Business Psychology Tips: 6 Psychological Issues To Consider When Starting a Business

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After seeing well over 100,000 entrepreneurs on my business plan app I want to share some observations about the common business psychology issues related to starting and building a business that I have been observing. In this article I share business psychology ideas, tips and strategies for dealing with various nuances that come up when starting or growing a business. Additionally, after the apps had over 300,000 people, I took every question that entrepreneurs ever asked on those apps, and answered it in a book. If you are interested in learning more about that book, here is the link to learn more about it. If reading a book isn’t your favorite thing, I also made a video-based online course addressing the issues that entrepreneurs asked me about. So if you are starting a business, chances are that many of the challenges or questions you have now, or will have in the future, are addressed in the course. Here is the link to learn about the course (with a coupon code for a big discount).

People may wonder why I am starting my new blog with precisely this topic, and the answer is that this is the most important topic in business that there can be. Why? Because your general psychology and the mindset with which you approach everything in your business is present 100% of the time. It affects every decision you make. And that cannot be said about anything else.

Maybe making money, doing marketing, or building a team may seem more important because they are more actionable. But your mental approach and mindset is with you 100% of the time, even before you get your business idea, to well after you are done with the business, no matter whether the business makes you a billionaire (we hope) or less wealthy.

Now let’s get to some specific business psychology issues.  The first and foremost is having a positive, can-do mental approach rather than a defeatist one where you find reasons why you cannot start. The second most important psychological element is keeping your ego in check and staying humble. Third is dealing with trust issues and working with people you can trust to build a solid founding team. The fourth topic has to do with keeping stress and anxiety in check. And the fifth topic will be about dealing with rejection and failure, which are normal everyday occurrences when starting a business. And lastly, we will discuss keeping your ego in check and staying humble.

Here is a brief video I shot on some of these business psychology topics:

1) Mental Approach vs. Finding Reasons You Can’t Start

Before and after you start your business, you will face hundreds of difficulties, many of which may seem insurmountable.  Some of the early difficulties are having a lack of money, lack of experience, lack of time, lack of support, and general inexperience. These prevent many people from even starting their business.

Instead of focusing on reasons or excuses (no matter how legitimate they may seem) for why you are not able to get started, try to change how you think and talk about these things. For example, instead of starting a sentence with “I can’t do thing xyz because…” try to think about how to get around that difficulty and form the sentence like “I am going to solve xyz by…” and the solution is up to you to figure out. Be creative and resourceful. The solution may not come to you right away, but keep hacking away at it. Believe you can solve that problem, and you will end up finding a way around that problem.

I also address this issue in my article on how a lack of confidence and motivation tends to discourage entrepreneurs and eventually lead to them quitting their businesses. Here is the full article on how entrepreneurs quit their businesses due to a lack of confidence, and what to do about it.

2) Keeping Your Ego In Check And Staying Humble

Building and growing a business can really boost a person’s ego. After all, everyone tells you that you are great, you may have employees who have to agree with you, and you are the boss. But you have to stay humble.  Staying humble will keep you more likable (which will make others more likely to follow your lead) and will help you keep an open mind when hearing negative things about your business. That will help you absorb feedback faster which will in turn help you make changes within your business more quickly.

Additionally, daydreaming about where your business will be, getting various press and constantly talking up your business can make you believe your own press and daydreams. Be careful of falling into that kind of a trap and don’t begin believing your own press, daydreams of the future, or praise of friends. Most of us still have a lot to improve on and to learn. We need to be humble and always look for ways to become better as people and business owners.

3) Dealing With Stress And Anxiety

Just about all entrepreneurs face stress and anxiety. This is one of the core business psychology topics and there are a number of strategies to deal with the stress of starting a business. The very nature of having a business almost facilitates that state of being. Every day, everything has to go right. Revenue must go up, the number of website visitors must go up, product has to improve, employees must be happy, customers must be happy, and much more. But there are almost no days where every aspect of your business is going great. Most days have a kind of a two steps forward, one step back theme about them. Some things go well and some things don’t. And overall, things are probably moving more slowly than you would like.  So you must prepare yourself for these days mentally and not let the stress and anxiety build up if things don’t go right.

If you let those emotions get a hold of you, they will affect your business decisions and you do not want to have your business decisions influenced by stress and anxiety. Instead, you want to make well thought out decisions that are based on reason and discipline.

Sometimes what helps to relieve stress and anxiety is the support of your family and close ones. Here is an article discussing how important it is to gain the support of your family for your business venture and what happens if your family does not support your business.

Additionally, if you are dealing with stress and anxiety, check out the article about the stress management app.

4) Dealing With Rejection And Failure

If you are growing your business and doing everything you can to make it happen, rejection and failure will be a very common business psychology issue. You will necessarily be dealing with failure and rejection on a nearly daily basis. It isn’t because something is wrong, but because that is just the common occurrence. You will be pitching your business to potential investors, employees, customers, and others. Not everyone will like what you are doing so get ready for some rejection.

The same is true for failure. If you are trying hard in marketing, building a quality product, growing revenue, and other things, some of your initiatives won’t go exactly as you need them to go. That is ok. Things rarely work out perfectly. In fact, the more common state of things is to encounter more small failures than success. But as long as you are persistent, you will accumulate the successes, and learn from the failures.

Over time, rejection and failure hurts a bit more than the success you encounter. And these negative feelings can linger and build up. So just keep it in mind, and try to be in control of these emotions. Don’t let them get to you as far as that is possible.

Here is a video on the business psychology of how to stay motivated when you are starting a business.

Sometimes you will face rejection when getting feedback on your business ideas. Here is a tutorial on how to go about getting feedback on your business ideas.

Book & Course On Starting A Business

If you are interested in more information about the right fundamentals when starting a business, check out the book I wrote on going from business ideas to having an actual business. And if you prefer learning from video rather than reading a book, I also created a video-based course on starting a business which can be purchased on Udemy.

5) Be Prepared To Work Like You Have Never Worked Before

While it is fun to daydream about your business, once you begin working on it, the business will require incredible focus, long hours of hard work, incredible discipline, and persistence. Keep that in mind. Those are not simple things which just happen as they need to happen. You are the one who will need to be doing much of the heavy lifting and as the business owner, most things will be on your shoulders. So just keep that in the back of your mind. Dreaming about a business and being successful is fun. But actually creating this business is going to take amazingly hard work. So be ready for that.

6) Stay Motivated By Keeping A To-do List

Give yourself a list of daily tasks. The tasks should be somewhat simple so that you can keep crossing them off and adding new tasks. That will help you build momentum and put you in a habit of moving the business forward every day.

Here is an article discussing the importance of daydreaming about your business and the future, but also making sure that you don’t just daydream, but actually get started.

Another way to stay motivated is to join a community or a networking group of entrepreneurs just like you. Many of them are probably going through the same issues that you are, and it can be beneficial to brainstorm such issues together. Check out the entrepreneur community that you can join on our site.

Bonus: Trust

For some reason, when starting a business, people often become competitive to the point of losing all trust in people around them to the point of paranoia. This is observed most commonly when it comes to protecting business ideas. But it is important to be able to trust the people that we work with. You must make sure that you surround yourself with people whom you can trust so that you don’ t close up mentally and emotionally, and can maintain a trusting and constructing business environment for you and your team.

Further Business Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app.  Additionally, here is the iOS fundraising app. And here is the Android fundraising app. And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.

Become a great entrepreneur

Here is a full tutorial I made with my thoughts on how to become a good entrepreneur.

Author: Alex Genadinik

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