There’s a necessary mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur if you are to become successful. Without it, it’s all too easy to repeat work and thought patterns which don’t serve you or your business. As an employee you’re in the role of a “technician” working a small part of a greater whole. The buck stops with the owner/s, not you. Your only responsibility is your small role in the company, with a regular job.
There’s a certain comfort in this too, and you can leave the job after the day knowing you’ll get paid for what you have done, or at least for your time. As an entrepreneur it’s very different. There’s risks and more responsibility. You can’t take your “time for money” mentality into an entrepreneurial venture and expect the same results. You need to approach it differently.
Mindset Shift From Employee To Entrepreneur
You may think that switching to the entrepreneurial role will give you more time, money and greater flexibility. While this can be true, it also brings a whole host of other problems you never thought about. While you’re working in a job, trading time for money, you have learned that working in such a way gives you a regular income and provides all you need. You have been conditioned by that job to expect a regular income, by trading your time for it.
In entrepreneurship you can’t expect that income because you haven’t built your business yet. So you might work longer hours for less money, or even for nothing in the early years of your business. While you work away in your new venture, enjoying being the “boss”, you are unaware of what actions and activities bring about the results you really want. So you might find yourself in the role of the “technician”, repeating roles which brought you success as an employee, but fail to do so as an entrepreneur.
As an employee you had the “cushion” of the company giving you a regular income. Other roles within an organisation did other things like drive the company, which you now must do as an entrepreneur. The problem is, you don’t know what actions and activities you need to focus on. You’re still stuck in the mindset of an employee – working on activities which don’t move your entrepreneurial life forwards!
Mindset Shift From Employee To Entrepreneur – My Story
Before working starting my own online business I worked for a company as a content creator. I got paid for writing articles. As it happened, it was articles about airport parking! For months I created new content around the topic and was severely burned out by the time I left! I thought it would be great to own my own online business and get paid the same just for writing content!
So I found some affiliate products to write about and I wrote and wrote. But I didn’t make any money. Despite working longer hours and for a much longer period, I still made much less than I did at my employee role. It wasn’t until I changed my focus that things began to change. I took my employee role and thought it would work in entrepreneurial life. It didn’t.
A similar thing happened when I built a martial arts school. I loved training in Wing Chun Kung Fu and did so for many years. “Great”, I thought -getting paid for my passion! But the things I was good at didn’t translate into building my school up and I struggled for several years.
I didn’t have the entrepreneurial skills to promote my school. I didn’t set out a curriculum which my students could follow and learn from. My mistake was that nly interested in my own training and didn’t know how to “package” my skills into a business model which was attractive. I was “stuck” in the habit of doing “my thing” rather than switching to providing value for my students. I was in the role of technician rather than business owner.
Employees Work, Entrepreneurs Drive
As an employee you job is to do as you are told. You work in a smaller role often, providing some element of value for a larger whole. But in entrepreneurial life, you’re the driving force behind your business. Without a vision of what you want to create with your business, it’s easy to fall back into the technician’s role and focus only on smaller actions which don’t generate the larger results.
The technician’s role is vastly different to the entrepreneurs. Their skill sets are different too. The technician works in the comfort of their skill set. The entrepreneur needs to focus on the bigger picture and if the company doesn’t make money, they are solely to blame.
So one of the best things you can do for a mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur is to take full responsibility for your success, or lack of it, and “failures”.
Reclaim Your Vision – Dream A Little!
As an employee too, it’s easy to lower your vision of what is possible. You position yourself with the people around you; many of whom lack vision and drive. Your circle of friends are your greatest influence. How many of them are entrepreneurial? Getting a “safe” job is often a priority for them, rather than living a greater life and finding a purposeful direction.
Another way to reclaim your drive for entrepreneurial life is to recall the dreams you had earlier in life. What was possible as a child someone loses its momentum as you grow up! You fall into the pattern of thinking like the masses, and never escape.
“Don’t take risks”, “get a steady job”, “stay safe” they say. But this kind of mentality doesn’t translate well into entrepreneurial life. Entrepreneurs take risks and have a larger vision of what is possible. You can’t bring the “safe”, steady mentality of 9 to 5 work into entrepreneurial life without it having an influence over the outcome.
Pain Pushes, Visions Pulls
As an employee, you need to keep turning up and trading your time for money. Your income in capped and you’ll always need to keep showing up to get paid. In entrepreneurial life, you need a “why” pulling you, or pushing you to take action to move your business forwards.
Without a strong motivating force, it’s hard to keep going when you don’t get paid for the work you do. As your business grows, you can, over time stop working and keep earning money, especially with a fully automated online business. But in the early days of building a business, you’ll work long hours and not see much. You need to lay the groundwork of your business and this is “underground” so you don’t see the results for it!
This is why so many quit before they start seeing the fruits of their efforts in entrepreneurial life. Often, the pain of working a job you hate forces you to take action and start your own business. This is the driving force to make you work so you have an escape route.
Once you’re out of your job, this goes away, and hence so does your motivation to drive your business forwards! That’s why pain pushes and vision pulls. As an entrepreneur, you need to use these forces to help motivate you. In a job, you know the money forces you to show up, day after day, until the pain overcomes the motivation to keep doing so!
See also affiliate psychology and thinking entrepreneurially.
A good book on this topic is The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.
Mindset Shift – Employee to Entrepreneur
When you shift from employee to entrepreneur, you’ll bring a bunch of habits with you. Most of these won’t serve you so you’ll need to do some “house cleaning”. As an entrepreneur you’ll need to be in charge of your business and this means getting clear on your objectives and manage your time well. Creating goals, putting up vision boards and creating clear targets to hit are pretty important and in employee life, these are often the things which are done for you.
Here’s a few of the habits you should start making as an entrepreneur:
- Reading – read inspirational and helpful mindset books regularly
- Goal setting – set specific and measurable goals for long term, short term and medium term so you can track your progress and hold yourself accountable.
- Time management – time is valuable as an entrepreneur. You don’t get paid for time in business, you get paid for results.
- Make daily lists and prioritise them
- Create a “don’t do” list too – this is a list of things which if you did, it wouldn’t make any difference to your business.
- Remove time suckers and distractions which cause any problems with the above.
It’s also useful to connect with other like minded thinkers. Many employees would kill to own their own business, but instead of doing it, will try and pull you back in. They secretly hope you’ll fail and can (perhaps unconsciously) sabotage your efforts with “helpful” words – often only meaning well and “looking after” you! See why your friends and family don’t want you to succeed.
Don’t ever complain to these people, as they will use it to “hook” you back into employee land to keep them feeling safe!
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