Texas Small Group Fall Invitation

Some blatant self-promotion is in order. You’ll deeply appreciate the benefits of surrounding yourself with a group of understanding peers. The first MENtrepreneurs small groups in Texas are forming in Dallas/Ft. Worth, Austin and Houston, facilitated by the Founder, Daniel Comp.

Adaptability and a ‘Punt’

WDWDWWD? Why Do We Do What We Do? It’s easy to answer that question once we understand the inverse of our ‘Strengths’. Garth Hardin and I are good examples. Well… I’m an interesting case, but Garth demonstrates how his ‘Strength’ works for him. In this post I point out clues to understand WWDWWD.

Despite What Others Believe!

My top strengths chart out as Achiever, Input and Learner, so you’d expect me to be gleaning and digesting, right? Right! The 2011 Ernst & Young report is linked at the bottom, as is the original posting on their site. I’ve simply whacked out all the reading for you to see the bullet points. Assuming you simply want a litmus test to compare ‘you’ versus ‘them’ – or ‘me’ versus ‘we’?

Buried Lead:

“These findings highlight that most successful entrepreneurs share a unique combination of seeing opportunity where others see only risk. And they tend to be optimists and believe they can succeed despite the fact that everyone else is telling them they cannot.”

I tell Angelina that she’s a “delusional optimist” at least twice a month and she changes tracks on me twice as often as that!

 

Digested E&Y Executive Summary

Decades of academic research has sought to identify the particular characteristics of successful entrepreneurial leaders. These characteristics alone are not enough to create the conditions for business success. Building a successful entrepreneurial venture also depends on a complex interaction of internal and external factors, including timing, geography, culture and sometimes luck.

With many major governments and industries around the world extolling entrepreneurship and innovation as a source of economic growth and job creation, the question remains, what makes up an entrepreneurial mindset?

The aim of this report is to provide some insights into the minds of today’s most successful entrepreneurial leaders and discern what makes them successful. We conclude with a model that we feel describes the core of an entrepreneurial leader, which represents both the intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of their mindset and abilities.

As the founders of the World Entrepreneur Of The Year Program,  Ernst & Young is uniquely positioned to share these insights. The report features perspective from a survey of 685 entrepreneurial business leaders from around the world and is informed by a series of in-depth interviews with Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award winners.

 

Point by Point

Entrepreneurs are made, not born

• 60% have worked in a corporate environment

• 33% of those say this was key to their success

• 45% of entrepreneurs start their first business after age 30

• 10% of entrepreneurs started ten or more companies

 

the most important source of learning?

• 33% experience as an employee

• 30% continued education

• 26% mentors

 

How many business ventures?

• 60% - started three or more companies

• 20% - six or more

• 10% - founded more than ten companies

 

Biggest barriers to entrepreneurial success

• lack of funding or finance (little to no sales)

• recruiting the right people (missing or poor team)

 

Entrepreneurs share common traits

• ↑ 75% ‘having a vision’ (great idea)

• ↑ 73% ‘passion’ (paying the price)

• ↑ 64% ‘drive’ (putting in the hours)

• ↓33% ‘flexibility’ (adaptability)

• ↓ 18% ‘quality’

• ↓14%  ‘loyalty‘

 

“These findings highlight that most successful entrepreneurs share a unique combination of seeing opportunity where others see only risk. And they tend to be optimists and believe they can succeed despite the fact that everyone else is telling them they cannot.”

 

Monte Carlo and London, 2 June 2011 – An Ernst & Young report

Nature or nurture: Decoding the entrepreneur  

http://www.ey.com/GL/en/Newsroom/News-releases/Entrepreneurs-are-made-not-born

One ‘click’ to ‘Snap Out of It’!

I expect guys want to read articles about business planning, market strategies and other ‘tangible’ stuff, but I keep writing about emotions and mental stuff.

Why do I do this?

I assume guys coming to MENtrepreneurs expect advice like ‘Seven Steps to Riches’ or ‘Launch Your Business In A Weekend’ or ‘Getting VC Money Step-by-Step”.

Why do I write about the invisible mental world, and not on the tangibles?

Because:

Business sustainability isn’t about a better ‘plan’ or an ‘exit strategy’. For three quarters of all the business owners (21 million) sustainability is about ‘getting FROM the day, not just THROUGH the day, as Jim Rohn said. It’s about learning. It’s about improvement. It’s about what this journey makes of us, not about what we get.

What do you do when twenty years have gone under your bridge and you are still trying to make it ‘through’ the day? What do you do when the stress fractures your primary relationships, and you have so much invested that you can’t call it quits?

Long-term Success / Avoiding Heartache or Burnout

Keeping your business alive as a solo-preneur isn’t about executing a better plan, it’s all about honing instinct and character. To make maters worse, it’s experimental. We can’t afford to screw-up too often – even if we believe that living in our car is nostalgic like Colonel Sanders’ or romantic like Robert and Kim Kiyosaki.

I focus on the ‘challenge’ of attitude rather than the ‘task’ of getting market share because I've not had an enterprising father to guide me through the decades. I’ve made a transition from ‘ambition’ to one of ‘meaning’ and I still believe that the truth sets us free.

Recall the last two articles I’ve posted.

Failing without Becoming One

I’ve chronicled my experience of failing to launch this year’s expedition as planned. Having worked for nearly two years to produce the MENtrepreneurs website and the Enterprising Cycle DVD, I fully expected my fourth Trans-America expedition to be a reward and a celebration for so much effort and sacrifice. I was wrong.

I imagined half a million dollars of work as the fuel required to fire my career, and our company, across the Snake River canyon, and did Evil Kenevil. You recall a small technical glitch that turned his dream into a scary rescue in the river far below? I thought we’d be cycling across America meeting guys and doing workshops so that we could touch down softly on the other side of the chasm, funded once again. So much for plans and hard work.

I’ve been able to recognize some of the ‘delaying’ factors – like our DVD being in hand far before the marketing got going, making sales insufficient to self-fund the expedition. I could blame the sour economy, or the corporate ‘pause’ on sponsorships, or even economic recovery programs where the ‘funding’ seems to vaporize long before we innovators’ can raise our hand for an RFP or contract.

Anchoring the ISS

If the reward we expect moves while we put in all the effort then there’s disappointment in store. Imagine discovering there are no ‘jobs’ after you finally get a degree? How about no ‘sales’ after the product finally makes it to the market? Our emotional ‘cups’ spill and all our fears squeeze the ‘fight’ ‘flight’ or ‘freeze’ behaviors into action and we have a meltdown – literally falling apart from within. It’s like we hang up the ‘closed’ sign and leave for the day, even though our bodies are still at work, or we still have the shop open, while holding back an emotional eruption, trying to not rip the head off the next whining customer that comes in.

Eventually, we go through all the stages of the death and dying process, and somewhere out the other end we pick ourselves up by our boot straps, vaguely remembering the entrepreneurial ‘seizure’ of our youth, or our daily need to fix our ‘addiction’ with another chase, and we give it another ‘stupid’ best effort.

Sound familiar?

One ‘click’ to ‘Snap Out of It’!

If I’ve written well, you should be feeling rather lousy by now. If not, then recall the pains of a decent failure, or the heartache of discovering a financial ‘hole’ in your books, or maybe an unfruitful marketing ‘expert’ you believed would turn everything around.  Feels pretty lousy, right?

Here’s a quick and simple way to ‘snap’ out of this resulting ‘funk’.

1) Open notepad, or Word.

2) Watch this video and monitor your emotions and self-talk.

Write your observation down.

 

You see?

Memory coaches teach us that all we need to do to recall anything is pin the ‘word’ with an image that is ‘exaggerated’ or really ‘contrasting’, like our pitiful moaning over a ‘situation’ with the image of Nick Vujicic inspiring people.

Ok, your turn. Snap the image of yourself with Nick’s attitude into mind!

One ‘click’ and you can ‘snap out of it’

$20 million in 6 Minutes!

We can battle strategy of sales or market analysis in long strings of windy words, or we can learn from the emotional intelligence of a man that found the support of $20 million dollars in a 6 minute presentation. I found this to be a most interesting lesson in humility and emotional intelligence, so I re-post it here for your consideration. “It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood…

Anchoring the iSS

I know a guy that has battled reactive thinking, and the associated behavior for decades. It seems he ‘always’ take things people say to him ‘personally’ far quicker than he ‘slows down’ to think rationally. His family puts up with his ‘eruptions’ but you can tell they’d prefer to be in another another room – or state!

You're familiar with the tantrums?

I’ve also wondered why it is challenging for him to remember people’s names, or to put lists to memory, like a speech or a lesson. Sure we all have ‘memory’ challenges, but this guy starts sweating on camera with just the thought of ‘forgetting’ all the points he wants to make. The sheer act of ‘remembering’ to not forget triggers his emotions into what Malcolm Gladwell describes as ‘choke’ or it’s nemesis - ‘panic’. In either way, pilots crash their plane, athletes ‘freeze’ and fail, and the self-fulfilling angst explodes in real life color.

This guy I’m writing about instantly mashes paragraph one with paragraph two – like a pent up genius with his mental processor pegged at 109% - combining the ‘emotional’ short fuse with a demanding ‘achiever’ strength until the emotional sparks fly.

I wish the guy would knock it off, but it seems he’s got a long-standing habit that takes a lot of effort to rewire in his brain. The trouble isn’t the guys 'will'. It’s not his ‘effort’. It’s not even his 'self-awareness'. The problem is that the wiring in his head is too closely packed. The emotional memories historic consequences are so closely linked in his hippocampus that his prefrontal cortex hasn’t a moment to be innovative or to creatively solve the quagmire before his instinctive reptilian core moves his physiology into a fearful fit - opening his mouth and tightening his chest and hands in a self-protective posture.

Have you seen this mess?

But wait, there’s more…

I woke up with a brilliant solution for this guy.

First the principle, and then my solution – for me, myself and I – the guy!

The Principle

My memory training coaches (Stephen Glover and Ron White) both suggest that to remember something I simply need to create a mental image that is:

1) grossly scaled – ie. super large , super small       2) numerically multiplied – ie. ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.ie.       3) sped up or down – ie. f      a          s                   t  slow

 

Then I need to anchor that image to the ‘word’ or ‘emotion’ or ‘name’ that I want to recall.

Here’s the insight I woke up with early this morning, and from which I’m writing a public apology to all the people I’ve wounded through decades of frustrating battles over self, which have caused far more grief than I wish to acknowledge. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Better than that – learn from my maturing recovery.

Here’s the image to recall, and the phrase to anchor to this image, so you, and I, can recall it faster than our primordial ‘reactions’ fire with fight, flight or freeze.

The Application

What to anchor (remember) about this image:

Anchor this:

Imagine yourself inside the International Space Station. Scroll back up and take a really close look at the scale. You’ll see the Shuttle, inverted at the very top. Now get a sense of yourself inside any one of the modules. Harmony (Node 2) is 24’ long with a 14’ diameter. You and the guy I’m writing about would be barely visible.

Anchor this:

Looking down at the United States, specifically focus on the lousy economy - or joblessness. Imagine fixing your attention on ‘entrepreneurship’ or ‘job creation’ or even your ‘bills’. They can’t been seen. Look closely. Even closer. Nope.

Now, close your eyes and imagine yourself on the ISS, worrying about your ‘bills’. Get a clear image of you floating inside a module, paying attention to the stress of the unknown – how are you going to change the situation that comes to mind?

Do it. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the above picture.

Get a clear image of you floating, weightless and surrounded by the essentials you need to stay alive. If the situation you are troubled by can be separated in your mind, like the image above, with your challenge on the ground, and you separated by a HUGE distance from that situation, then the strong feelings can also be separated from impulse to react. This image can break the reactive impulse of fear or fight. Remember this image and see the separation between the individual (you) and the situation beneath the clouds, on the ground, in a building, on a desk, on a screen….

Separate the individual (you) from the situation.

 

ISS

 

Individual                                                               <   Separation    >                                                           Situation

 

When we imagine the individual separated from the situation, the focus of our mental activity shifts for just a moment from the emotional core – our thalamus - to our prefrontal cortex.

The picture above can be recalled when an emotional trigger is detected, or an overwhelming feeling comes  forward, or a depressing thought grips you. Mentally moving the individual, a person, a human ‘being’, not a human ‘doing’ from inside a situation is all it takes to break the habitual cycle of reactive behavior and ‘stinking thinking’.

It’s working for the guy I’m writing about. Me.

International Space Station – ISS – Individual Separation Situation

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Accepting Failure w/o Becoming One

If you’ve been an entrepreneur for long, you know this feeling. It’s a heavy, dull sense of something that disappoints you, like the sun not coming out for a week. It’s a vaguely familiar feeling of loss, like the death of an unborn child, something anticipated that is never to be.

The pain is somewhere deep inside our core. It pulses with sadness, frustration, anger and even rage. The waves of primitive emotion sweep over us, again and again silencing all hope and confidence. The doom is only broken by an occasional gasp of air. It seems as if we don’t have any reason to live, but we can’t muster the hope or strength to fight from drowning any longer. We vacillate between fighting, fleeing or freezing.

Wisdom tells us that;

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick”    Proverbs 13:12

As I write this, after 18 months of hard work planning, executing and promoting this year’s expedition I have a sick heart. My hope for a vividly imagined marketing and masculine initiation adventure has come to a halt. The past three weeks have been a torturous struggle to understand the thickening chaos and to squarely take responsibility for the shortfall while shoring up my ego and the reputation damages for this years expedition not launching as expected.

Sure, I could look at the evidence and find an excuse; the sick economy, frightened men, even WA Hwy 20 not opening due to avalanches and a late spring weather pattern, but blame does no good. It’s like a vulture’s shadow. The shadow isn’t even the real thing spying my carcass for the absence of life. A real bird of prey would be something to be afraid of, but this is just a sketchy shadow.

I can point to a rider that panicked and drove back home without saying goodbye. Another that has had so many set-backs it’s hard to imagine much more strength in the face of adversity. And another that simply nodded silently as if to say ‘hmmm’ guess that’s that.

So where’s the lesson in this for us?

 

Lesson One

Balance your PMF

Doing some forensics on our Product, Marketing, Finance (PMF factors), I can see a distinct pattern, from which I can point out my leadership blind-spot. Michael Gerber writes about the situation with this caution; “work ON your business, not IN your business”.

That’s a real dilemma for solo-preneurs. We easily default to a single portion of our enterprise. Not surprisingly, it’s our coping mechanisms that predispose us to our PMF corner, and ‘pressures’ further entrench us in our habitual cave of choice.

On the left, is an illustration of Production resources increasing rapidly, then as the product gets refined and ready for release, more time than resources are spent. The balance to this (blue line) would be that marketing expends little resources until nearing the end of the development cycle, upon which Marketing jumps to life. The two should reconnect, with awareness and product and demand in the top right. Perfect timing and launch in theory.

In the illustration to the right, are the past 3 years of my effort in green. I note that ‘Production’ ran far ahead of ‘marketing’, redirecting over $500k to create a great product and a series of imagined outcomes long before the market was informed (cyclists and MENtrepreneurs). We’re self-funded. So, with marketing lagging, our sales fall short, and resources to get the product to market fall short, and the excitement and confidence falter, leaving others stunned and questioning themselves, and us. (or so I think) In reality, people are busy elsewhere, and we simply haven’t yet got their attention.

Some habitual coping mechanisms pop up in these kind of situations. Fear, anger, and a bunch of other Fight/Flight/Freeze behaviors. Some of which look like these:

The bottom line of advice:

Be sure all three factors (PMF) are in balance, even if it means slipping the launch for the others to catch up, rather than pressing on the others to ‘catch up’ ‘measure up’, or simply to PRODUCE RESULTS! Remember my top strength? ACHIEVER? It’s my blind-spot and my offender!

 

Lesson Two

The ‘story isn’t over’ unless you quit.

The second half of the proverb is:

“but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life”

I interrupted my ‘production’ to listen to today’s lesson from Les Brown. He’s one of the ‘distant’ mentors I have in my quorum.

His point today?

Don’t quit. Don’t give up. Keep after your greatness. Find another way. Try another route, another date, another partner.

Hmmm. So if we had been riding, I wouldn’t have submitted for the Ashoka ChangeMakers competition, or found the interest by Providence Hospital Systems in co-branding our Enterprising Cycle? Maybe the route and timing have simply changed and I’m only dealing with unrealistic expectations? Hmmm.

I rationalize and reason Les’s shot of advice this way:
If I quit, I am certain of the outcome. If I try again, then I have half a chance of succeeding – which is double where I am now. Ok, then let’s write the Executive Summary for Providence.

 

Lesson Three

NEVER go it alone.

Another of my ‘mastermind’ is the husband wife team behind the ‘Art of Manliness’, Brett and Kate McKay. I learned about the resiliency of Casey Burgener in a recent article. I didn’t realize I would be learning valor through Casey for a few weeks - after the expedition postponement was obvious.

“Casey knows all about the highs and lows of this struggle for athletic glory. He’s been competing in Olympic-style weightlifting for almost two decades. He and his wife Natalie, who is also a weightlifter and competed in the 2008 Olympics, live together at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Co.

Casey qualified to compete in the 2008 Olympics but had his spot taken from him the night before the opening ceremonies when weightlifters from other countries were disqualified, thus changing the results of the qualifying rounds. Such a disappointment might have crushed a lesser man, but Casey just got back to work, setting his mind on training for another four years to compete in London in 2012. 

 

Lesson Four

Understand Grief

From Wikipedia: The Kübler-Ross Model, commonly known as The Five Stages of Grief, was first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying

The stages, popularly known in its abbreviated form DABDA, include:

1. Denial — "I feel fine."; "This can't be happening, not to me."
   Denial is usually only a temporary defense for the individual. This feeling is generally replaced with heightened awareness of possessions and individuals that will be left behind after death.
2. Anger — "Why me? It's not fair!"; "How can this happen to me?"; '"Who is to blame?"
   Once in the second stage, the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue. Because of anger, the person is very difficult to care for due to misplaced feelings of rage and envy.
3. Bargaining — "Just let me live to see my children graduate."; "I'll do anything for a few more years."; "I will give my life savings if..."
   The third stage involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying, "I understand I will die, but if I could just have more time..."
4. Depression — "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"; "I'm going to die... What's the point?"; "I miss my loved one, why go on?"
   During the fourth stage, the dying person begins to understand the certainty of death. Because of this, the individual may become silent, refuse visitors and spend much of the time crying and grieving. This process allows the dying person to disconnect from things of love and affection. It is not recommended to attempt to cheer up an individual who is in this stage. It is an important time for grieving that must be processed.
5. Acceptance — "It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it, I may as well prepare for it."
   In this last stage, the individual begins to come to terms with her/his mortality or that of a loved one.

The point here is that small business is personal. You’ll not just get back to business as usual without going through the steps above. Guess which one I’m finally in? Five – Acceptance. This pain is mostly because I worked so long, and vividly imagined every mile of the route in my mind, and using Google maps.

 

Your turn.

What have you learned about resilience and bouncing back?
Who’s there to remind you about perspective?