Recently, in the span of a few weeks, I had several strikingly similar conversations with women entrepreneurs in our community.
The conversations generally started with these women sharing some sort of dilemma in their business: How do I decide whether to offer x or y? What if I hate or don’t want to support social media? Is it time to focus on this business full-time? Is it time to stop focusing on this full-time?
With my coaching hat on, I sensed that the questions they were asking didn’t seem to be their real questions. I took note of the tender and subtly hurt tone in their voices. And when we dug a little deeper, it became clear that certain past experiences were sitting within these women as painful memories, even as near secrets that they felt shame about.
Some had courageously put an offer out into the world and…no or little response.
Others had been persisting for a long while without the number of customers or level of success they hoped for.
And because of that…
Some of these women were left thinking their gifts weren’t really wanted or welcome in this world.
Others questioned if they were meant to be entrepreneurs at all.
Many were getting lost in “compare and despair” as they looked at others’ seeming success.
These thoughts and feelings were particularly demoralizing because they’d already worked to overcome such self-doubts in order to even start their businesses in the first place!
And then, with those painful experiences and the self-doubt or bewilderment they caused, many had put business projects and dreams on hold.
Some convinced themselves they needed to get training or expert advice.
Others convinced themselves the problem must be an internal block like fear or self-sabotage they had to then fix through intensive inner work.
Others concluded they had to just wait (and wait, and wait) until the universe brought them something different.
I want to offer a different perspective on these experiences.
I live in Silicon Valley, a place world-renowned as the epicenter for starting and growing successful businesses. Even in this context – in which people take themselves damn seriously as the ultimate experts in starting and growing companies, and in which companies get millions of investment dollars to recruit the best people, do paid marketing, and build the robust technologies – people still expect a very low percentage of businesses to work out.
For example, a venture investor works to select what they feel are the most high-potential start ups, then gives those start ups ample money and guidance and support, yet expects that only about 10-20% of the companies they invest in will become big successes! And they’ve formed these expectations about their odds based on a lot of past data.
Here’s a second important thing: those 10-20% of companies that do succeed don’t get it right on the first time. In fact, tech investors expect startups to spend ~3-18 months in a process of experimentation in order to discover – via trial and error – what resonates with a group of customers. These businesses often find traction with an offering or positioning that is wildly different than the entrepreneur’s original idea.
It pains me that while (mostly male) tech entrepreneurs are embracing this ethos of experimentation and not taking failures personally, so many of the women creative and small biz entrepreneurs I speak with are in a very different situation. We haven’t been told that we are allowed to have lots of trial and error, let alone supposed to have it! We expect ourselves to get it right, right out of the gate, and we often take on so much self-criticism and shame when we don’t.
So please hear me, loud and clear.
Business struggles have nothing to do with worth.
Often, they don’t even have much to do with talent.
Having few customers does not signify that you are less talented, unique, or less liked or loved than someone who has many.
All it means is that you haven’t yet landed upon the combination of elements that make a product work for some particular group of customers.
That’s it. It’s actually a kind of boring, tactical problem. Nothing more and nothing less.
And one more thing: for all of you creating beautiful art, exciting innovations, or new forms of healing and personal growth work, please know that sometimes the most valuable, revolutionary work and ideas aren’t met with huge demand in the marketplace. The mainstream world’s consciousness of its actual needs – its understanding of what is actually most deeply valuable – may not be there, where you are, yet. And if that’s your situation, you don’t just have to wait or despair. There are a whole host of specific implications for how to approach your cutting edge work, as well as for how you sustain yourself financially.
Alright – so big picture, if you’ve been carrying pain or shame around these topics, I truly hope this note helps you to begin to let go of it.
And if you’d like to dive deeper into these ideas,
• to learn what experiments to run in your business, so that those experiments help you discover what will find traction with an audience
• to get off the emotional roller coaster ride, and separate confidence and self-worth from your business metrics once and for all
please join me for Trust & Traction, my entrepreneurship workshop in August.
In an intensive (and joyful!) day together, we are going to let go of myths, learn a ton, and land into a powerful reset in our businesses. Get your spot here!
With love,
Tara
Photo credit: Martin Reisch
