61. Encouragement for the Entrepreneur
Ep61
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Entrepreneurship as Experiment
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[00:00:00]
Audra Dinell: [00:01:00] Today I want to share a little encouragement for the entrepreneurs, and I wanna start by talking about a mindset that we must all embrace, and that's the experimental mindset. Entrepreneurship is not a performance, it's an experiment. And if we approach it as a performance, every mistake is gonna feel like exposure.
If we approach it as an experiment. Every mistake gets to become data. And data doesn't shame you. Data informs you. The joy is in the journey and not because the journey is always easy, but because it's alive, it's responsive, it's co-creative. When we build with experimental mindsets, we test offers, we test messaging, we test partnerships, we test identity.
We [00:02:00] don't say this failed. We say, this didn't work out the way I expected, so what did I learn? And that mindset, that's the difference between entrepreneurs who last two years and entrepreneurs who last 20, well, at least I think.
Iterate Not Inconsistent
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Audra Dinell: So I'll speak for myself and say last, at least five,
have you in the past season? Launch. Something that didn't go as planned, changed your offer at least once. Pivoted more than twice. If you said yes, you're not inconsistent. You're iterating.
Advice Is About Fit
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Audra Dinell: The stories we tell ourselves along this journey matter because we're gonna get a lot of advice. And here's the problem with advice.
It's complicated. We are in a world full of advice, good advice, bad advice. Loud advice, confident advice, advice from people with [00:03:00] 10,000 followers. Advice from people with 10 followers. Advice from people who have built something massive and advice for people who have built something small and mighty.
So how do we tell the difference between good advice and bad advice? It's not always about the quality. It's about the fit. Good advice for someone else. Can be misaligned advice for us. Someone might tell us scale immediately. Another will say, stay small and boutique. Someone might say, raise capital, and another will say, never take outside money.
Someone will say, work 80 hours. Give it all you've got. Another will say, work 20 and protect your nervous system. Who's right? From my perspective, they might all be, but we have to figure out what fits us because entrepreneurship is best [00:04:00] when it's aligned. We can follow a blueprint that works brilliantly for someone else and feel miserable inside of it.
We can build something impressive on paper and dread waking up to it. To me, that's not success. That's misalignment. So. Think of one piece of advice that has been rattling around in your head lately. Maybe take a moment if you're not walking or driving or moving your body somehow to ask yourself, who did this advice work for?
Does their life look like mine? Does their nervous system look like mine? Does their season look like mine? Advice is neutral. Alignment is what makes it powerful.
Stop Abandoning Your Strengths
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Audra Dinell: So my advice to you, whether you choose to take it or not, is this, don't abandon what makes you great. [00:05:00] It happens all the time. Entrepreneurs start out strong, clear, convicted, energize, and then comparison creeps in.
We see someone who's doing it better, faster, bigger, more polished, more profitable. And slowly, almost imperceptively, we start shoulding ourselves. I should be farther by now. I should post more. I should launch differently. I should pivot. I should sound more like him. I should tone myself down. I should really toughen up and without realizing it, we can start letting go of what makes us great, our unique strengths, the very things that make us magnetic in the first place.
It's easy to build a business that looks like someone else's. It's much harder and much braver to build one that feels like you. Because here's the truth, you will never experience that full body. Yes, kind [00:06:00] of success if you abandon yourself in the process. We might achieve our numbers, we might hit milestones, we might get applause, but internally it will all feel off.
So close your eyes. Again, if you're not driving or walking or using a knife, close your eyes for 10 seconds. Ask yourself, what's the thing that people always tell me I'm good at. What's the thing I minimize sometimes? Because it just comes easily.
And then ask yourself, have I been building from that strength? Or have I been trying to compensate for it? I know for me this is the advice I needed to hear.
Finding Your Edge
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Audra Dinell: So now let's talk about the edge. The edge can look like burnout, resentment. It can look like anxiety that we can't quite name. It can look like fantasizing about burning it all down and quitting.[00:07:00]
It can look like overworking underworking. It can look like hiding. Entrepreneurship brings you to the edge because that's where growth lives. And I believe that the key is not to avoid the edge completely. If we are so scared of the edge, we're never gonna take risks. We're gonna build something safe and small and maybe stagnant.
But if we sprint recklessly towards the edge without any self-awareness, we are gonna hurl ourselves off. So what I want us to remember. Is when we go to the edge. If we fall, we can get ourselves back up. We've done it before. We've pivoted, we've survived, we've learned, we've rebuilt. Resilience is not theoretical for entrepreneurs.
It's part of it.
How People vs Wow People
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Audra Dinell: Surround yourself. With people who know the power of wow. [00:08:00] And here's what I mean by this. As you build, pay attention to who is standing next to you. There are how people in the world, and they are so valuable. They're gonna tell us how to structure our launch and how to optimize the funnel and how to price our offer, and how to scale on the backend.
And we need those people. But if we only have how people in our life, our world might get small and tactical and incremental, we visionaries, entrepreneurs, creators need wow people. Wow. People think big. They help us expand our imagination. They don't ask, how will you do that? They ask. Ooh, what could be bigger?
They believe in our audacity before we do. They see possibility where others just see risk. So be careful in environments where the first response to your [00:09:00] vision is logistics, because logistics matter, but vision comes first. And if we're only around people who are how people, we might start shrinking our ideas to fit what feels immediately doable.
And the world needs more. Entrepreneurship requires proximity to expansion. Choose rooms where boldness is normalized. Choose relationships where our ambition doesn't feel excessive. Choose conversations that stretch you beyond what feels reasonable. Here's a quick gut check. When you share a big idea, what's the first response you usually get?
Is it a. That's exciting. B, how are you gonna do that? Or C, that seems risky. Who in your life expands you? Who contracts? You know the answer to those questions.
Identity Expansion and Bravery
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Audra Dinell: Entrepreneurship, to me, is [00:10:00] definitely not about perfect execution. It's about identity expansion, becoming someone, someone who takes risks. And experiments makes decisions without guarantees, builds in uncertainty, learns in public, adjusts in real time. It's bravery and it's not joy at the finish line. I believe it is joy in becoming someone capable of standing at their edge and saying, I'll try and if it doesn't work, I'll adjust.
And if I fall. All rise.
Resilience Contract Closing
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Audra Dinell: As we close this. Episode, I love you to take your phone out again if it's safe, and write a sentence to your future self. Start with this. When I hit the next hard moment in my business, I want to remember blank. [00:11:00] Save that, pin it to the top. That's your resilience contract.
Don't rush past the joy of the journey, because someday we're gonna look back at the season, the messy, scrappy, uncertain, brave season and realize this was the good part. All right, y'all, thanks for joining me on this episode of the podcast. I read to you the encouragement that I need for myself, and I hope you took a little nugget out of it.
Have an excellent week and I will see you next time.
