From a psychological point of view, fear is a reaction from your Lizard Brain – the part of your brain that is very primitive.

Fear is a survival tactic – it warns and protects us against dangers. It can also paralyze us from taking action.

In business, fear can be our worst enemy and it can come at the most inopportune times.

You might think, looking at other startups and small businesses, that you are the only one who is fearful of failure, being lost, etc.

You are not alone.

Fear is a common denominator that ties the business community together.

Nearly every entrepreneur experiences fear at some point in their business careers.

It usually starts for most people when they’re struggling to figure out how to start a business.

But fear doesn’t stop there.

The perceived fearlessness you see around you is typically entrepreneurs re-framing their thoughts to sound brave.

The truth is often very different.

Jen Groover, author of What If? and Why Not?: How to Transform Your Fears Into Action and Start the Business of Your Dreams, a book about transforming your fears, says that rejecting fear creates destructive self-doubting habits:

Until you can jump over your inner roadblocks, the outer ones will stay firmly in place. Overcoming these inner obstacles is about learning to rethink the fearful thoughts that can lead you to quit before you start.

Groover makes the connection between re-framing and using fear to your advantage.

Fear can prevent bad decisions and negative situations, but fear can also be fostered in a way that propels you forward.

For example, fearing failure can push entrepreneurs to work harder in their business, and make better decisions, all while avoiding mistakes.

The key is to avoid shutting down.  Entrepreneur and author Jonathan Fields, in his book Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance, explains:

One of the single greatest determinants of high-level success as an innovator or creator in any realm is the ability to manage and at times even seek out sustained high levels of uncertainty, bundled lovingly with risk of loss and exposure to criticism. These three psychic horsemen of creation must often not only be sought, but embraced repeatedly and with increasing level of intensity over extended periods of time.

What do entrepreneurs and small business owners fear, and how can you take advantage of these fears to improve the success of your business?

Here are four of the biggest and most debilitating fears that all entrepreneurs and small business owners experience and how to overcome those fears.

1. Fear of feeling lost.

Every entrepreneur or small business owner will feel lost at some point.

It’s crazy to expect to know what you are doing 100% of the time or to always assume that the plan will work without problems. Things change fast in business, and you must constantly adjust and evolve.

It’s okay to feel lost, but it’s not okay to stay that way. Always have a Plan B and adjust to changing situations through trial and error until you get it right.

2. Fear of not having “enough” funding.

Plenty of businesses start from nothing!

You don’t need Silicon Valley unicorn-level funding to ensure success. Many successful entrepreneurs and business owners bootstrap.

Remember that fast growth isn’t always right for every business. There have been so many spectacular failures among well-funded startups and businesses that the term “unicorn” has already become pejorative in the startup community.

Just think of how Apple started – a few people in a garage, working together towards a common goal. They were not always the revolutionary tech industry leader they are today.

There are many other similar stories, including stories about some of the most successful companies today.

3. Fear of what others will think.

It would be nice to always have everyone on your side and happy with what you’re doing.

The truth is that sometimes, family and friends think you’re nuts for investing time in a business they don’t understand.

Maybe they’re right to be skeptical, but as long as you believe in your business, chances are that others will too.

People who think differently end up making a difference in the world.

Steve Jobs accomplished this with Apple. Jeff Bezos accomplished this with Amazon. And Elon Musk has made a difference across multiple companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.

People who question what you’re doing are often just fearful themselves of the risks at stake. Their fears tend to impact you.

Believe in yourself – don’t let others bring you down.

4. Fear of failure.

The fear of failure perseveres in the minds of all entrepreneurs and small business owners – even the most successful ones.

After all, if you fail, you fear that others will think you made a terrible move to quit your job to chase a pipe dream.

The truth is, you will be some letdowns, delays, and disappointments.

Everyone fails at some things. But without those mistakes, you can’t learn anything or improve from the experience.

If you can’t learn and improve, you can’t get better.

If you fail at something, ask yourself what you learned from that situation. How can you grow and improve so that you won’t make the same mistake(s) next time?

Be careful not to celebrate failure because not every failure is a learning experience.

Knowing what not to do helps you focus and avoid setbacks, but doesn’t help you adapt to changes. You know what didn’t work — does that help you next time when you need to figure out what will work? If you ask successful entrepreneurs whether they would rather hire someone who has failed or someone who has succeeded, I suspect most would prefer to hire the person who has succeeded. This is not surprising — scientific research shows that we learn more from success than from failure.

A recent University of California, Berkeley study revealed that the threshold of risk and success plays a large role in how motivating or debilitating a fear will be.

The study found that when the chances of success were high, people were more likely to use their fear as a motivator to overcome the challenges. However, when the chances of success were likely to be low, people gave in to their fear.

There’s another interesting aspect to the fear of failure. Some people imagine success and believe they will not fail.

Although this seems intuitively right, this could actually be counter-productive. Positive thinking alone is not enough.

Scientific research has shown that we create best outcomes when we balance positive thinking with visualizing future obstacles and ways we must overcome them.

Fear is real and can be paralyzing.

However, if you risk nothing, you risk everything.

The post 4 Fears Leaders Must Overcome To Help Their Businesses Succeed appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

Richard Branson of Virgin agrees that passion is the fundamental reason behind his company’s success:

When you believe in something the force of your convictions will spark other people’s interest and motivate them to help you achieve your goals. This is essential to success.

Richard Branson has been immensely successful and it’s natural for you to respect what he says about entrepreneurship.

In theory, following your passion appears to be a great foundation for a successful business.

The reality for most aspiring entrepreneurs is quite different.

Most people do not feel true passion.

Sure, many feel the need to be passionate and to speak passionately about their ideas and startups.

But there’s a very important difference between feeling the need to be passionate and actually being passionate about an idea.

Richard Branson was passionate and has continued to inject his passion into every business he started. But, even his passion hasn’t fail-proofed his startups. There have been plenty of failures along the way.

Passion is exciting, contagious, and interesting.

We celebrate people who appear passionate – and we should.

But passion can also be fleeting.

Here are three reasons why passion might not be enough, in the long run, to help you launch and sustain a successful business:

1. Passion does not compensate for no expertise.

I could be very passionate about building passenger rockets.

It could be my dream to launch a company that can send people to space – much like airlines do across the world.

But no matter how much I am interested in passenger rockets, that doesn’t mean that I know the technical, financial, or logistical aspects.

There are billions of people in the world and many are passionate about space. Who other than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are converting their passion into a for-profit company looking to solve the space travel problem?

Lack of expertise leads many aspiring entrepreneurs to believe that their product is great. Reality can be harsh.

Too many aspiring entrepreneurs fall in love with their idea and ignore the problem.

Ideas are shiny, new, and interesting. But often, they don’t solve an actual problem.

2. Passion is fleeting.

Passion is a powerful feeling of extreme love or hate and is classified as an emotion.

Here’s the problem: whether we like it or not, emotions aren’t permanent. They appear just as quickly as they fade.

According to a series of four studies on finding a career based on passion, or developing passion in a career chosen by skills, researchers found that “both facilitate success”.

However, the same researchers noticed that there were differences in the motivational and productive patterns of the workers.

The most interesting finding: those who found passion in a career they chose based on objective reasons ended up being slightly more successful than those who simply just followed their passion.

Think about it – if the passion disappeared (as it nearly always does), what else will motivate you to continue pushing forward with your idea?

Don’t kid yourself that your startup will be a rocket ship. Few are. Even the most passionate entrepreneurs hit a wall. After all, startups are like roller coasters and while the highs are great, the lows are equally depressing.

3. Passion doesn’t replace a strong work ethic.

Some of the most passionate people I know are also some of the laziest.

It doesn’t mean that all passionate people are lazy (in fact, most are not), but it does suggest that passion does not always result in a good work ethic.

A good work ethic reflects a person’s resiliency, discipline, and desire to do a good job. They have to be willing to put in the time and effort to start a business, to take a pay cut, to push through times when they face failure. Passion will not get them through it, because it will most likely disappear in times of trouble.

I’m not suggesting that entrepreneurs should ignore their passion.

Passion does play a large role in starting and growing companies. Passion is often the reason why we take risks.

But passion clearly isn’t enough to keep a business afloat when you hit the entrepreneurial wall – and you will. Find your passion, but also be sure you know what else can motivate you to move forward when your passion starts to fade.

The post Why Follow Your Passion is Bad Advice For Entrepreneurs appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.

If you run or work at a startup, you experience many highs and lows and you can’t always anticipate what’s ahead.

Education and experience help us to overcome many difficult situations, but education and experience are rarely enough.

To be successful, we also must be creative in the ways we face and overcome problems.

Why isn’t education and experience enough?

Startups don’t typically have the same resources, capital, or credibility found in established companies.

This forces entrepreneurs and their startups to think outside of the box and to take actions that are very different than those an established company might take.

For example, established companies rarely bet their entire company on a single new product, yet startups regularly do this.

Established companies tweak marketing, product design, sales, and many other processes in incremental ways. Many established companies talk about innovation, but few actually understand how to innovate and even fewer are innovative.

Psychology professor Thomas B. Ward found that a majority of an entrepreneur’s creativity is invested in solving paradoxes. The Routlegde Companion to Creativity summarizes one of his findings:

For example, in introducing a new product in the market, entrepreneurs will have to combine novelty and familiarity, the former for catching attention and the latter to prevent outright rejection.

This paradox happens because startups must be able to do many things well, but lack resources. The Routledge Companion to Creativity explains:

In a physical sense, the most critical of these paradoxes, as apparent from the situation described above, is the mismatch between the requirements and availability of resources. Building a new enterprise and establishing it in the competitive field would need a lot of resources, which the newness and smallness of the enterprise/entrepreneur prevents them from attracting. In prioritizing the tasks to be performed while implementing their entrepreneurial vision, entrepreneurs have to focus on the critical tasks, but paradoxically have to take care of every routine, in the absence of robust organizational systems and procedures. Such paradoxes can also cloud the mental processes of the entrepreneur.

Even though entrepreneurs are asked to do the impossible and to disrupt our daily lives, they often struggle to find the right way to do this.

Before you conclude that creativity is only necessary when you’re trying to figure out a new business idea and that education and experience can lead the way afterward, consider the following research study published in The Journal of Enterprising Culture.

In that study, researchers discovered that the creativity linked to innovation (i.e. ideation) directly affects an entrepreneur’s managerial/leadership skills. In the study, the more innovative a person, the better they were at being a leader.

It turns out that innovative people use that same nexus of creativity to problem solve financial issues or employee conflict and to create a unique company culture. Without these important skills, no company can become sustainable.

But what happens if you get a creative block? After all, we’re all human and rarely perfect. Do you stop being a good entrepreneur when you’ve misplaced your creativity?

Don’t worry – this is a temporary problem.

According to Good Therapy, creative block affects a majority of creative people.

When creative block strikes, truly innovative entrepreneurs push forward and overcome the block. They either know how to harness their energy, refocus, and let their creativity recharge – or they take specific steps in order to return to their creative state.

Before you conclude that putting your head “in the clouds” is worthless, you should know that scientific research supports this approach.

A study on creative cognition revealed that the more distant a creative was from the issue blocking them, the faster and better they solved the problem. The study highlights this idea as “cognitive distance”, which is like mentally walking away from a situation that is at a standstill. The study also examines the idea that within that distance, there is an ability to daydream – what the Psychology Today article refers to as “head in the clouds”. Daydreaming allows us to delve deeper into our psyche, and release any mental inhibitions we may have, which are often the cause of the creative block.

We might not all be MacGyver, with superhuman skills to make creative things out of ordinary objects, but we can all leverage creativity to overcome problems that seem insurmountable. Many times, our ability to overcome such problems is the difference between our companies succeeding and failing.

The post Do You Have To Be Creative To Be A Successful Entrepreneur? appeared first on crowdspring Small Business Resource Center.