The Single Ingredient for Small Business Success is Confidence

Small Town America Needs Confidence
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Confidence counts for a lot in our lives and is substantial to the success of a small business that must continuously overcome challenges. Overconfidence creates undue risk while confidence assesses new information to make accurate assessments of success (or failure). Without confidence you are unlikely to start a business or succeed through the positive and negative aspects of society to maintain your business. Your personality and your business are often intertwined during the initial stages and your belief in yourself is key to longevity.

One way to improve on confidence is to think about the different possibilities and the truer likelihood of success or failure within the market. If you aren't sure you certainly can take a blind leap of faith but it is often better to try and find opportunities to narrow those gaps of missing information. That isn't always easy when you lack the self-belief to start walking down the path to success. 

I read an article in Forbes by Caroline Castrillon entitled This Is The Secret Ingredient For Small Business Success that discusses the nature of confidence. I stole their APA Dictionary of Psychology of underconfidence as, “a cognitive bias characterized by an underestimation of one’s ability to perform a task successfully or by an underrating of one’s performance relative to that of others.” (Its a very informative article so I suggest you read it.)

What we find is that underconfidence, just like overconfidence can impact our decisions and in turn our outcomes. They may often seem subtle but add up in profound ways over the many series of choices we must make. While underconfidence leads to certain outcomes we can sometimes overcome those difficulties as we weigh and balance options. Consider the following...

1.) Look for information before making major decisions.

2.) Listen to your inner self and match that with logical analysis.

3.) Be open to different possibilities and outcomes. 

4.) Stay in touch with industry changes and pay attention to what others are doing.

5. Bounce ideas off of others (Get a consultant if you don't have someone to bounce)

6. Recognize that business is a process and failures often lead to success. Just keep working on it!