MBA2555 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Gain The Confidence to Start a Business?

0:05Hey everyone, welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host Omar Zenhome and today's episode is a Q &A Wednesday episode where we answer a question for one of you, one of our listeners, one of our subscribers on YouTube, one of our community members. Today's question is from Jerome and Jerome asks, how do I gain confidence to start a business? Jerome, this is a big question. I'm excited to get into it because I get asked about this a lot. This concept of confidence. Is it something you're born with? Is it something that you have to cultivate or build? How do you get enough confidence to get started?

0:38All that and more. So I'm going to dive into this idea of confidence. How do you have confidence in the first place so that you can start on the path to where you want to be, to where you want to get to? And by the way, if you have a question you want to ask on business, any topic, anything that you're going through right now as you're building your business, go ahead and ask it. You could submit it on our website, 100mba.net.q. Submit your question. We'll answer right here on Q &A Wednesday. Here's the thing. Confidence is not about knowing you're going to succeed without a shadow of a doubt.

1:10It's about being okay with the unknown and still take action. This is what entrepreneurship is all about. It's about understanding that action is what's going to get you results, is that the confidence will come the more you take action. Okay. Confidence grows when you push through self-doubt, when you actually do things and look back and say, oh, I did that. I actually went past my fears and made it happen. So let's take a look at how you can start building that confidence one step at a time. The first step I recommend is to start small and build momentum. I'm a big believer in momentum. Momentum is huge because it allows you to get some wins.

1:56It allows you to get some pushes that make you feel like, okay, I can do this. And that's where the confidence built. So you want to get started with some tiny, tiny wins. Okay. Even if that small win is something like, I'm going to sit down today and write in my journal and just brainstorm some ideas about my product or service. It may not be a sale. It may not be making, you know,$10 ,000, but it's a tiny win where you say you're going to do something and you do it. Confidence isn't built overnight. It comes from small, consistent wins that give you proof that you are capable. You are capable of pulling things off.

2:38This is why I love the practice of exercise, daily exercise, going to the gym or playing your sport, because you're proving to yourself every single day that you are a person that is consistent, that holds to your word that, hey, I'm going to work out and you work out. And every time you work out, you're reinforcing this idea that you are consistent. So these are tiny wins I'm talking about, just building the confidence that you can do it. And you need to do that in building your business. So don't wait. Don't wait until you feel confident to start a business. Your confidence will come when you start the business.

3:11It's the other way around, okay? When you start moving forward, the confidence will start to grow. Start with small actions that feel manageable for you and build upon that success. Let me give you an example. When I started my first business, I wasn't like immediately confident, like I'm a baller, I can pull this off, I can make any business a success. No, I took small steps like reaching out to my network and securing my first client. I slowly built my website, I started to go to conferences, I started just being around successful people and that was a baby step to becoming successful myself.

3:47So I want you to take an action step to move forward. Take one small action today, whether it's researching your business idea, talking to a potential customer or creating a simple business plan, small actions compound into big confidence. If you are curious about how to take a small step and you're looking for ideas, you can go to our worksheets. We've got tons of worksheets that like creating a business plan over at 100mba.net slash worksheets. It's totally free. Go ahead and grab all our worksheets. Number two, surround yourself with support. This one might be the most important takeaway from today's lesson.

4:22I alluded to this earlier, but confidence can grow and shrink depending on who you are around, right? If you surround yourself with people that actually believe in you, that have done what you want to do, have been there already, are already successful, it's going to be natural for you to feel like you could do it. It's going to feel normal, right? For example, if you're around people that work out every day, they're just fitness rats, right? They love going to the gym. They're super healthy. If you just hang out with these people every single day, you don't work out yourself, but eventually you will feel compelled to work out.

4:59You're going to feel like this is something I should be doing. Everybody around me is doing this. I feel left out. This becomes your new normal. I experienced this in my journey. I surrounded myself with some amazing people. I moved to a city with a great entrepreneurs like New York. That's a little bit of extreme, but you can surround yourself even virtually online or go to conferences or meetups, go to a coworking space in your area that has other entrepreneurs. And what this does is that it shows you what's possible. I met some people that really inspired me that, that made me feel like, Oh, I can do this.

5:31These people are not so different than me. And they're living these lives that I wish I could have, like having an online business and being able to be financially independent. You know, when I met these people, it was not only inspirational, but it gave me confidence to believe I can do it too. That doesn't happen by accident. You need to take action and you need to surround yourself with the right people. And by the way, surrounding yourself with people that don't do the things that you aspire to do or are not aligned with your goals will actually lower your confidence, will make you feel like you can do it because they can't do it, right?

6:07They're not doing it. So then you're thinking, I can't do it either. Here's an action step. There are actually two steps here. Number one, you're going to come out, come out to your friends and family that you are now an entrepreneur. Okay. I now identify as an entrepreneur and I need your support, share your business idea, your passion for what you're trying to do for the future that you believe you can have with your friends, your family, your mentors, with the people around you, with your community, so they could support you. And if they don't support you, you'll know that you can't spend too much time around them because they're not gonna help you get to where you're going, right?

6:44They're gonna hinder you from progress. The second action step is you need to find the new people in your life that are going to support you, that are gonna help you, that are gonna give you the confidence that are already a few steps ahead of you, right? And they're not that far away. It just means meeting some new people. Going again to meetups, go to meetup.com, go to eventbrite.com in your local area, meet these people, spend some time once or twice or three times a month meeting up with people. And you'll be amazed how confident you'll feel because you're around people that are doing what you aspire to do.

7:17Number three, learn from others who've done it. Now, hanging out with other people that are successful or where you wanna be is one thing, but pulling out the information and learning from their journey is another, right? When you see other people's journey, you realize they started with doubts, just like you, and you learn that their story gives you perspective, right? And it gives you the reassurance and the confidence to grow in your own experience. It also gives you a reality check. It also tells you, hey, I'm learning about this person. And by the way, you can learn about somebody through a book, right?

7:51You can read somebody's biography. This is one of the favorite things I like to do is read biographies or watch documentaries because what you learn is this is this person's journey. This is what they went through. This is what they had to go through to get where they are today. Am I willing to go through that? Am I willing to suffer a little bit and delay gratification? It gives you some perspective, but it also gives you a wake up call that, hey, this is going to be tough and I got to be ready for that. But the story of being able to be patient enough to go through those tough times and make it out the other side gives you the confidence that you can do it, too.

8:27Like I mentioned, I love biographies. I read about 50 books a year. if you are interested in reading about what I think of these books, I have book reviews on our website. So you can get a synopsis or get a little summary of what the book's about. You can listen to a whole podcast episode of my must read review and you can go over at 100mba.net and on the top, you'll see book reviews. Just click that and you can search and you can filter by topic. But some of my favorite biographies is Open by Audrey Agassi, Kitchen Confidential by the late great Anthony Bourdain, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

9:01These books are incredible. They change your perspective on what it takes to be successful. So your action step, pick up a book that you enjoy. Choose one of the books I recommended. Listen to a podcast interview of somebody you look up to and hear their story. Notice how they built confidence over time and not before they started. It's when they started, they build confidence. Number four, focus on your value, not perfection. A lot of us think that we have to be perfect out the gate, and that's just not true. And it's actually a blessing that you aren't perfect in the beginning, because when you're not perfect and you're just getting started, your audience is small.

9:41Not a lot of people are watching. Not a lot of people are viewing your material, your work, or whatever you offer. And that's okay, because you're still refining your craft. You're still refining yourself in your service, in your business. And as you grow, you start to get more and more popular, more and more people look at it. And at the same time, your work gets better. And I say this to kind of comfort you because confidence wavers when you aim for perfection, right? When you think things have to be perfect, you start to feel bad about yourself because you'll never be perfect. You're always going to be judging your work, thinking that it has to be perfect.

10:13Instead, focus on providing value. Is what you're providing valuable to somebody? Is it helpful in any way than not giving that value? When you concentrate on helping people and just focus on that and solving their problems, the fear of not being perfect starts to fade. Don't focus on yourself. Focus on the person you're trying to serve. I realized that my goal wasn't to be perfect, but to be helpful when I started my software company, Webinar Ninja. I launched a product knowing it wasn't perfect. I knew that I needed to do a lot of work, but I thought to myself, I got time. Why am I so in a rush?

10:46Why don't I just see this as like a 10 year journey? And maybe it's going to be somewhere in the first six months and the next year it's going to get better. And the year after that, it's going to be even better. And that perfect product in my head might get there in a decade. And that's actually exactly what happened. I built Webinar Ninja in 2014. I continue to grow it, improve it, make it the best software possible. And I say me, it wasn't just me. Of course I had my co-founder, Nicole, I had a whole team of people working on this product, you know, engineers, some designers, to salespeople, to copywriters, to customer success, to customer support.

11:20Right. But in that 10 years, I'm so proud of what we built. And it was such a remarkable feed that, you know, we were acquired by pro profs and somebody thought, Hey, we want to buy this company and take it to the next level. And it was a great moment for me because I really thought that, Hey, it actually paid off for me to have a long-term goal to kind of see this as a 10-year journey rather than trying to make it happen within months. And when you think that way, you know that, no, it's not going to be perfect right away. I'm going to work towards perfection in the next 10 years. And of course, when I sold it, it wasn't perfect.

11:53You know, nothing's perfect, but that's fine. I love that because it allows you to keep striving. So action step, shift your mindset to how can I help rather than how can I make this perfect? Start with the value that you can provide today and then you can refine later. You can improve. You can make it better and better, right? There's no pressure to make it perfect right now, right? So just keep moving on. And if you need some inspiration, if you want to kind of get a real life taste of what I'm talking about, go on a site called the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a website that takes a snapshot of websites on the web.

12:30And you can look up any website and what it looked like in the past. So you can Google up, like, for example, Google. What did Google look like when it got started? What did Yahoo look like? What did Facebook look like? Like the website, right? What did Airbnb look like? And you'll notice how crude the design is, how ugly it is, frankly, how simple the service was, but it got started somewhere and it got better and better and improved and iterated over time. Jerome and everybody who's listening, confidence is built over time, not before you start. Start small, surround yourself with a supportive community with people who are on the same journey as you and maybe a few steps ahead of you.

13:12Lean into other people's journeys, read about their stories and focus on providing value and on your customer instead of yourself and trying to be perfect. Remember, confidence grows with every step you take. So you won't become more confident until you take more steps forward. Thanks for tuning into the$100 MBA show. And again, if you have a question you want to ask on Q &A Wednesday, just go ahead and submit it over at 100mba.net slash Q and we'll answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday. No question is disqualified, you know, whether it's a beginner question, a more advanced question, maybe even a personal question that you're struggling with.

13:51I'm here to help you. And of course you can keep it anonymous and just say, anonymous sent this. No worries. I got your back. My whole goal with these types of episodes are to just help you out, help the listeners out, help our community out to make sure that, you know, your specific issues, your specific challenges are addressed. I hope this episode gave you some perspective and push you towards that confidence you're looking for to start building that confidence through each step you take. I'm Omar Zanum and I'll see you in the next episode.