief and pain are our own, so our courage, by association, is completely unique to us also. Have a think about what courage might look like for you based on your own personal fears and experiences. It may be:
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having the courage to start your own business
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having the courage to invest more money into your business
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having the courage to do something unique
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having the courage to branch away from tradition or what is expected of you
Think about what your current challenges are and start to think about how you can face them head-on and overcome them.
How can you actively be more courageous?
This is where self-awareness becomes very important. It’s only by knowing what our fears and weaknesses are that we can understand how we can be more courageous. Our fears stand in the way of our goals, so one way we can start to understand what our courage should look like in the practical sense is by practising a bit of visualisation.
Imagine yourself on a road with a tall wall in front of you. You know that at the end of this road lies what you’ve been working towards, so getting through this wall is essential.
We need to figure out what this wall is representing for us, what is our fear? What is the obstacle we just can’t seem to overcome? This might be a fear of failure, a fear of being in debt, a fear of a failed business. Allow your subconscious mind to create an image that best represents this fear, by relaxing as much as possible and really focusing in on that fear and how it makes you feel. Once you’ve got your fear or obstacle in front of you, how can you get past it? What does it look like? What is required of you in order to overcome it?
Something that I find when I do this is that the thing in front of me has no actual power over my actions. It’s the fear of the thing that stops me from getting past it, not the thing itself. For example, if my fear was the fear of losing money and I see that fear represented before me as a big pile of money in front of me that I’d have to walk away from, the likelihood that it would physically stop me from moving forward is zero. I can choose to walk past and not look back and deal with whatever comes my way after the fact.
Overcoming obstacles in the way of courage
The root of most of our fears as business owners is the belief that we’re either not good enough or simply not capable of doing what needs to be done. This is never true. Never.
I’ve never done a tarot reading for a client and had the cards tell me that the person is not good enough to succeed, or that they aren’t able to do what they want to do. These are beliefs that live inside your head, not out in the real world. Yes, there may be obstacles, whether material, emotional or mental, but there are always ways to overcome obstacles. Actual physical blocks, things that quite literally prevent you from doing what you feel called to do, are extremely rare.
All of us have the courage we need to tackle anything that comes our way. Tap into the passion and connection you have with your business or project and use that to power the courage you need to get through.
