This is how you increase your endurance

culled from:enterpreneurscan.com

What ever you do, never ever give up!
Endurance or perseverance is the most known characteristic of entrepreneurs. It is the most researched and mentioned one. Ask an arbitrary group of people on the street and and they will recognize the entrepreneur being the one with the most stamina. Also in scientific literature entrepreneurs score significantly higher on their ability to keep going even if they face setback after setback.

Today or tomorrow?
Endurance is needed especially when you ran out of luck. When you are tired, you don’t want to continue anymore or when you experience resistance or setbacks. Exactly at that moment you want to throw in the towel, you are challenged to call for an extra effort and try once more. Every human being and so every entrepreneur has and knows these kind of moments. Still, every entrepreneur thinks like this: what I can do today, I don’t have to do tomorrow. Because they see the longer journey ahead of them, they find a way to call for their inner motivation and the power to take that extra step.

Do you see bears on the road?
This is a Dutch saying that means that you only see the obstacles instead of seeing the possibilities. Endurance also refers to when you have the feeling you will not achieve what you want so desperately. That you’re targeting an ever further moving target. With each step your end goal is becoming vaguer. Most people then start to see the obstacles. Or as the Dutch say, see bears on the road and get scared. Slowly negative thoughts take over. Till they are convinced it’s a mission impossible and quit. Entrepreneurs can develop such thoughts too. But quickly they develop a positive thought at the opposite. A thought that brings them back to their inner motivation. The ultimate reason why they became an entrepreneur. Walking down the end of the road, the bears often tend to be cuddly bears, to conclude the Dutch saying.

It’s all about the combination
Endurance has a relation with other important characteristics for successful entrepreneurship, like the need for achievement and self belief. It mainly relates to motivation. If you really, really, want something, it is so much easier to continue. Just think back to the time you really wanted something so badly and all the things you were prepared to do to get just that. What is it now that you really want to achieve?

Tips to increase your endurance:

    Make sure that you have a clear and explicit goal you want to reach. The clearer, the better.
    If you don’t have a clearcut goal and rather work intuitively, make clear what’s driving you.
    You have a clearcut goal? Divide into smaller steps that are easier to achieve.
    With each step you have reached, try to reach even more at every next step.
    Reward yourself for each step; a reward stimulates your brain and prepares you for the next step.
    Do you have a setback? Take a step away. Look back and reward yourself for what you already have accomplished.
    What I always do that helps me a lot when having a setback. A try to smile whole heartedly and continue where I left.