By Dr Wilfred Isak April
I AM very excited to write to you all this morning. It is kind of fun and very interesting to have a group of people who are determined to work on themselves to take their businesses to the next level.
I think focusing on yourself is probably the best asset you could ever have, in fact it is the only asset you will ever have. This is really a perfect opportunity to work on yourself and I am going to talk to you today about the “psychology of entrepreneurship.” In the interest of whoever today’s discussion will appeal to, I spoke to a number of people to see to whom this topic is going to appeal to exactly. I realized a number of Namibians are passionate about running their own businesses now or in the future. That is why today I am going to break down for you how I have seen entrepreneurship with business owners and the conversations I have had with those who have a keen interest in this particular subject. The conversations made me realize that I am also obsessed with what makes people tick, understanding body language and psychology and also trying to understand what makes people confident. The big one for me in Namibia is the lack of confidence amongst our people.
A lot of people in this country could benefit from building their self-confidence. People miss out on opportunities in life simply because they are not confident. Namibians find it very hard to express themselves both in business and in their personal lives. I know there are so many great dreams and ideas in this country, but we are so afraid of what other people will say or think that they simply do not bring themselves to do extraordinary things. I know they might be terrified that once they are in the limelight they have to keep up with the expectations of society. This is like “death” to some people.
I want you to think about the number of advertisements for jobs, which appear in our daily newspapers. A lot of people with good credentials simply do not apply, because they talk themselves out of it, even before filling out the application form. They start to psyche themselves up, by thinking about the number of people in the country, thinking perhaps only certain races get preference for certain jobs or I am from the south and don’t deserve this.
My dear reader, there you have got it all wrong. That is a defeatist mindset. One of the greatest abilities in life we all have is to market or sell ourselves. This is what you have to bring out when you meet a potential partner for a business or at times during a job interview. My advice to you is never to wait for an opportunity, but you have to learn to create one. This comes very useful with the concept of layering. Layering looks at what is the first thing you would like to do when you are confronted with a challenge or when you have a business idea to deal with.
In business if you are trying to set up a business, you must be able to deal with the immediate issue in front of you, and do that first. What is the finished slice you would like to bring down the issue to? Imagine you want to start a business deal with partners in Angola, probably the first slice is learning how to greet in Portuguese. In any business encounter it is always critical to think who do you need to meet? Because your character and personality will carry you through and sometimes in business you need to have that. Sometimes you really do not to know everything about business when you start up, but once you are in touch with your character and personality, you are going to succeed. At times we have to let our personality do the talking, even if knowledge can’t. Next week, we will continue to explore deeper into this topic, by looking at selling your business idea.
Dr. Wilfred Isak April holds a PhD (Entrepreneurship) from New Zealand and lectures in Leadership, Organizational Behaviour and Entrepreneurship at the University of Namibia in the Department of Management Sciences.