Session 4: Entrepreneurial Leadership
Making the decision to become an Entrepreneur is at the leading edge of self
responsibility. It requires you to take complete responsibility for your situation, yourself,
your decisions, your actions, the results you product, and the value you produce for others.
To me, Entrepreneurial Leadership is about the ability to take yourself and lead yourself to
do new things - things that might be counter-intuitive and seem to fly in the face of what
everything else thinks is right. So in this session we're going to talk about leadership and
self responsibility.
One of my favorite quotes is from Helen Keller -
"Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
As I said before, as an Entrepreneur, you must risk. It turns out that most people don't really step up and take the risk - they don't take the personal responsibility, the control. They take a more reactive stance to life, instead of being proactive. They wait and see how things will turn out before they decide what they're going to do. They think by waiting and seeing they're being proactive, but they're really not. Being proactive means taking responsibility for what we get in life, but the strategy a lot of us learn from an early age is to not take responsibility... for ourselves, for our situation, our relationships, our results. The problem is when we don't take responsibility and risk, in the long run we're trading pennies now for dollars later.
So in order to become a leader and direct yourself to do what is a better thing, you must take control and personal responsibility. Brian Tracy says in Psychology of Achievement that if anything goes wrong, if you get triggered and you feel out of control, tell yourself "I am responsible." You might be upset and pissed off, but keep saying it to yourself, and keep looking at it from how you are responsible... you'll discover how you really are responsible. Then you'll see ways of changing your situation and giving yourself more power in the process.
One of the psychological challenges when starting a new business is it's hard to be a human being who sees, believes in, and is working to build something that others don't see. It's particularly hard when you're doing things that other people don't understand.
My friend Alex Mandosian likes to tell the story of a species of bamboo that builds roots for 3 years underground without ever coming to the surface. If someone see you watering an area of plain old dirt - for 3 YEARS - they'd think you were totally whacky.
So in order to become a leader and direct yourself to do what is a better thing, you must take control and personal responsibility. Brian Tracy says in Psychology of Achievement that if anything goes wrong, if you get triggered and you feel out of control, tell yourself "I am responsible." You might be upset and pissed off, but keep saying it to yourself, and keep looking at it from how you are responsible... you'll discover how you really are responsible. Then you'll see ways of changing your situation and giving yourself more power in the process.
One of the psychological challenges when starting a new business is it's hard to be a human being who sees, believes in, and is working to build something that others don't see. It's particularly hard when you're doing things that other people don't understand.
My friend Alex Mandosian likes to tell the story of a species of bamboo that builds roots for 3 years underground without ever coming to the surface. If someone see you watering an area of plain old dirt - for 3 YEARS - they'd think you were totally whacky.
