The Journey Begins and Stage One: Pre-decision
You, in all likelihood, have little to no dough and have been thinking about creating your own business for some time. Since you are reading this blog, I imagine you also are now becoming serious about moving ahead with and acting on your thinking. Creating your own business can seem overwhelming at the beginning. The first step of your entrepreneurial journey is deciding to decide. That should be easy…right?
Well, maybe. An understanding and awareness of the internal processes will greatly assist you. A self-awareness where you understand and connect with what is going on internally within you, what you are thinking and feeling, all of which are perfectly natural, is tremendously important.
You must also be aware that almost everyone on a similar journey experiences the same feelings and emotions. To understand the internal processes and to be conscious of those processes as you travel along your journey will make it more understandable, but not necessarily more comfortable. Every individual and team goes through these steps. While each experience is unique, each step of the internal process is present at some point during the duration of your startup project.
Two parallel processes that take place as you begin your journey. The obvious one is to follow these steps to develop your idea into a successful business concept, as shown in the innovation flow chart at the beginning of the posts (where applicable). These will be explained in depth as you continue to read the posts and articles that relate to “Hatching Your Million Dollar Business Idea”. The other process involves your internal experience. This will identify the stages of the journey, beginning with Stage one: Pre-decision and relate them to the internal experience.
Each stage of the internal process has three basic components: emotions, cognition and actions. Emotions are all about feelings. Cognition is the process of knowing, perceiving and remembering. Action is driven by the need to get something done and is the doing. Based on observations of both individuals and teams over the years, here are the stages of this process: pre-decision, exploration, introduction, launch and autonomy. Each stage features different emotions as well as cognitive activities and actions.
Emotions play an important role as to influencing you into action or inaction. Some examples of emotions that move you to action: anger, desire fear, passion, euphoria, and self-confidence. Emotions that lead to inaction are anxiety, dread, worry, apathy, despair disappointment, contentment, relaxed, calmness, indifference happiness.
Cognition is mental processing such as calculating, reasoning, problem solving, decision making, memory, concept formulation, pattern recognition and mental imagery are examples.
Actions is to take action and move in a direction. Action is all about doing.
Below is a closer examination of Stage One: Pre-decision, the other four stages will follow in the next several posts.
Stage one: Pre-decision
Emotions – nervous, excitement, stressed, elated, courage, fear and hope are a few of the typical examples for stage one.
Cognitive – reasoning, problem solving, decision making are the main cognitive elements in stage one.
Actions – recording your thinking, collect data, assess probabilities, organize would be an example of action.
I am sure at some point you have seen the cartoon with a person having an angel on one shoulder whispering into the person’s ear and a devil on the opposite shoulder – whispering directly contradictory statements. What is the truth? What is your mind over- amplifying? To what thoughts and ideas are you paying more attention? Which are realistic? Which are merely your imagination? If this internal debate becomes intense, then each debated point needs to be examined. Write down each point and collect data about each. Work on each of these points until you are confident you have determined a solution for each. Does your data point move you ahead or delay moving your idea forward? Sometimes staying in your current situation feels safe, but often this current situation will feel empty. Whether or not you move your new business idea ahead is entirely your choice.
Join us in our next post Hatching Your Million Dollar Business Idea: The Journey Begins for the next stage, exploration, with introduction, launch and autonomy in following posts. If you cannot wait for the posts and articles check out my book on YouTube, Amazon or visit us at Satori Inc. and “awaken your possibilities”.
