As a small business owner, you probably have experienced pain while running your business. There is the pain of not getting a big sale, the pain of letting someone go, the pain of not reaching a goal. The list could go on and on. What I want to talk about is the difference between experiencing pain and anticipating pain.
Experiencing Pain
Experiencing pain is hard. No one likes it. The pain you go through while running a business is mostly of the emotional variety. It is a place you would not go willingly. Yet, having experienced the pain of a situation, you find that you can live through it. Even more, you usually can learn from it. Take the pain of losing out on a big sale. It hurts, it may affect your bottom line negatively, but you can also learn from it. Next time you will be more prepared, know what warning signs to look for, and have a more tailored sales pitch.
Anticipating Pain
Anticipating pain is something else. I think it can be more depilating to a business. Here is what I mean. If you go into a big sales pitch, you may expect to fail. It has happened before, after all. You become adverse to the possibility of failure, so you take measures. Rather than learn from the past pain, you do what you can to avoid it. You may just convince yourself that you will fail and give it little effort. Even worse, you may not try.
Avoiding Pain
In business, as in life, you tend to want to avoid painful things. If I hurt my knee, I start to limp and hop so I don’t put any weight on it. This is fine, because eventually I know the pain will go away and I can get back to walking normally. But in business, it is possible to start limping and never stop. Something could cause pain one time and you could avoid it forever. You allow the anticipation of pain to limit your possibilities.
Take a situation where a small business owner hires an employee to do a job that she has always done in the past. Great news, the business is moving forward! But wait, the employee doesn’t pan out. In fact, the new employee does a horrible job. It is a nightmare. Eventually, the owner lets him go. She vows never to make the same mistake again and takes the job back over herself. Now the business can’t grow like it could if she would just find the right person to fill the job. But her anticipation of pain will keep her from trying to fill that role again anytime soon.
In that example, the owner had a chance to learn from the pain she experienced. But she didn’t. Whenever you experience pain in your business, try to diagnose it. What really happened to cause it? Avoiding it in the future will not be helpful in any way to your business. The business owner in the example should have looked at her hiring process, the systems she had in place to help the hire do the job, etc.
Going through painful experiences in your business is no piece of cake. However, if you do not face the pain head on, you could seriously derail the potential of your business. The good news is this. You can learn from past experiences. When you anticipate pain, it is usually worse in your mind than it will be in reality. In fact, the more you confront it, the easier it will get.
