It’s time for a leap of faith.

Last week I addressed some of the lessons learned from becoming an Amazon author.  But those lessons were only the tip of the iceberg.  The lessons I personally found to be even more valuable were the ones about acting with faith and positive expectancy.

Lesson #4: Get crystal clear on the decision criteria that make sense for you.

Every entrepreneur (every individual, regardless of job title) has been faced with having to decide what to do with recommendations and advice from countless sources.

Many of these sources are well meaning.  Many of them are highly experienced.  None of them are in your shoes, which means that none of them get to decide what happens in your business.

Say you’re getting ready to venture into the world of online product sales, and you get a strong recommendation to source products that can be drop-shipped from a foreign country at a very low price.  This makes good economic sense.

But what if you’re committed to buying products made in your country and keeping the jobs relatively local?  Buying foreign-made goods doesn’t fit with your values, which means that – regardless of the economic advantage of sourcing from a foreign country – following that advice is not right for you.

This lesson ties in closely with the next.

Lesson #5: Trust your gut, even if others question your actions.

It may be challenging sometimes to distinguish between “this is right/wrong for me” and “I’m just being a chicken about moving forward on this.”  That’s okay.  The more you practice making decisions that are right for you, the easier they will come.

If you’re not on particularly close terms with your gut, practice tapping into it.  Choose a low-risk situation (“Which new menu item should I try at this restaurant?”), check in with your gut, and go with the very first answer you get.  Don’t over-think or try to analyze.  Remember Eva Young’s warning that “to think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.”

Lesson #6: Trust that you’ll figure out whatever you need to figure out.

Clicking on that first link, committing to that first action, telling that first person about the big project you’re taking on…any and all of these can feel scary.  It’s easy to get caught up in thinking about all the things which inevitably will come up, which you have no idea how to handle.

It takes a very big and purposeful leap of faith to act as if you will figure out how to work around any difficulties you encounter.  That, too, is okay.  The solution you come up with may not be easy; it may not be elegant; but you will come up with it – as long as you commit to keep on keeping on.

Seriously now: If Indy could step off into apparently thin air in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, then figuring out how to market your business – or publish books on Amazon – is a relative piece of cake.

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If you’re curious to see what came of my applying all these lessons, I’d be delighted for you to pop over to my author page and flip through my Kindle short reads.  Whether the focus of the book is mindset, marketing, or productivity, I guarantee there will be goodies in there which you can use today.  All is takes to find out is a leap of faith that those goodies are waiting for you.

(BTW, thanks to Groupon and Brian Dean for posting the “leap of faith” photo in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.)

3 Responses to It’s time for a leap of faith.

1. Pingback: And a-one, and a-two… | Stepping Into Big

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