By Books Author Denise Turney

As sweet as dreams are, it takes more than a dream to be a successful entrepreneur. Successful entrepreneurs must have vision, tenacity, hope, agility, flexibility, endurance, and heroic determination. They must truly believe in what they want to do. If there’s doubt, the doubt cannot be prolonged. In a nutshell, successful entrepreneurs must have more than a dream, a lot more.

How Entrepreneurs Succeed from Within

Here are 10 must haves if you’re eager to create a rewarding life as an entrepreneur. See how many you already possess. Identify which of these must haves you’d do well to work on obtaining.

Clarity – Who doesn’t want to succeed? Regardless of your childhood programming, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that you don’t set out to fail. Yet, as notable as the desire to succeed is, it’s not enough to see you across the finish line. You need clarity, a strikingly clear vision of what you want to achieve. All the better if the vision surfaces to your consciousness from deep within you. The clearer your vision — your goal — the more motivating the vision or goal can be. The less clear the goal, the easier it is to get sidetracked, confused, and frustrated. Write about your goal. Listen to music that aligns with what you want to achieve. Sit still and meditate if you must. Just move forward with clarity.

Hope – Can a dream exist absent hope? That may be impossible. But you can’t just have hope at the start of a dream. No. Hope must remain. It must be there during the most painful challenges and setbacks. There must be hope even when you’re thinking about throwing in the towel. Like a riverbed, despite how your business, products, or services go, there must be hope.

Want to Entrepreneurial Winnings? You’ve Got to Believe

If you don’t believe in yourself or think that you don’t deserve goodness, it’ll be hard to succeed. And even if you do succeed, that success might be short lived if you don’t have the following two elements.

Faith – Call it trust, if you must. Just don’t move forward without faith (or trust). Should you get off to a victorious start, pulling in record sales and profits, if you want longevity as a successful entrepreneur, you’ll need faith. Why? A wealth of analytics, combined with a team of skilled analysts, won’t eliminate dark spots. Numbers and data won’t save you from experiences when you don’t know what to do now or next. That’s when the only element that will keep you advancing is faith.

Commitment – Entrepreneurs do what they do because they love what they do. Loving what they do allows them to be committed to their goals. It’s what keeps them committed to enduring success. Commitment fuels entrepreneurs’ efforts to continue developing new, improved products and services. Fortunately, consumers can spot commitment. When they do pick up that a business owner is committed to what they’re doing – offering the public – consumers respect the people behind the business, the developers of products and services that they, consumers, enjoy and support.

Successful Entrepreneurs Build Smart Teams

Although relationships might seem like an external element, they aren’t. Healthy, rewarding relationships are built from the love, care, and thoughtfulness that’s within you. Soon you’ll see how important relationships and courage are to your success.

Relationships – What is life without relationships? To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to establish smart relationships. At the start of your career, you might attend three to four networking events a week, building smart relationships. Later in your career, you might peel back on attending networking events but not to the point where you attend less than a large networking event once a month. However, you don’t stop at building relationships. You invest time in nurturing existing relationships, and not just with customers, but with family and friends too.

Courage – Introverted or extroverted, successful entrepreneurs are bold. If they feel fear, they don’t let it stop them. Yes. Rather than stop, they stir up courage and press forward. Admittedly, it’s not always easy to access courage, especially if you’ve been overcome with worry for several weeks. For you, accessing courage might require prayer, meditation, walking in nature, blessings counting, listening to deep success tapes, journaling, and dare I say it – faith.

Supporting Successful Entrepreneurs

Although entrepreneurs might spend a lot of time alone, to achieve their goals, they build smart teams. They bounce ideas off team members, seeking insight, feedback, and advice. Another thing they do is to sharpen their imagination, the heart of creative endeavors. Check out the below on support and imagination.

Imagination – At the core of product and service development is creativity, and at the heart of creativity is imagination. Build imagination by opening your mind and allowing ideas to surface without judging or silencing them. Writing in a journal is another effective way to strengthen your imagination. Let your inner child have fun. That decision could fuel the creation of more products and services, developments that keep you in the consumer mind, developments that keep increasing your sales and profits.

Support – Akin to relationships, to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need support. You must have support. No one achieves lasting or enduring success alone. Accept emotional and psychological support from family and friends. Avoid digging so deep into your work that you end up pushing people away. Also, support others. After all, to have friends you must be a friend. That shared, support may also come from other business owners. These people know firsthand about challenges you face. They’re familiar with the ups and downs of starting and running your own business. Because of this, they can be among your greatest supporters.

Determination is an Entrepreneur’s Friend

Without determination, you could fold when life in this world gets hard. Yet, determination by itself is not sufficient. Want to build a successful career, read the following on the importance of valuing your health and living a determined life.

Health – Managing a business, including a solopreneur organization, takes energy. Gaining and maintaining good health requires you to make good food, beverage, sleep, and exercise decisions. Therefore, you need to set strong love-based boundaries to avoid slipping into workaholism. Love-based boundaries also keep you away from getting out of balance.

Determination – It’s going to take strong determination to have enduring success. You must be determined to win to get your dreams over the top and keep them above the bar. Blend the above elements and you may discover that you’re more determined than you think.

Regardless of where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, to experience continued success, you’ll need to get to know yourself better. Keep digging within. Love yourself and give yourself permission to awaken. Working with journals, prompts that support your inner explorations, and writings that prompt you toward deeper thought, may also prove helpful. Do the work, gain the above elements, and celebrate and enjoy your success!

By Fiction Books Writer Denise Turney (www.chistell.com)

It’s been said that you might procrastinate, put off pursuing goals, because you fear making a mistake. In a way, that makes sense. Should you have met punishment, ridicule or judgment in the past after someone discovered that you’d made a mistake, it makes sense that you might want to avoid making a mistake.

Achieving Your Goals

What is more difficult to understand is why you’d avoid doing what you really want to do, especially considering that you could start making smart efforts in that passion field in private. For example, no one has to know that you’re painting, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing, writing, fishing or woodcutting for the first time.

Yet, even with the chances to make mistakes in private, you might still delay achieving a greater good or even stepping into your destiny. Just as with procrastination, you might think about, daydream about and even talk to others about what you really want to do. The thing you won’t do is get around to actually doing what you most want to do.

This is in regard to love-based good works that you absolutely know is what you came to this world to do. Why do you keep putting it off?

Perhaps you believe that you’ll always have time to do what you want to do. So, you keep pushing getting started into the future. Or you might equate thinking about, fantasizing about and talking about doing this work with actually achieving your goal.

Takes More Than Imagination

Depending on the strength in your imagination, you might feel similar emotions while just daydreaming about doing the thing that you’d feel if you actually did it. What you won’t do is leave the effects of your good work, your creative arts, you social good, etc. for others to benefit from.

After all, dreams and fantasizes are private. Even if you talk about dreams with others, another person can’t experience your dreams the way you do. In other words, you really do have to do the work. And, if you don’t, you could leave a gap. Who knows? The world might be waiting for you to achieve what you came into this world to achieve.

Whether you’re willing to accept it now or not, time is running out. Even as an eternal being, you won’t be in your body forever. You simply don’t have forever to do what you came here to do. Time is running out.

Powerful Motivation

Instead of choosing to accept that fact with fear, be encouraged. Let the fact serve as powerful motivation. Start taking actions to do the good that you came here to do. Research, but don’t stop at researching. Talk to others who’ve done what you want to do or who have done similar things, but don’t stop at talking to those with experience.

Set a day and a time when you are going to take smart action. Don’t talk yourself out of it. Just do it!

Those early attempts might fall flat. When I look back over my early writings, I’m talking work I’ve never published – yikes! I still have a long way to go, but I am so much better – beyond words better than I was when I started. To this day, it moves me deeply when readers approach me and tell me how much a book I wrote touched them, helping some to make life changes. That wouldn’t have happened had I not gotten started and kept at it.

What about you? Are you doing what you truly want to do, what you know you came here to do? If not, why not?

Go For It

Look for ways to encourage yourself. Read stories about other people who failed and made mistakes and failed and kept trying until they hit the bullseye. They really are no different than you from the standpoint that they too are human.

Encouraging you to go for it! Time really is running out.