Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

What`s almost exactly the same between the years of grade school, including high school, and starting a business? Handling *direct* competition. Do you have some emotional baggage you`re carrying around, remembering what it was like in high school? That`s probably affecting how you feel about your business.

Think about it: When you`re out of high school (and much of college), you enter a whole different type of competitive world. You likely get a job, are told what to do, and the only real competition you face is categorized. It`s separated out in time, where one arena might be for a date, another might be for a job interview.

Generally speaking, we don`t have the sort of intense, broad-spectrum, daily competition we faced in school. Ah...those high-school days! Everything you did was subject to evaluation, and the slightest sign of difference or weakness could be a total downfall.

On any given day in high school you were competing on your clothes, your looks, your grades, your physical prowess (Phys. Ed.), your popularity, your parents, how cool you were, and what sort of trouble you`d got into. When you got home you were competing for attention, for your rights, for money, for permission, and everything else.

Everywhere you went, every day, all the time, somebody was right there in your face competing. Then you finally got out of school and life relaxed.

Until you decided to start a business.

An entrepreneur likely hasn`t gone back to examine all the emotional lessons and conflicts they faced so long ago in school. It`s "over and done with," time to move on. That`s fine, until you put up a Web site and wonder how to get traffic. Isn`t that the same as going to a school dance and wondering how to get noticed?

It`s a principle of feelings and experience that when you replicate the circumstances, your mind reproduces the previous feelings, thoughts, and emotions. But if you don`t know it`s happening, you`re likely to wonder why you feel all sorts of odd anxieties that seem strangely familiar.

Take some time, ponder your experience of adolescence, high school, and how you developed your identity. Who did you claim to be, back then? How did you present yourself? Were you outgoing and secure, or shy and retiring?

Whatever methods and systems you developed to compete in high school, most of those are likely still in place and operating the same way now. Being an entrepreneur puts you into direct competition with the open marketplace. It`s there, every day, all the time, whenever you think about a new idea or getting a sale, or how you look and speak.

I figure we`re doomed.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

-------------------------

James Lindon, Ph.D. Patent Attorney
Lindon & Lindon, LLC
Cleveland, Ohio
Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights, Pharmacy Law, Litigation
[this is not legal advice - provided for discussion only]
Intellectual Property for the Individual and Small Business: Identify, Protect, Enforce, Defend.
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
http://www.LindonLaw.com

LOL! Competition....it`ll kill ya just as easily as exercise! :-D

My industry is ultra "High Schooly".  The pretty and popular girls are worshipped like gods - even though they may lack true talent or personality.  Those who are smart but not so "pretty" are tossed under the bus. 

I hated high school politics 20 years ago and I still hate it today.  My mother always told me I needed to learn to "flirt" - I still can`t bring myself to stoop that low - LOL!  I operate under the notion that I`d rather be respected than popular.  I may not get my scrapbook pages published in a magazine or win "Scrapbooker of the Year" (an actual contest in which the winner gets 15 minutes of fame)  but dang it, if you you want to know about the business side of the scrapbook industry, I`m your girl!

~Kim

Yup, that`s exactly what I`m seeing, Kim. Too many of us don`t realize that we`re "feeling" the same things we did in High School, because we don`t intellectually believe we`re in that environment. But in so many cases, we are.

Arrested development is a huge problem in our historic times. And it has a deep impact on the ever-present conflict between "popular" and "quality." My reason for bringing up the topic is that I believe if you *know* what you`re dealing with, you can usually figure out a way to overcome it.

It`s only when you`re being affected by things and you don`t know why or how, that you end up in trouble.

Aging is mandatory... maturing is optional...

I loved it when Kirsty Alley won an Emmy years ago and she held it up and said, "This is for all the girls who were mean to me in High School!"  I think those of us who were "toughened up" by high school politics actually do better in life.

I had a hard time skipping my 20 year reunion a few years ago.  It took me months to decide to NOT go.  It was bizarre that I had such a hard time making up my mind.  But, in the end, I decided that, "I hated most of these people 20 years ago, why should I go pretend I like them now?"  It was a very liberating (and mature) realization!  Nobody cared that I wasn`t there and I wasn`t somehow diminished personally by not showing up.

And, to add insult to injury to my HS years - my dad was our Vice Principal in charge of discipline...  I walked the halls in FEAR every day of my life. 

 

 

Alright, so what`s pertinent to this discussion is that when you look out from behind your eyes, today, in your current business, there`s going to be a whole lot of unexamined "baggage."

The way you perceive your customers, potential customers, and the other people competing with you in your business---all these perceptions are going to be colored by the experience you had in high school.

Not only that, but the strategies and tactics you`ll develop to compete, to stand out (or to shy away), those too will be reminiscent of how you handled high school days. You say you walked the halls in fear? There`s a good potential that you have similar feelings as you work on your business, nowadays. See?

I disagree with just about everything L. Ron Hubbard wrote (Scientology), excepting one particular idea: Engrams. Modern psychology has demonstrated examples where how we store emotions and feelings is different than learning words.

To overcome these "body memories" mostly requires "taping over them." In other words, you can`t intellectually say you`re going to be different from how you were in the past, where it comes to feelings. You have to basically re-live the experience with a different outcome. It`s the old falling off a horse and getting right back on.

Many of us "fell off a horse" in high school, for years at a time, sort of like a recurring "Groundhog Day" movie. But not everyone "gets back on the horse" after they graduate. If that metaphorical horse is "competition," then it`s going to affect you all these years later.

I know my experiences in High School have given me a tough skin and an "I couldn`t care less what people think about me" attitude.  That takes you far in business (as long as you don`t abuse people with that attitude).  I run across so many people in my business who can`t handle anything but happy thoughts and absolute adoration of ANYTHING they do.  They ask your opinion but really don`t want it.  If you disagree with the opinion of the "popular girls", you`re going to get yourself dumped in the garbage can.  It makes me nuts because the "popular girls" make some pretty dumb moves that cost them tons of money but they won`t listen to anyone but their minions who are "paid" to agree with them.  I don`t have the desire to be popular, just successful!

So, for me, as hard as High School was, it really made me the tough chick in the end and for that, I will be eternally grateful!

~Kim