Have you ever suffered from ‘Existential Business Crisis’? Never heard of it? Well, I kind of just made it up but let me describe..

Phase 1

  • You have an idea or lots of them.
  • You decide to pick one and start and seem confident about it and get to work.

Everything is going well up until now and then..

Enter Phase 2:

  • Your start questioning what you are doing and second guessing your choices. Questions like “Why am I doing this? Is this the right choice? Will I be successful?” consume your thoughts and you can no longer move forward.
  • You take two steps back..that blog you started gets abandoned, that domain name that you thought was perfect seems lackluster and basically..nothing gets done.

Enter Phase 3:

You find yourself curled up in fetal position in the corner of the room, the only light coming from your computer monitor.

  • You’re preoccupied with thinking “what if” or “will this be successful” that in fact you never even get started. Sorta like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Been there done that.

Your business idea before it even got a chance to take off was snuffed by your own thoughts/fears/concerns.

Starting or learning something new can be both challenging *and* distracting. Hello Twitter?/Facebook/Google+/

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the desired end result that it is easy to forget that things can be broken down into smaller, actionable parts. Think back to when you first started to learn how to drive. The instructor didn’t just sit you in the car and say-”Go!” (at least I hope not)-you had to take theory courses, familiarize yourself with the car and start with the basics. The same applies if you are beginning your social media strategy or a new blog, a product and so on. It is easy to think you need to do be everywhere and do everything; become frustrated by all the new information there is to learn and then end up doing nothing at all.

Take a step back and start with the basics

To quote one of my yoga teachers-

if you don’t start somewhere, you won’t get anywhere

Ask yourself:

  • What are your goals?
  • What do you need to learn to accomplish those goals?
  • What resources can you use to help you?
  • Are there success stories that you can learn from?
  • What is the minimum that you can implement that you can start learning from and measuring success?

    • The key is breaking things down and getting started.

    Once you break your project into smaller parts, it will be easier to identify the parts that you can easily start with and other parts that can wait. Start small and gradually build, always evaluating and identifying how things can be improved. I’ll get into this more in another post but I wanted you start thinking about starting small and what in fact is stopping you…

    As for the perfect idea and making the right choice? You won’t know until you actually start.

    How about you? Have you gone through an Existential Business Crisis?

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