Your Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
Do you ever feel like you’re getting in your own way? Do you find that you kick yourself more often than not over easy wins that somehow turned into another failure?
What’s going on here?
You might be someone who’s struggling in your professional life, but you can’t put your finger on why you’re not being successful. When you look around, it seems like everyone else is achieving milestones and getting what they want – everyone but you.
This can leave you feeling frustrated and maybe even feeling like a failure. It could be that you’re struggling with issues you’ve yet to identify and these are what’s really holding you back.
Or it could be that you know you have struggles, but you don’t know how these are hindering your success. Once you take time to analyze what’s not working well in your business, instead of forging ahead blindly, you’ll be able to succeed faster than if you just decide to fly by the seat of your pants.
Lack of Confidence and a Fear of Failure
Many people hesitate to get started. They don’t set goals, and they don’t break out of their comfort zone. Instead, they remain where they are – working on the same projects, floundering in the same career, and performing the same mundane tasks day after day.
They make up excuses as to why everything stays the same and success is seemingly beyond their reach. These excuses may range from not having the time to go after goals, to needing more skills or knowledge with no funds to get the proper training.
But the reality is that these excuses stem from fear. They’re afraid of trying things that could end in professional success because they’re afraid of trying and failing. The root cause is that they have a lack of confidence.
This lack of confidence and fear of failure are usually linked to a specific cause. One of the main causes is playing the comparison game. They compare themselves to other people and usually to those that are hugely successful.
When you compare yourself to other people, you’re creating questions in your mind. These questions cause you to doubt your abilities and erode your self-confidence. In the comparison game, you will never come out a winner because the people that you choose to compare yourself with could be further along in their career.
They may have had access to resources or other things that you didn’t have. But you don’t know that. So you just think they’re better than you – that they’re smarter, more talented or just happen to be a winner.
Besides the comparison game, your lack of confidence and fear of failure could be because you recall missteps that you’ve had before. Maybe you attempted something, and it didn’t work out for you.
Because of that failure, it left behind a sting of embarrassment and doubt that you’ve yet to recover from. Sometimes what you feel or think about yourself and your abilities leans toward the negative because of stuff that happened to you when you were a child or when you were in high school or college.
Even your parents, who are supposed to be your biggest cheerleaders, could have played a role in your attitude. Did they voice their displeasure v when they found out you weren’t the smartest kid in the class? Did they want you to socialize with certain kids whose parents held high status in town?
Maybe you tried and were rejected by these kids. Maybe you couldn’t get the help you needed to succeed in chemistry. Whatever the reason, it didn’t work out, and you were the one left embarrassed at school and scolded at home. That’s enough to send anyone to their room, hiding until graduation.
These life situations can shape the way that you see yourself for years after the incident. So when you look at attempting something, those life situations are there to haunt you, and moving toward success seems too daunting to you.
Confusion and Obstacles in the Learning Process
Whenever you’re trying something new, there’s going to be a learning process. No matter how badly they might want the dream of being an online entrepreneur, the confusion and obstacles that can occur can stop people in their tracks.
That’s because it’s so easy to get overwhelmed when you’re trying to learn new things. It can seem like there’s no end to all these new ways or ideas that you have to implement.
Choosing to become an entrepreneur can open up an exciting new world of freedom and more money, but it can also double or triple the amount of information that you have to learn, and that’s just to get started.
If you’re like many people, you may not even know how to launch a blog. You don’t know the first thing about how to find the best hosting company and what amounts to a good set up.
You don’t know whether to choose privacy protection or how to get your blog theme the way that you want it to be. In addition to just getting it off the ground, you also don’t know how to write the content.
So that’s something else that you have to add to your list of things to learn. You don’t know what topics to write about or how often you should write. You don’t know how long the posts should be or anything about headlines, bullet points, or adding images.
This is an area that stumps a lot of entrepreneurs who need a blog. The overwhelm gets to them. Besides all the content you need to learn how to complete and manage, there’s also monetizing your efforts.
You need your blog to earn money in order to be viable and there are many ways that you can set it up to do that. There’s a lot of technical and strategic information that you have to know how to do.
You might feel like you jumped into online entrepreneurship without knowing what you’re really doing. So you end up making mistakes that frustrate you and slow down your progress.
You may have to keep pushing back your launch date because everything’s in disarray.
Because you’re working solo, you don’t have a team to help you. If you’re like many new entrepreneurs, you don’t really have the funds to create a team, even if you did know who to choose to help you.
You might get to the point where you realize that you’re going to have to gain some knowledge. It can be a difficult journey in the beginning because you don’t know who to trust that you can learn from.
It’s good to be cautious because there are so many scammers online. They’ll gladly take your money or waste your time and you’ll end up in the same place that you were before you connected with them.
This might be something that worries you and you’re concerned that you’re going to learn the wrong things and end up wasting your efforts.
You Don’t Know How to Commit to Something Long-Term
Being an online entrepreneur is all about having the freedom to make your own decisions. But it also means being structured enough to know that you need a long-term commitment because no business success is built overnight.
You might be someone that struggles because you flit from business model to business model. You set up the components of the business, but then you veer onto something else.
Or maybe you switch from niche to niche. You can’t seem to settle on anything for a long period. You might be someone that goes from task to task. The problem is that no matter how well intentioned you are, without consistent follow through, you won’t find the professional success you’re hoping to achieve.
You’ll always end up falling short. Sometimes people think that not being able to commit to something long-term is just part of who they are. They might even label themselves as chasing new things or always changing their minds and while that might seem like a good way to explain it, in the end, it’s just a recipe for failure.
When you don’t know how to stick with something, it’s a form of self-sabotage. When your actions, whatever they are, keep you from being successful, it can derail your business and leave your self-esteem in the dirt.
People practice methods of self-sabotage by not committing, but the root cause can be found because of what they’re thinking or feeling. Usually these people are indecisive about a direction.
Because they can’t pinpoint what to do, they end up constantly changing tasks or goals or business ventures. They think they can fix an inward problem by changing what’s going on in their world.
But all the changes that you make can’t help if you’re not willing to address the true issue. No one wants to acknowledge that they’re engaging in self-sabotage. They don’t want to look in the mirror and admit that they’re the problem.
But when you become an entrepreneur, it’s important that you get honest with yourself and that you don’t try to hide from your faults or habits that you have that cause problems that prevent your business success.
You must be willing to face what you’re doing or not doing and quit trying to make an excuse for it. Commitment can be hard if you’re used to not following through. It can also be hard when you don’t know what you’re doing or the path gets tough. But without it, your business will never reach its full potential. It won’t grow and neither will you.
You Lack the Funds You Need to Get Started
Becoming an online entrepreneur can require many things. One of these things may be money. A challenge that can stop some people from reaching professional success is not having the funds they need to even get started.
If this sounds like what you’re experiencing, it can be discouraging – especially if you know that if you could just get your business off the ground, you’d do a great job with it.
You might feel that you need a huge sum of money to get started.
That may or may not be true. It doesn’t always take a lot of money. It all depends on the business model. Obviously, some businesses do require that you start with some seed money – but again, that still depends on the business model.
There are various reasons why you’ll need some funds to get started. You’ll need to have some money that you can use for courses. If you’re like most new business owners, you’re not going to already have the knowledge about every aspect of running a business.
No one really knows all there is to know about how to run a business when they first start out. So they end up having to take courses that will teach them about their particular business.
It might be that you need to take courses on how to set up a blog or how to earn a profit from your blog. While there are some things that you can do from scratch, you may not be able to build everything without specific resources or tools.
For example, you may need things like page builders or keyword tools. When you start, you want to make sure that your business looks professional from the beginning. You don’t want to create pages that look homemade even if you do design them yourself.
You want them to look professional. No matter how much you like the idea of running your own business, one of the struggles that you might face is how to go about getting it set up for the content that you’ll need to have.
The type of content that you’ll need is going to vary depending on what type of business you have. You may not have the talent to do this portion yourself. This is yet another reason why you might need some seed money.
You’ll need to hire the services of a ghostwriter to create the content that you need. Or if you’re trying to work a full time job and get your business off the ground as a side hustle, then in order to find the time to do that, you may have to hire someone.
When you think about starting an online business, it’s a good thing to have a dream and the enthusiasm to make that dream a reality. However, you do want to make sure that you have whatever necessary funds the business will need. You don’t want to let something like that hold you back.
You Have No Time to Devote to Building Your Business
There are quite a few hurdles that can get in the way of building a business. This is why you may face a struggle. Struggles are common and though some hurdles can easily be overcome, not all of them are handled so simply.
One of the struggles that is fairly common among online business entrepreneurs is not having the necessary time to devote to building a business. No matter how you look at it, when you create something new, there is a time commitment involved.
When you have a lack of time, it’s not as simple to build a business because you can’t create extra time out of thin air. You can’t give what you don’t have. Not having enough time can sometimes be caused because of overextension.
You thought you had it handled. But you were already doing too much and didn’t really think through how you were going to manage to juggle any more responsibilities. Or maybe you didn’t know everything that it would take to put your plan in motion.
You might be experiencing this kind of difficulty because you thought at first that everything was going to be a lot easier to put in place than it actually was. It looked that way on paper or in your head.
Once you were ready with action steps and started trying to set up and build the business, you found out that there were all these extra tasks that cropped up. These tasks called for more time that you figured, so the demand on your time is a lot greater than what you originally planned for.
You’re only one person and you can only do so much. This issue of not having enough time causes a lot of people to give up on the idea of becoming an entrepreneur. It’s just too hard on them.
That might sound like something that you’ve experienced yourself. Maybe you’ve discovered that the job you already have doesn’t leave as much room as you thought to building the business you want.
When you really took a moment to look over what you do, you found that your schedule is already packed to the brim and your planner is filled with a to-do list that seems like it’s constantly growing.
There are a lot of demands on your time and it might feel like it never lets up, like you can’t even accomplish small business-related tasks. You’re finding that the tasks you’re already committed to handling, including your personal life ones, are already taking up all of your time.
This can make you feel so frustrated that you want to shove the idea of building your business onto the back burner and stop trying. Don’t let this get you down. Make a plan and work it until your business is on the path you feel will offer personal satisfaction as well as profits.
