Show love to your supporters this month!
February is a month to feel the love and to show some love! Now is a great time to reflect on feeling the support and gratitude that comes with it. A healthy entrepreneur can see the big picture and realizes that the success of a business depends on everyone involved. Feeling and showing gratitude have many benefits. Learning to show gratitude as a habit is an effective way to not only improve your entrepreneurial skills but improve your psychological and even physical health.
Let 3 Steps to Startup kickstart your “feeling the love” and remind you that you are not alone in your business venture. There are countless others behind the scenes rooting for you and your success, including us! How can you practice gratitude as a habit?
- Keep a gratitude journal. With a gratitude journal, you can track and enhance your productivity, network better, and rebound from negative experiences. Logging things you should feel gratitude for helps you reflect on the good and learn from the bad. Entrepreneur.com recommends a good old-fashioned paper and pen journal and says to forego a phone or digital one.
- Appreciate the failures you experience and focus on a promising future. Learning from failures means that you figure out what went wrong and avoid doing it again, right? Wrong. Failure is an opportunity to feel gratitude: you can see your progress through failure. You can contrast that feeling in favor of gratitude in success. Finally, failure shows us how to love ourselves, even when our efforts aren’t fruitful.
- Connect and communicate with those around you who support your business’s success. Truly examine all of the help you have received and continue to receive in your efforts toward success. Reflect on the generosity of your investors, mentors, clients, staff, and more. There is a whole team of contributors behind your business, and you should direct some gratitude their way.
Once you’re feeling the gratitude, show it! 3 Steps to Startup once again comes to the rescue! Here are some of our best ideas for how you can show that you appreciate those who have supported you along the way. Remember, to show gratitude, you cannot simply go through the motions. You have to feel it.
- Write a heartfelt note to express your sincere gratitude. Communicating gratitude helps you network and build trust. Beyond that, it feels good. Putting your gratitude in writing not only shows the recipient your sincerity but also helps you fully realize your gratitude.
- Recognize colleagues and staff members in a meaningful way. Positive feedback can fuel a culture of gratitude within a business. Recognized employees perform better and engage positively with others.
- Pay it forward – help someone the way someone else has helped you. Show a green entrepreneur the ropes. Let a friend tell you about their business idea and provide your feedback. Overall, recognize how much outside help meant to you and try to keep that support going.
- Be slow to complain or place blame. What you say influences how you feel and act, so be vigilant against expressing your complaints. Placing blame on others also stops your cycle of gratitude. Many times, when we feel tempted to blame others for a particular failure, we played a role in that failure. Those who blame others for their mistakes lose status and perform worse than those who own their part.
- Simply say thanks. When you are in the habit of feeling and expressing gratitude, it becomes natural to say thank you every time. Get into the practice of saying thank you in all aspects of life: thank waitstaff, cashiers, employees, and anyone you encounter who makes your life a little bit easier. Carrying this habit over into business is a breeze when you are already habitually say thank you in your day-to-day life.
At 3 Steps to Startup, we want to encourage you to express your gratitude and show some love to those who have supported your business. Meanwhile, it’s time for us to express some gratitude of our own – for you! Our state’s business landscape has made incredible progress over the past several years, and you have been a part of that progress! Our mission is to support West Virginia’s entrepreneurs as they fuel our forward progress. 3 Steps to Startup is grateful for all of the business community members who have contributed to our ability to serve our community. If you think you have a business idea that we could help you kick start, connect with us! We would love to welcome you to the growing West Virginia Business community.
Tags: 3 Steps To Startup, Business Networking, Businesses, Community, creative thinking, Entrepreneurship, Gratitude, Growing West Virginia, innovative problem solving, Rural Entrepreneurship, Self-Care Entrepreneurship