Branching Out
Hello All,
There’s a quote from Carl Jung that I really like: “Where your fear is, there is your task”.
During a recent consultation, a client mentioned that she had been wanting to start a business, but was afraid and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of (sometimes conflicting) information available. This resonated with me, as there are numerous times that I have clung to the status quo due to the fear of the unknown.
As business owners or self employed workers, most of us have taken that leap of faith. We have found and seized opportunities and have often started new ventures completely from scratch. This may have been for different reasons - for some it was a creative impulse that needed to be fulfilled while others wanted to take more control of their career path. And then there are those who are entrepreneurial by nature.
Of course, as business owners we are also prone to fall into the same patterns and stick with something that seems to be working. Change is difficult at every stage. And while change is not a necessary component of success, it is important to assess our businesses regularly to see if there are any looming threats or perhaps because the work we are doing has become routine and uninspiring.
Threats to our business can be insidious and don’t often present themselves until they have made a dent. This is often a competitor or perhaps a new technology (this is especially important in the wake of AI). Other threats can relate to costs (such as increases in the prices of materials) or a change in demand for our products or services. There is also the threat of losing a large customer or supplier (as happened to one of my clients during the semiconductor chip shortage during Covid).
Alternatively, our businesses might be doing fine but we might find ourselves back in a rut. We are no longer motivated and might be mindlessly churning out outputs while the passion to do so has been slowly withering.
All this to say, is that I think it is important to regularly assess where you are and question whether fear might be holding you back from taking on a new opportunity or branching out into an uncertain but potentially exciting direction. If there is fear, examining where it is coming from is a useful first step, and you will often a) find that it is perhaps not so scary after all and b) by simply acknowledging the fear be more comfortable stepping into the void.
QuickBooks Tip: Using Multiple Tabs
When working with QuickBooks Online (or any cloud based software) there are times when you want to look at two or multiple screens at once rather than clicking on back or forward. Quickbooks Online allows you to open multiple tabs at the same time.
To do this, simply right click on the second screen that you want to open and select open in new tab. Note that this doesn’t work for all clickable links in QBO (for some reason), but it is still a good time saver.
See my video on using Multiple Tabs in QuickBooks Online:
