In a way, the very meaning of being persistent is to strive to overcome difficulties, so this article is really debating a moot point. However, the reality is that when obstacles arise, or when you find it difficult to concentrate, or are lacking your creative muse, it can be very difficult to continue with your work.
Here are five things I like to do to encourage and motivate myself to persist during the hard times as a small business owner and entrepreneur.
1 – Believe in what you are doing
When it gets hard as a business owner, like when you haven’t made a sale for a while, or you have a mental block and can’t figure out what to do next, or you have suffered a rejection from a prospective client, you need to go back to basics and remind yourself why you are in business in the first place. You undertook the leap into the world of small business because you believed in yourself, and that hasn’t really changed deep down.
2 – Prioritise your work
I find this an easy way to overcome the mental blocks and encourage myself to continue to persist as an entrepreneur. Whenever I get stuck, I make a list of the tasks I want to achieve within a certain time frame. Then I select the most important task to do next. Listing out the jobs on my whiteboard helps too. Often I’ll even put down a time next to each task, and give myself a mini-challenge to complete the task in the allotted time. This helps me to focus and persist with what I need to do.
3 – Identify the roadblock
If you can identify what the problem is, and why you are having difficulty, you are one step closer to overcoming the obstacle in your path. One day I found I just couldn’t focus, and after a few minutes of wondering why, I realised I was just very hot and the room was stuffy. I turned on a fan, went and had a cold drink from the kitchen and when I returned to the computer, I found my energy and enthusiasm again. Identify whatever is really blocking your road and then work out how to remove the roadblock to your creativity.
4 – Identify what you do NOT need to do
Often as a small business owner you can have so many different projects or tasks to complete. Having different deadline days for different clients helps me to prioritise what I have to do when, and more importantly, what I do not have to complete that day. This is part of time management and prioritising, only working on the essential work first.
5 – Forget perfection paralysis
One of the common obstacles we will all face is what I like to call “perfection paralysis”. Sometimes you can spend hours trying to research a particular point, or an hour trying to perfect one single sentence in a marketing message. Instead of spending so long on one point when you are stuck, move on to the next item or task to complete. Come back to it later when your mind is fresh and you can be creative again.
Don’t try to be perfect the first time around. We all need to rework a first draft, before sending it to the client. If you get stuck on a particular sentence or paragraph in a document for example, it often helps if you write the next one anyway. Then you can come back and rephrase the sentence that was troubling you, once you have got back into the flow of writing again.
Being persistent in your tasks and projects will certainly pay dividends. It is worth struggling through the hard times to make your achievements even sweeter in the end.
Photo Credit: 
photo credit: Brian Forbes
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