Others have had success maintaining a sense of purpose in isolation with mental practices such as meditation or prayer to maintain focus and help set long-term goals. Still others turn to visualizing desired outcomes as a day-to-day motivator. Some are more adept at these practices than others, but professionals who use such techniques report feeling less isolated when starting down their own paths to workplace independence.
In addition to combating feelings of isolation and staying motivated through mental and spiritual exercises, it’s important to maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle in other ways. If your physical health is out of whack, then the foundation of your entrepreneurship is out of whack. So fundamentals of well-being like maintaining a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, and making time for exercise should be your priorities.
This stands to reason. As the fulcrum of your business, you must be operating at your best if you hope to manage the stress of starting a business while maintaining the requisite level of productivity. Some experts even recommend taking a “scientific” approach to health by gauging things such as cortisol levels and nutrition intake.
You can also use healthy habits to model the kind of business you want to build. In this framework, you don’t think “happy thoughts,” you treat yourself like the vital part of your business that you in fact are. If you’re not healthy, your business can’t be either — and you will inevitably fall prey to sensations of futility, regret and loneliness.
Fear of Failure
The fear of failure is natural. But in business, failure occurs only in the absence of insights derived from the experience.
Remember:
if your first attempt to build a business is a dud, it’s not impossible to bounce back. In fact, as you know, many successful entrepreneurs have failed before they made good — from Thomas Edison to Bill Gates. (Ever hear of Traf-O-Data? Didn’t think so). Some observers even take a failure or two in one’s past as a measure of stick-to-it-ness and grit. Are you resilient enough to come surging back for more after failing? Can you learn from the hard lessons of failure?
We all know how Michael Jordan failed to make the varsity basketball team in high school — and how that failure fueled his passion for the game and a primal need to dominate the court for decades to come. “I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed,” His Airness once remarked.
Author Robert Kiyosaki flunked out of high school altogether. Later he saw his first two companies go under. Then a book he was desperately shopping around got rejected by so many publishers he decided to print it — the eventual bestseller “Rich Dad Poor Dad” — on his own dime.