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If You Should and You Could...Would You?
Copyright 2003, Rich Becerra
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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
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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 rich_becerra@administaff.com
<mailto:rich_becerra@administaff.com>.
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This article was originally written: December, 2003
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The article on this page is Copyright © 2003, Rich Becerra
You are not required to show the creative commons license notice when you reprint this work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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