Starting a business during a time of uncertainty? Start by reflecting on your 'story of self'.
The entrepreneur’s journey is filled with uplifting milestones and troughs of tribulation. The stories that inspire them to embark on their entrepreneurial journey begin long before they ever make their first sale. Their stories are unique, multifaceted, and edifying. Through their experiences, they have been given the opportunity to persevere, and it’s their resiliency that continues to push them closer and closer toward achieving their entrepreneurial dreams.
In her best-selling book, Rising Strong, Brené Brown says, “If we can learn how to feel our way through [our] experiences and our own stories of struggle, we can write our own brave endings. When we own our stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in stories that someone else is telling.”[i]
I think that’s a powerful lesson, but how does it relate to entrepreneurship? The ability to tell your story, what I call the story of self, helps you trace a clear line through the pathway that led you to starting your own business. By better understanding your origin story, you can more clearly envision your business values, goals, and strategy to align with who you are and the entrepreneur you aspire to become. Being able to do that will help keep you motivated and focused when challenges arise, and the way forward is unclear.
Research has shown that those who are more apt to self-reflection are better able to build a reservoir of knowledge about themselves, and from their experiences they are more motivated toward a sense of significance and purpose for their life.[ii] In short, you can’t move forward until you understand where you’ve been.
To demonstrate this, I want to share a bit of my own story, but before understanding how to tell my own story, I had to first understand my father’s. My father was only a few years old when he and his five siblings were taken in by the Child Welfare Division of the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare. Imagine a kind of home environment where a first-grader, my eldest uncle, misses school because he’s babysitting his five younger siblings – the youngest of whom were still in diapers.
My dad’s father was in jail at the time, a destination he arrived at by way of alcoholism, drug addiction and thievery; my dad’s mother was aloof, absent and negligent. That led to Child Welfare intervening, collecting my dad and his siblings. Sadly, they were then separated into different children’s homes where they remained for most of their formative years.
When my dad entered the sixth grade, he and a friend began walking around neighborhoods with a push mower, earning a few dollars for each lawn they mowed. In an informal way, they had become self-employed. Where did this entrepreneurial drive come from? Perhaps it was circumstance. Significant life events and adversity, such as growing up in a children’s home, can often trigger a desire to act on one’s own behalf to create a better path for one’s self – in essence, to become an entrepreneur.[iii] My dad’s self-employment eventually evolved into a job-creating landscaping business that he owned and managed for more than a decade.
As you have surely noticed, I’ve started telling my story of self with my father’s story. Yes, his story is his own, but my story isn’t possible without understanding his journey and his father’s journey before him. I can learn important lessons from their mistakes and hardships, and how they managed to overcome them. Throughout these courses, I’m going to share more about my own story, but I want to pause here and encourage you to think about your own story of self.
There is tremendous value in telling our own story – both for ourselves and for others - but it oftentimes doesn’t come naturally. It requires that we engage in a process that psychologists refer to as “autobiographical remembering and reasoning.” Autobiographical remembering, also referred to as autobiographical recall, happens when we recount the details of past events: where was I? What did I do? Where did I go? How did I get there? Who else was there with me? These questions help answer the details of the story. It’s like reciting your resume.
Autobiographical reasoning, on the other hand, happens when we reflect on the meaning and significance of past events, not just a description of what happened.[iv] Autobiographical reasoning helps us define our personal identity. It allows us to reflect on how past experiences helped shape who we are in the present moment. It forces us to examine our emotions. How did we feel when that event happened? How did a certain significant event help you establish the values that are important to you? Did that event set you on a different trajectory? Autobiographical reasoning helps us establish a foundation of continuity in our identity, so that when times are most challenging, and we feel unsure about our ability to persevere, we have anchors of support that we can rely on.
Studies have shown that autobiographical reasoning is an integral part of developing and maturing our self-identity.[v] We learn from the experience of others, as well as ourselves. Certain key events in our story of self are drivers of our decision to embark on the entrepreneur’s journey and as we will see, it’s also an important step toward becoming a more resilient entrepreneur.
A former boss and mentor of mine once asked me to write down and share my story of self. It was part of an organization-wide exercise. I thought I was checking off a checkbox when I handed her a brief bio. After a couple of days, she handed it back to me and encouraged me to dig deeper. “What led you to the path you’re on today?” she asked. “What were the hardships and adversities you experienced and how were you made stronger by overcoming them?”
I revisited my short little bio. It stared at me, as I reflected on the more substantive journey that took me from school to work and from one job to the next. A lot of thoughts popped into my mind, but I found it challenging to put those thoughts into words. Initially, it was awkward writing about myself in such reflective, almost eulogistic prose. Compared to people I’ve read or heard about on the news, my own journey seemed inadequately short-lived. I wasn’t even 30 years old at the time. I didn’t feel like I had enough knowledge, experience or success to justify my own story – at least not yet. I mean, what did I know, really? I feel the same way today, years after writing my story of self for the first time.
Looking back on my own story of self, there’s nothing particularly harrowing compared to a lot of other peoples’ stories. I could tell countless stories about people whose struggle with adversity would be more compelling and inspiring than my own. We could find more gripping and rousing stories of the entrepreneur’s journey, but the purpose of recounting our story of self is not to measure it against someone else's story. Every story of self contains trials, tribulations and lessons learned.
Recounting our story of self is an opportunity to deeply reflect, introspectively, on our ability to learn from failure and stand steadfast and be resilient in the face of misfortune. Wherever we’re at along the path of entrepreneurship, our story has value. We don’t have to have a typical “success story’ defined by popular standards. We don’t need to have had deeply traumatic experiences to have faced and overcome adversity in our life. Our stories cannot be zero sum tales of either triumph or tribulation – our journeys are too unique and multifaceted for such oversimplification.
When we acknowledge and appreciate the adversity of our own story, we build the self-confidence and resiliency needed to face and overcome future hardships. Self-focused reflection helps us process emotions and fosters stress-related growth.[vi] The ability to do this has been found to be a significant driver of entrepreneurship – even the seemingly small feats we’ve overcome, the interim victories along our nascent entrepreneurial journey, can lead to increased assurance in our ability to meet future challenges.[vii]
With an increased sense of confidence comes the belief that our sustained efforts will eventually get us past the difficulty of the moment, so we persevere and persist longer than we might have otherwise. Reflecting on your story of self resurfaces the times when you faced hardship, overcame obstacles, processed feedback in a constructive way and emerged on the other side better, stronger and more resilient.
If you’re still not sure or completely confident about your own story of self, that’s okay. It takes courage to own and share your story. You must put yourself out there. Yet, doing so is necessary because when adversity strikes, you’ll need to call back to it to remember where you’ve been, who you are and where you’re going. Let’s look at one last example.
Whitney Wolfe Herd is the co-founder of Bumble, a female-first dating app where the woman always makes the first move. Her story of resilience illustrates how the story of self can become lost and manipulated when we allow other people to hijack it. Before Bumble, Herd was the co-founder of Tinder, another popular dating app. She and another Tinder co-founder, Justin Mateen, were involved romantically, but the relationship ended bitterly after about a year. The events that ensued after the break-up resulted in Mateen bombarding Herd with viciously insulting text messages, calling her a “whore” and “gold digger.” Herd responded with a lawsuit against Tinder, which settled outside of court for around $1 million.[viii]
As the story became public knowledge, people weighed in with their opinions on message boards and social media. Herd became victim to internet-led hostility and bullying that made her question herself. “I was being told the ugliest things by complete strangers,” she said in an interview with Forbes.[ix] The online bullying escalated into rape and death threats via social media. Herd became depressed and couldn’t sleep.[x] “I really felt completely lost and scared,” she told CNN Money in 2017. “I felt like I had lost a piece of my identity. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I was letting these strangers on the internet define that.”[xi]
It’s when we are most vulnerable that we need our story of self to anchor us. When the bullying led Herd to lose a piece of her identity, she forgot who she was – she forgot her story. Despite the barrage of hate and negativity, Herd’s entrepreneurial spirit could not be diminished. She began planning a social network exclusively for women – a place for women to support one another through positivity. As we will see throughout this book, surrounding ourselves with positive social networks is key to becoming a more resilient entrepreneur.
Herd’s social media idea evolved into Bumble. As it evolved, so did Herd. She redefined her story of self and in the process, the world, and roles of online dating. Bumble differentiates itself with its female-first model, but more than a dating app, Bumble is an online platform designed to help people learn how to “establish and maintain healthier connections.”[xii] There were many pieces of Herd’s personal and professional life that fell apart, but she managed to put them back together and create a foundation for something much stronger – and much more profitable as well. Bumble has amassed more than 22 million. In its first 15 months of sales, revenue surpassed $100 million.
In an interview with Entrepreneur.com, Wolfe shared that “No matter who you are in life, where you come from or where you live, everyone is fighting their own battle and everyone’s battle is equally important as the next. To each person, those are their problems and they are more important than everyone else’s.”[xiii]
Wolfe’s story is a testament to the value of telling your story of self as you continue along your own entrepreneurial journey. I hope you’ll find the strength and courage to write, re-write, and fully live your story of self.
To get started writing your story of self, begin by reflecting on the events that made a big impact on you. Most people can recall some of these major milestones happening between the ages of 15 and 25, but wherever they were in your life, take a moment to reflect on them. As you begin to write down your story of self, here are some initial question prompts to help you get going:
1. When was your first exposure to the idea of entrepreneurship? It doesn’t have to be a business endeavor in the traditional sense, it could have been that time you participated in fundraising for a school activity or sport. What did you learn from that experience? How does that experience relate to the entrepreneurial journey you’re on today?
2. Think of a difficult situation you encountered when you were younger. How did you deal with that challenge? What did you learn from it?
3. Was there a special person in your life that taught you something new (A parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a coach, a teacher a friend, etc.)? Was that person there for you during a challenging time? How did they help you? What did you learn?
4. Reflect on a time when you were given a new responsibility that you might not have felt ready for at the time. How did you respond? Did it make you more self-reliant?
5. Remember a time when you worked hard for something. How was it that you were able to persevere when you might have wanted to quit instead? Did the hard work pay off?
[i] Brown, Brené. Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way we Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Random House. 25 Aug. 2015.
[ii] Trapnell, P.D. & Campbell, J.D.. (1999). Private Self-Consciousness and the Five-Factor Model of Personality: Distinguishing Rumination from Reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 76. 284-304. 10.1037/0022-3514.76.2.284.
[iii] Shapero, Albert, and Lisa Sokol. "The social dimensions of entrepreneurship." (1982).
[iv] D’Argembeau, A., Cassol, H., Phillips, C., Balteau, E., Salmon, E., & Van der Linden, M. (2014). Brains creating stories of selves: the neural basis of autobiographical reasoning. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, 9(5), 646-652.
[v] Lilgendahl, J. P., & McAdams, D. P. (2011). Constructing Stories of Self-Growth: How Individual Differences in Patterns of Autobiographical Reasoning Relate to Well-Being in Midlife. Journal Of Personality, 79(2), 391-428.
[vi] Janoff-Bulman, R. (2006). Schema-change perspectives on posttraumatic growth. Handbook of posttraumatic growth: Research and practice, 81-99.
[vii] Miller, D., & Le Breton-Miller, I. (2017, January). Underdog Entrepreneurs: A Model of Challenge-Based Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice. pp. 7-17. doi:10.1111/etap.12253.
[viii] Kosoff, Maya. Report: Ousted Tinder Cofounder Settled Her Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against the Company for ‘Just Over $1 Million’. Business Insider. 4 Nov. 2014. < https://www.businessinsider.com/whitney-wolfe-settles-sexual-harassment-tinder-lawsuit-1-million-2014-11>
[ix] O’Connor, Clare. Billion-dollar Bumble: How Whitney Wolfe Herd Built America’s Fastest-growing Dating App. Forbes Magazine. 12 Dec. 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/11/14/billion-dollar-bumble-how-whitney-wolfe-herd-built-americas-fastest-growing-dating-app/#535f0674248b
[x] Tait, Amelia. Swipe Right for Equality: How Bumble is taking on Sexism. Wired Magazine. 30 Aug. 2017. <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/bumble-whitney-wolfe-sexism-tinder-app>
[xi] Garcia, Ahiza. Bumble Founder Created the App after Experiencing Online Harassment. CNN Money. 19 Sep. 2017. <https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/14/technology/business/bumble-whitney-wolfe-fresh-money/index.html>
[xiii] Zipkin, Nina. The Founder of Bumble Reveals How the ‘Question of Nine’ can help you Stay Focused. Entrepreneur.com Jun. 2017 <https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/295185>