• As an entrepreneur, starting ans running your own business in the corporate world is not all rainbows and butterflies as it may seem at first.
• Being an entrepreneur means that you'll have to go through different phases of success and failure, ups and downs.
• You have to find the will to continue and that will is greatly, if not solely, based on the core reason of your desire to start your business in the first place.

We all have them … those days when everything seems to be just too hard, and where it seems like it would be easier to give up and go back to the 9-to-5 grind. After all, packing it in and going back to work for another person’s business would mean that someone else:

• Would shoulder all the responsibility,
• Worry about making ends meet,
• Make sure the pipeline is full,
• Sort out all the problems with internal and external stakeholders … and the list goes on.

There are times in your own business when things get so intense that you are left wondering why you bothered stepping up to try and change the world around you … but if you’re not careful, that mindset can see you stuck in a rut for days.

And worst of all, as an entrepreneur it can feel like you’re going through this all on your own. Your passion to do things differently and bring things to the world in a different way can leave you somewhat isolated. That is until the world suddenly sees the magic of what you’re doing and catches up. It can be lonely out there, running your quest all on your own.

As entrepreneurs we are visionaries. We see the way the world could be, rather than simply accept the status quo. Without us, the world would be stationary and stagnant.

We’re so important to the advancement of the cultures we live in, but this entrepreneurial skillset can see us standing alone through a lot of our journey, because our visionary capabilities show us things that others can’t yet see.

This can mean that we spend a lot of time with others who are struggling to understand, and often support us in our quest to change and better the world. It can mean that the very time we need to hear words of support and encouragement, we must find them from within ourselves – because our external world simply can’t see our vision for the future yet.

As a recovering perfectionist, in the initial stages of running my own business, I felt the intensity of those days in a way that floored me. I found that I could lose days at a time being stuck in a spiral of negative chatter and non-productive thought patterns. I needed to find a way that I could move with the ebb and flow of business – a way that would minimise the impact of these ‘negative’ days.

How Do You Overcome These Thoughts?

I discovered that it is one thing to know what you are doing, but until you know ‘why’ you are doing it, you won’t really have a connection with it. It is the ‘why’ in business that keeps us going. It is the ‘why’ that keeps us focused when distractions come along. And it is the ‘why’ that keeps us driving towards our end goal.

If you don’t know why you are doing something, then your commitment to keep going through thick and thin will waver, your determination to succeed will dissipate and your desire to be the change you wish to see in the world will wane.

To make sure I that I can always stay focused and can easily bring myself back to the things that are important to me in any situation, I created a process to establish what I now call my ‘indestructible why.’

This ‘why’ is at the very heart of me – it is what drives me and sees me jump out of bed every day with a passion and connection to make positive change in the world. It is the very essence of everything I do. It transcends the boundaries of life and work; my ‘why’ is my connection to everything I do.

In creating my ‘indestructible why’ I set two rules for myself:

1. The ‘why’ must be something that is ONLY for me. It could not be something that I was doing for someone else; rather, to make sure I was really connected with it, it had to be something that I did that was just for me.
2. The ‘why’ must be something that would drive me in every aspect of my life. There is no separation between work and home now with technology interweaving all aspects of life. Therefore, the ‘why’ must underpin everything I do.

Having an ‘indestructible why’ doesn’t mean I no longer have days that are tough. It simply means that I am less distracted by them, move through them more quickly and experience less of the emotional trauma than before.

Limiting these things alone makes it easier for me to stay on track, keep focused and fully fuel my drive to globally ignite change in the world.