In our latest entrepreneur advice article Atefeh Sadeghi looks at an entrepreneurial mindset.
The new year in Brussels presents a great opportunity to reflect and learn about the international society that this city hosts and what it might be missing in the hustle and bustle of EU affairs and the yearnings of an ever-growing and transforming culture: an overtaking of an entrepreneurial mindset.
Being conscious about one’s own mindset is one of the greatest achievements in life that everyone can enjoy by putting some effort into knowing themselves. Whatever mindset we are tuned to has massive and profound impacts on our lives. Our mindset is what makes us recognize the opportunities but it also is what leaves us unprepared and, as a result, and we miss favourable circumstances. It is what is fabricated beneath our unconscious self and yet it can be exposed through practice.
What we have missed in our education systems is a teaching that enables us to employ all of our faculties of which we are aware. This system has also kept us away from discovering the aptitudes with which we are not acquainted. The positive news is that we can still become competent in this and grow in even farther horizons than what we previously thought could be possible.
Making a commitment to ourselves to ameliorate our mindset is the first step towards resurfacing our capability in learning and once that is ignited, the familiar ways of our thinking and acting would no longer suit us since we would be aware of the alternatives and more creative and productive ways.
As you are about to wrap up your year and intend to set yourself some resolutions for the year to come, have you considered a cognitive belief system in line with an entrepreneurial outlook?
What you interrelate as your assumptions and knowledge in order to establish new grounds to progress in your life make a huge difference to you and society. Your decisions, when informed through different perspectives can, in fact, highlight what can be inevitable in terms of changes. An entrepreneurial mindset is one that, although the term might suggest, does not solely benefit you financially. It is a behaviour adaptation that is first and foremost guided by recognising your ability to develop your desired outcomes in life.
With an entrepreneurial mindset, you would set your enthralling goals and you would be intrinsically motivated. However, you may still sometimes miss some beats and feel inadequate to be highly engaged with your own projects.
That is also part of the journey if you take on this approach. What matters is taking the ownership of your engagement or the lack of it. Look at it as a 3D sculpture or an installation at which the visitors from a large and diverse society are looking with admiration and criticism at the same time.
Some may criticize it for the success it has made, while others might amire it for its failure to deliver what the artist has intended to convey and foster. This is what you can expect from developing your mindset to be more inclusive.
What an entrepreneurial mindset offers is curiosity exposed, creativity nourished and critical thinking sharpened. It is the acknowledgement that not only success alone can bring admiration but it is the ownership of whatever comes at the crossroads of creating your life and taking it to the next level that generates affluence in every aspect. Be it failure, transformation, diverting to another path or constant dealing with uncertainty, you are in the front seat – and that is resilience.
An entrepreneurial mindset will enable you to have a more realistically ambitious approach towards the unpleasant events in which you might feel trapped. Through building your resilience higher with every situation of unpredictability and all the constraints imposed, this mindset will make you resourceful and solution-oriented because you have become aware of your full faculties.
Imagine people who walk into a museum with glowering expressions the source of which could be unknown even to themselves. After visiting a monumental figurative sculpture that has been the talk of the town for weeks, they are leaving the museum with a brightening pronouncement of the inspiration they have received. This comes from aesthetics of life and what entrepreneurial mindset engages with is in a form of aesthetic living. It is the aesthetic living that enlightens one to search for beauty, optimistic interpretation and mindful engagement with others.
Contrary to some belief that illustrates entrepreneurial mindset as an exceptional hereditary trait, it is more tangible and achievable than you might think. What it takes in the first instant is being aware of your thinking habits and the actions that follow your thoughts. Then, you would not only need to be open to knowledge, you would be demanded that you seek knowledge without hesitation. More and in the next stages, you would want to experiment with your ideas at micro levels and gain the insight into what it can serve the society with and how it can impact the life of not just you, but also those around you.
People with entrepreneurial mindset create values by finding solutions to problems that affect their community. That is the humanistic outlook embedded within such an approach, a shift from self-focused to other-focused. An entrepreneurial thinker knows that success would be delusional if the needs of society are not taken into consideration because it is society that informs critical guidance for growth.
Another element in practicing and adapting to an entrepreneurial mindset is examining the elements of the culture and readiness to offer reliability and understanding with interactive solutions. It is crucially important to note that identifying your individuality in the collectiveness of society may often appear dispositional but in reality it is not. We have lived the fast life for decades, and we now have reached the need for a slow life, which has been promoted through various initiatives for some time already. For a long time now, we have also been living a life in which praise has been presented to individuality.
However, society is waking up to the need for collectivism. An entrepreneurial mindset would lose its core if it does not give recognition to this need for reinventing collectivism where individualism has been reigning. Submitting to the essentials of reality does not mean losing momentum in experiencing a high value life. On the very contrary, it means paving the grounds for the phenomena of a counter-culture which is a constant process of revisiting the ornaments that have been decorating our lives for far too long.
It is not complicated although it might seem so. You can measure your progress in acquiring an entrepreneurial mindset by weighing it against your sensitivity towards the multiplicity of perception. Through this, you would realize that for whatever perception, idea, solution and whatever initiative that you face, confront or build, there are many others that match, counter or reject it entirely. You can investigate your concerns through witnessing your society and offering it a freestanding projection of possibilities.
Let an entrepreneurial mindset be the shining ornament in your life.
