THE 6 STAGES YOU GO THROUGH WHEN YOU DECIDE TO START YOUR OWN BUSINESS

Share This Post:

Taking the self-employment plunge is undoubtedly scary. You’re going from having a job with that stable income to one where you hope and pray that your business idea flourishes. We all go through the stages of the decision of opening our own business and we all grow up a whole lot more the moment we made it official.

Stage One: Excitement. When you finallytruly believe in the ideas that you’ve been throwing around for years. It’s the moment when you start talking about the future plans of your super successful hypothetical company.

Stage Two: You quit your day job. Now that you believe in your dream, you must embrace it. You walk away from your 9-5er and from a consistent paycheck. It’s a terrifyingly liberating feeling.

Stage Three: Quitter’s Remorse. The morning after you give the “big notice” the anxiety sets in. You wake up in a panic and you question your recent decisions and wonder how you would beg your old boss for your job back.

Stage Four: You catch your breath. After an hour and a half of your extreme self-doubting, you’re finally able to start to breathe in deep full breaths and your insistent self-questioning starts to cease. And in these moments during the decline of your anxiety, that belief that prompted it all resumes and it feels so good.

Stage Five: You say it out loud. You catch yourself addressing your employment title as a “business owner” for the first time and you feel a sense of pride that you’ve never felt before.

Stage Six: You finally believe in yourself not because you want to but because you know you have to. Once you’ve made the choice to go down the road of starting your own business, you can’t go back even if it gets hard— you must continue. You realize that you must believe in yourself completely because if you don’t no one else will.

These six stages define a small portion of the population. We are the dreamers, the risk takers, the doers, the movers and shakers and the ones brave enough or foolish enough to believe in our dream enough to pursue it. Keep your head up and keep going— there’s no going back.

CATEGORIES