If You Should and You Could...Would You?

By: Rich Becerr - [self]

It's an easy question to ask and a hard one to answer.

Fact: One hundred percent (100%) of all business failures share one thing in common when you ask their respective owners. They all share that they should have done something differently.

It's ironic that both the problem and the solution are both found in what "Should" have been done!

We have all spent the majority of our lives learning what we should and shouldn't be doing. From our earliest childhood memories we recall our parents advising us to: Say thank you, Do your homework!, Don't eat before dinner......well you get the point.

It's amazing that knowing what we should do and having the ability to do it has nothing to do with actually doing it. Here's an example that will illustrate my point.

You arrive home and are hungry. It's after the holidays and you've put on some extra pounds. Facing you in the refrigerator are two choices, celery sticks and left over pumpkin pie! You Should eat the celery sticks. They are there fresh, cleaned and available so you Could very easily eat them. Would you?

Stay with me here and I'll get to the point. Let's just say you decided to eat that slice of pumpkin pie, several things will probably occur.

1. First and foremost you have expediently satisfied your hunger.

2. Secondly, you will probably begin to feel the first 'pangs' of guilt that remind you of what you Should have selected.

3. The third emotion you might feel is a conviction that when faced with a similar decision again, you will be resolute and make a better choice.

So it is with business owners. Having run my own business I can speak from personal experience. Almost without fail, I knew what I Should do in all instances. This is instinctive in most entrepreneurs and is in fact the original vision that drives most of us to open our own enterprise in the first place. This vision is an idealistic view of our new enterprise accomplishing great things by doing all of the things other companies don't and we know they should.

We 'trot' out with our vision intact and ready to do what we should, quickly find that we can't for various reasons and pick the most expedient solutions available at the time. In other words, we eat the pumpkin pie! Not because we particularly want to, but because we feel we have no other workable solution.

So let's look at what is going on in our mind:

We start with our self-image. Typically in our minds eye we see ourselves as successful business owners. We are exceedingly adept at doing things better than any other similar enterprise in the market and we are sure we will avoid the mistakes others have made. We are somehow different and have a desire to build our business right and without compromise!

In conflict with this self-image is: Guilt

For compromising what we know we should have done.

Remember that we will instinctively gravitate towards solutions that support our self-image and away from things that erode it. We truly want to do what we should; our challenge is to use our self-image to support an appropriate decision.

Intuition tells us what we should do. What it fails to clearly define is when. Knowing what should be done is only half the challenge and at times like this it is better to pause and even postpone action if the proper (Should) decision cannot be made.

Our deep-rooted original vision of how our business was to be constructed and what would make if flourish were not wrong! Stay with your vision and always find ways to do what you should do rather than what's easier or less costly to do at the moment.

You are running your own show because you know how to make your business work the right way. Compromising will only begin a counterproductive spiral of self-doubt ---- Don't Do It!

I challenge you to stay TRUE to yourself. Succeed or fail on your terms, not because you compromised. Only then can you look back and truly say it was your own show!

Best of Success, Rich Becerra http://www.Administaff.com

Resource Box: Rich Becerra is a business process consultant for. Currently working with Administaff, Inc., this publicly traded company (ASF) provides HR solutions and is the nations leading Professional Employer Organization. To contact Rich: (800) 203-0240 or richbecerra@a... mailto:richbecerra@a... .

Posted: Tue Dec 30 02:48:56 EST 2003

For more articles by this author, please visit:

http://ThePhantomWriters.com/freecontent/d/index.shtml#RichBecerra

>>Reprint/Distribution Source : ArticleWareHouse.com