Originally posted on Jan 31st 2014

When it comes to running their business, Entrepreneurs will fall into one of 2 categories – Ostrich or Control Freak. This is especially important to understand when it comes to dealing with stress in the business (and growing a business is certainly stressful at times).

If you are an Ostrich, you default into avoidance mode, putting your head in the sand and crossing your fingers, hoping that someone else will swoop in and save the day. Ostriches generally don’t like, or understand, the “behind the scenes” stuff in business.

In fact, some of them may hate it. So they tend to rely too much on other people for the answers and to do the work that needs to be done. They will hire and blindly trust people on a whim, assuming that whoever they hired is doing it right, which isn’t always the case and can lead to big issues. This can lead to a lot of wasted time and money spent on hiring the wrong people, implementing the wrong systems and trying to fix mistakes down the road.

If you are a Control Freak you default into do-it-all-myself mode, where you keep everything on your plate, rarely delegate and end up working yourself to exhaustion. A Control Freak comes from a place of believing that they do it best and that no one else could possibly do the work as well as they could. Although this might be true to a degree, it’s a dangerous place to be in as a Control Freak will get caught in a trap of doing the wrong work. They will spend so much time and energy on all the “behind the scenes” stuff, that they don’t have time to actually grow their business and deliver their services. This leads to a lot of frustration, long working hours and ultimately, burnout.

What we are aiming for is to be in the middle – what I call being an Empowered Entrepreneur. When you come from an empowered place as a business owner, it means that you are:

1. aware of what it takes to run and grow your business (vs. putting your head in the sand) AND
2. you also have a team/systems in place that you trust to get the job done (vs. trying to do it all yourself.)

You own your responsibility in what it takes to run your business, and you won’t settle for less than the best for everyone concerned (including yourself!)

Now that you know your default mode for running a business, it’s important to know what kind of business you are building… we’ll talk about that next week. 😉