Is fear a motivation?
My greatest fear is the dentist because experience has taught me I’ll have some degree of discomfort or pain, once in the chair.
Consequently, I’ll have anxiety for the 24 hours that lead up to my appointment. Others fear public speaking and for some, it may be doing taxes. We all deal with fear in a number of ways.
As a Professional Business Coach, I focus on the fear business owner’s face. Over the past two years, I have developed a keen instinct on what business owners avoid. The biggest issue they face is fear of failure. When they entered the world of entrepreneurship, they had high expectations with sufficient dreams to drive them to take risks and go forth with confidence. So what happens over time? They plateau to where their skills and education will not get them past problems which have started to pop up.
I worked with a business owner last year who constantly put up a front that he knew everything. He had a great product and his service was very efficient but he was very quickly leaking money to the point where he was no longer profitable. It was only a matter of months before he would lose the business.
Fear was starting to possess him.
Suddenly he became very motivated to listen. The more questions I asked, the deeper we saw opportunity. He finally admitted he needed help with his processes. The good news was that he knew the solutions but needed to be asked the right questions so he could focus on the real issues.
What changed was his readiness to face his fear of asking for help. His pride had prohibited the ability to say ‘I don’t know what to do next.’ Finding support is a critical success factor. We are not afraid to ask for legal or tax advice, so why stop there?
Business Coaching is not new but to discover its effectiveness, you need to seek out reputable coaches with true business experience.
John Mulrey, a Professional Business Coach with AdviCoach with over 35 years of business and education experience, can be reached by Email at jmulrey@advicoach.com or by tel. 954-251-1599.
