I am not sure how many of my valued ImagineNation™ community friends and colleagues have ever purchased a completely new, “make believe” apartment “off the plan?” Nor am I aware of any who have attempted such a huge challenge in a different and strange country, with a war going on, in an indecipherable language and an argumentative culture, and survived and lived to tell the story! Needless to say our recent move to our “almost finished” potentially beautiful new apartment has brought me back, yet again to the importance of the one core generic principle for succeeding in accomplishing almost anything, especially in regard to identifying what are the keys to entrepreneurial success.
I can happily play with how I have learnt (and failed) to apply this core attribute, not only towards trying to get our new apartment completed, to a reasonable standard of quality. It also applies to the challenges most people face in becoming successful innovative leaders and start-up entrepreneurs. This is “the” key to entrepreneurial success because, strangely enough, if you know how to embody and enact this core attribute, on a daily basis, you can, and will, accomplish anything that requires courageous and creative endeavors!
The key to entrepreneurial success involves developing strong self efficacy
Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self efficacy “as one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations”. Our sense of self-efficacy plays a major role in how we approach setting and achieving goals, completing tasks, and with how we persist in mastering challenges. It affects every field of human endeavors, and is determined by the beliefs we hold regarding our power to affect situations, it influences the personal power we are able to develop and the choices we make when facing a challenge.
Understanding self efficacy
When I presented at the European Innovation Conference in Brussels last year on “Disrupting the Entrepreneurship Learning Paradigm” almost every academic, presented a paper on the critical role good self efficacy plays towards enabling entrepreneurial success. Of course, as all good academics do, they established relevant “why” and “what” frames, they just mostly left out the “how to”.
Of course, as a coach to innovative leaders and entrepreneurs, most of really important foundational groundwork is towards enabling my participants to cultivate strong self efficacy required to persist and sustain them through the peaks and troughs of the disruptive “Start-Up Cycle.”
So that they can ultimately succeed in innovation and entrepreneurship game by developing strong self efficacy!
The benefits of a strong sense of self efficacy
Is when people:
– View challenging problems as tasks to be mastered
– Develop deeper interest in the activities in which they participate
– Form a stronger sense of commitment to their interests and activities
– Recover quickly from setbacks and disappointments.
Strategies for cultivating self efficacy when facing entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial challenges
Here are seven simple and specific strategies for cultivating your self efficacy to go and play where others don’t dare to!
- Self efficacy requires resourceful states of be-ing
Make time to retreat and reflect, to go back to a time when you really succeeded at something significant, visualize yourself in that powerful emotional and physical state, tune into how it felt, and tell yourself “I can do this!”and/or “I just haven’t done it yet!”
- Self efficacy requires an inner belief in self
Make time to retreat and reflect, in silence and perhaps in a meditative or mindful state, take a moment to tune into your inner knowing or wisdom, and ask “How can I approach doing this?” and/or “How can I get this tedious job done effectively?”
- Self efficacy requires us to maximize our inner resources
Make time to retreat and reflect, in silence and in nature, if possible, and just notice the internal conversation you habitually have with yourself about what you “must” and “must not do”. Notice the range and power of each of the voices, and identify who is in charge. If by chance, it is a doubtful or critical voice, turn the volume down, to allow a more resourceful voice to be heard, the one who tells you how good you are, and encourages you to be powerful and successful.
- Self efficacy requires us to maximize our outer resources
Notice your habitual use of language, when discussing a challenging task or problem, do you tend to self depreciate, focus on the limitations, constraints and negatives?
Here are some tips for shifting you limiting language when you are in challenging situations;
– “I could never do that!” and ask instead “What if I could do that?”
– “I always fail at solving problems!” to “I only failed just this time!”
– “I have no more energy left for this!” to “I am worn out right now, and need some time out to recharge!”
- Self efficacy requires us to maximize our strengths
Focus on what you have achieved up until now, no matter how small they may seem to be, the point is that you did complete the race, solve the problem, build a new team or business whilst many others may not have even tried! Focus on cultivating and applying your inherent strengths, on what you do well, and not on what your weakest points.
- Self efficacy requires us to stay focused on the goal or outcome
Always keep the end in mind, focus on what it is you are trying to achieve and why it is important, and how it will benefit you, your team or the world, if you persist with it!
- Self efficacy requires us to learn from our mistakes
The last and most important strategy is to “fail fast to learn quickly”, and whilst it is really hard for some of us, surrender into your failures, re-framing them as “learning opportunities.”
Tell yourself, that it “just didn’t work that time”. Taking it further, make “brilliant blunders” to create infection points, paradigm shifts and mindset flips, that would not have arisen, if you had not failed and used the opportunity to pivot to success.
Our apartment is not completed yet, however, the real challenges have just begun, and we have a number of key strategies in place, to stay in and master the “buying off the plan game.”
It’s essentially no different to creating and sustaining an innovative and entrepreneurial start-up!
The key entrepreneurial success factors involve managing our reactive responses and sustaining our self efficacy during the disruptive peaks and troughs of the innovation and start-up cycles!
At ImagineNation™ we provide innovation coaching, education and culture consulting to help businesses achieve their innovation goals. Because we have done most of the learning and actioning of new hybrid mindsets, behaviors and skill-sets already, we can help your businesses also do this by opening people up to their innovation potential.
Contact us now at janet@imaginenation.com.au to find out how we can partner with you to learn, adapt and grow your business in the digital age.
