Being an entrepreneur can feel like a rollercoaster ride. One with steep highs and lows, moments of intense adrenaline, exposure, and occasionally the sense that you have somehow arrived back where you started.
If your experience of being an entrepreneur includes moments of vulnerability, doubt, guilt, fear, and anxiety, the good news is — you are doing it right. It should feel like this. Why? Because many of the challenges that entrepreneurs face tap into some of the core psychological challenges that we all face.
Take identity, a person in employment is given a job specification, a piece of paper that says: “This is who we would like you to be.” In contrast, the entrepreneur gets a blank piece of paper. They need to operate without boundaries, guidance, or feedback on progress. They need to choose and create their business and themselves as business owners. That kind of choice comes with inevitable doubt, responsibility, guilt, and a strong desire for someone to reassure you that you are “Doing the right thing”.
These are challenges that all of us face in life. We can choose to create ourselves by making conscious choices about the kind of person we want to be. Or we can avoid the discomfort of making those kinds of choices by letting someone else tell us who we are. Identity is just part of the story; there is also vulnerability, risk, passion, failure — all human challenges and all part of the process of being an entrepreneur.
The ride that the entrepreneur is on feels intense because it is harder to avoid these human challenges when you choose to set up your own business. How can entrepreneurs survive the ride? The difference between someone who loves rollercoasters and someone who hates rollercoasters is their relationship with the experience. The very thing that one person doesn’t enjoy — a lack of control, the speed, the height, the disorientation — is exactly what the other person loves. It is the reason they queued up to go on the ride in the first place. — The Guardian
