Michael Hyatt's Blog, page 36

How to Create New Products

7 Simple Steps from Idea to Launch

New products are the lifeblood of a company. But product creation can be overwhelming for many business owners. Based on years of experience launching successful products, we share the five-step formula that will take you from drawing board to marketplace in no time.

And Away Wii Go!

How Nintendo Rethought Its Product and Got Its Groove Back

I wouldn’t have wanted to be in Nintendo’s board meeting when they looked at the number of consoles Sony and Microsoft sold compared to the number of Nintendo Gamecubes sold. Sony alone sold over seven times more PlayStation 2s than Nintendo sold Gamecubes. The Xbox was a brand spanking new console and sold a few million more units than the Gamecube.

These were all huge red flags for Nintendo. Their console just wasn’t getting the support of third party game developers because it couldn’t run games that the other two consoles could.

High definition televisions were another big driver of Xbox and PS2 sales. Their consoles could run games at 720p and eventually 1080p and would look amazing. Gamecube games looked very washed out on and grainy on HD TVs. What was Nintendo to do?

If I were them, I would have beefed up the graphics to compete with Microsoft and Sony. I would have made it easier to connect with friends through Nintendo’s online network. I would have tried to get third party developers to come back and make games specifically for Nintendo.

And I would have been dead wrong.

Going sideways

Well, to be fair, they did do some of those things. But this was Nintendo, the only video game company that also owned a Major League Baseball team. And they decided to throw the curveball.

In came the Wii. No console had been so explicitly family oriented before. They gave us the Wii controller, which was the economic miracle that Nintendo needed. It was also an oddity and almost a throwback. The market at the time was dominated by games like Call of Duty and Halo. You needed a console with online multiplayer capability to run any of those blockbusters.

Nintendo said foo to that. Instead it gave us a controller with motion controls and told us video game consumers that we would really need it to play Wii Sports. And we did.

Starting in 2006, families were ecstatic to find this wholesome alternative to all of the violence and gore that the gaming industry seemed to produce in buckets. Not only did the Wii force people to play next to each other, Nintendo made it fun again.

They also considered price. The Wii was much cheaper than its competition. A family could purchase a Wii for at least $50 less than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. That’s a big deal when you are on a budget for Christmas.

Many of the consoles were sold because the whole family could get involved in the action. I remember being way too excited one Christmas because all of my relatives were coming to my parents’ house. We were all going to play Wii Bowling together.

There was also Wii Tennis, Golf, and Boxing. All in one game. It was the perfect package for an amazing time. And guess what? Nobody cared about being online. Nobody cared about the graphics. And nobody cared that they were using a motion controller instead of those newfangled double joystick controllers.

Nintendo built on top of tech that they had pioneered in the 1980s – think the Duck Hunt game with its toy light gun – to give us a gaming experience that we had never felt before. People rewarded this new experience by buying the console and continuing to buy it in decent numbers for about a decade. It sold over 100 million units worldwide.

This gave Nintendo new life to once again have a seat at the video game table. Who would have guessed that a motion controller and only a handful of video games could bring the gaming community back into the living room?

The Nintendo difference, and yours

Nintendo had always been different than the competition. That difference makes it possible for them to succeed when they don’t try to copy the competition.

Since the Wii, Nintendo has produced the Wii U and the Nintendo Switch. The first flopped, the second is currently lighting up the charts again.

The Wii U struggled to succeed because it forgot the thing that made the Wii such a success. It was too much like the competition and not enough like the Wii experience, which had encouraged gamers to play next to each other.

Nintendo got back on track with the Nintendo Switch. This console can be taken on the go, which allows it to be a handheld gaming system, but it can also be played on the big screen at home and the controllers have such add-ons as a motion-sensitive wheel that can be used to play racing games.

I was at a local video game console arcade about a year ago and my whole family used those controllers to race through Mario Kart together. That is the sort of experience that didn’t even seem possible in 2006, until the Wii launched.

There’s a lesson in here for businesses far beyond the world of video games: Don’t always be so quick to copy the product of your competition. Look at what makes your organization different and where you add value. See if you can persuade customers that you can not only meet their needs with your product but also offer them a unique experience.

The Virtues of Iteration

Why It's Okay to Try, Try Again With Your Product

It might seem strange that an iconic concert venue is offering a sneak peek at musicians rehearsing for upcoming shows.

“As a valued corporate supporter of Carnegie Hall, your organization’s employees have the unique opportunity to observe the artistic process of a world-class orchestra as it prepares for a Carnegie Hall concert,” notes the famed New York City auditorium’s website, in an appeal to deep-pocketed potential donors.

Why allow the public to see and hear the orchestra’s work in progress? Audience members of a rehearsal could easily pick up on missed cues from conductor to musician, flubbed solos, perhaps even personnel changes if rehearsals aren’t going according to plan. And in the iPhone age it’s possible those mistakes won’t stay within Carnegie Hall’s walls.

The answer is that Carnegie Hall folks have tapped into an important professional virtue: iteration. Under this approach, a top-shelf product – in this case the orchestra’s musical performance – gets rolled out to the public one step at a time. We can see it warts and all early on with the longer-term goal of producing the best product and getting it to the widest possible audience.

Great things are possible only through continuous learning and improving. Launching a prototype and making iterations public can expose the weakest points in an organization’s assumptions and plans and help find ways to fix them.

One of the only ways to successfully innovate is to be prepared to iterate like crazy. There is a misbegotten belief that new growth businesses arise fully formed out of an innovator’s head. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Carefully look at the history of just about any innovation success and you’ll find a course correction, if not an outright failure, along the way.

Gmail’s gradual growth

Would-be Carnegie Hall orchestra rehearsal attendees might very well have heard about the event through a Google alert. These missives mostly go into Gmail accounts – the now-ubiquitous email system launched by Google in 2004.

Gmail now accounts for nearly 30 percent of email addresses, according to one study. But it didn’t reach that point of dominance overnight. Gmail’s public-facing evolution offers a bold lesson in the virtues of iteration.

It seems funny to think about now, but Gmail was in test mode for more than half a decade. Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004, and ended its testing phase on July 7, 2009.

That long runway allowed it to build off of its inherent competitive advantages. At launch, Gmail had a storage capacity of one gigabyte per user, a good deal higher than most competitors at the time. That increased as the testing phase went along and has gone up further in the near-decade since – the service now comes with 15 gigabytes of storage, enough for even ravenous hoarders of photos, music files, etc.

In addition to massive storage space, each Gmail iteration had a visual-friendly interface, instant search and other advanced features. Competitors like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail (remember them?) just couldn’t keep up.

Even once the beta testing phase was long over, Gmail’s iterations continued. In November 2011, Google began rolling out a redesign of its interface that streamlined Gmail’s look into a rather minimalist design, to make it consistent with other design changes in the tech giant’s products. Users were able to preview the new interface design for months prior to the official release, and for a time revert back to the old interface.

Google in 2018 similarly introduced a new web user interface for Gmail. Like the prior iteration seven years earlier, not everyone loved the changes. Some raged about it on Twitter. But within a few weeks the new interface largely grew in acceptance – and it likely won’t be the final Gmail iteration.

Incremental approach: the good and the bad

The iterative design process is a simple concept. Once, through user research, you have identified a user need and have generated ideas to meet that need, you develop a prototype.

Then you test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way. Then you take what you learned from testing and amend the design. Next, you create a new prototype and begin the process all over again until you are satisfied that you’ve reached the best possible product for release to the market.

But what if that’s not enough?

Iterative design can be deceptive. It does a great job of delivering incremental improvements. Those improvements build upon each other after each iteration. Still, you can end up with incrementally better versions of the same product. And sometimes an entirely different product is needed.

The trick is knowing the difference. On the whole, though, users are likely to favor the incremental approach. As Carnegie Hall orchestra rehearsal-watchers can attest.

Spell out the Organization’s Purpose

Helping Your Team See the Bigger Picture

If you want to achieve your quarterly sales quotas, slash expenses, or reach some other important benchmark, it’s import to remember your why—why you started your company, why you spent long days and longer nights helping it grow, and why achieving greater impact is critical.

But unlike personal goals that are often chased in isolation, business is a team sport. And if you want to win as a team, you need to communicate your organization’s purpose so that your team members can make it part of their why.

Get specific about your mission

Few things ruin a team’s focus more than generic objectives (increasing website traffic or launching new products, for example) that aren’t directly connected to the company’s mission. According to Joel Schwartzberg, a communications expert and public speaking trainer, using abstract goals to share an organization’s purpose is a mistake that makes fulfilling the true mission much more difficult.

“Whether your company makes the world a safer place or makes a profit from selling soft drinks, always end your point with the highest value proposition,” Schwartzberg says. “Always ask ‘Why is that important?’ until you reach the ultimate goal, then make that your point.”

This approach transforms a desire of “opening more stores” to “becoming the market leader and saving more lives.” The first is little more than an abstract goal, while the latter is clearly more purpose-driven.

Yet even after determining the highest value proposition, specificity is still important when determining how to communicate it. And, adds Schwartzberg, “badjectives” should be avoided at all costs.

“’Badjectives’ are adjectives that are so broad and overused that they mean virtually nothing—words like ‘great,’ ‘very good,’ ‘awesome,’ ‘interesting,’ and even ‘important,’” he says. “What’s ‘important’ to one person might be irrelevant to someone else.”

Instead of using those words, Schwartzberg recommends asking why an approach or goal is “very good” or “great.” The answer, he says, will bring you back to your organization’s highest value proposition and true purpose in the most concise way possible.

Tell a story

Jesus taught in parables for a reason: Wrapping important messages in the context of a well-told story makes them easier to understand, easier to remember, and easier to act upon.

Vlad Giverts has co-founded three companies and been one of the first employees or executives at five others. He now coaches business leaders and finds that a lack of storytelling often prevents deep buy-in from team members.

“Many companies have inspirational purpose statements like ‘Reinventing Finance’ or ‘Revolutionizing Education,’ but no one knows what they really mean,” says Giverts. “These statements are often obvious to the founders, and they can’t imagine how their team members, who they see and talk to every week, don’t just ‘get it.’ But they usually don’t.”

To help turn an organization’s purpose with a story, Giverts recommends answering the following questions:

● Who is the protagonist?

● What is their struggle?

● How will the company make a meaningful difference in these people’s lives and, thus, make the world a better place?

Responses to these questions provide clarity and, when incorporated, can turn a generic statement like:

“We’ll make it more convenient for people to get groceries!”

Into:

“Millions of professionals are working long hours to succeed at their jobs. They’re struggling to keep up with chores with the few hours they have left. What if we could free up some of their time to live their lives, instead of dealing with chores?”

Statements like these are much more effective in connecting team members to the organization’s why and uniting everyone with an objective that’s both shared and compelling.

Stay positive

It’s not just enough to communicate an organization’s purpose if team members don’t believe that it can actually be fulfilled. There are challenges inherent to running an organization and leading teams—and the larger the vision and intended impact, the more those challenges compound.

According to Earl Choate, CEO of Concrete Camouflage, the antidote to team frustration and apathy is for the leaders tasked with this communication to simply stay positive.

“Managers are limited in the amount of work they can accomplish individually, and there is only so much a person can get done in a given day or week,” he explains. “However, their attitude can have a tremendous impact on the work done by other people in the company.”

As the leader of an e-commerce company that designs and sells its own proprietary concrete staining supplies, Choate implements this simple strategy on a daily basis. He also notes how effective positivity is as a motivator and driver of purposeful action.

“A positive outlook is so important from a leader because it wears off onto the rest of the team,” Choate says. “It helps create a culture that inspires risk taking and personal initiative from team members.”

The Science of Teambuilding

Forget Trust Falls and Puzzle It Out Together

“Tell me about a time you worked with a team.” It is a common interview question, one many of us have heard before. If you’re like me, a flood of past teams comes cascading into your brain, some good and others not so good.

There is the team where you had to the do all the work, and the team where you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The team meetings that devolved into useless monologues and those that ended in smiles and fits of laughter. Some teams energize, while others leave us feeling depleted.

Companies worldwide are moving away from hierarchical, functional organization towards networks of teams in an attempt to increase efficiency and better respond to business challenges. At the same time, teams have varying levels of effectiveness.

In a 2013 survey conducted by the University of Phoenix, 68 percent of respondents had been part of a dysfunctional team. Only 24 percent reported preferring to work in teams. With such high levels of dysfunction, who can blame them?

To harness the power of teams, we need to understand them and actively work to build better teams. Luckily, science can help.

Finding the ‘It’ factor

What exactly are we trying to achieve in teambuilding? To know, we need to identify what gives effective teams their edge. In 2010, a collaborative research effort conducted by Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Union College set out to identify what factors foster and diminish teamwork-superpowers.

They assigned 699 participants to groups of various sizes and assigned each group a set of tasks. The most predictive measure of each group’s ability to perform their performance on previous tasks. Group dynamics, or collective intelligence, best determined future effectiveness.

Researchers then identified two characteristics that corresponded with collective intelligence: social sensitivity and conversation turn-taking. Successful groups also tended to include more women, but this was mediated by women’s likelihood to score higher in terms of social sensitivity.

Future studies have further downplayed the importance of group composition. According to Dr. Alex Pentland of the MIT Media Lab, patters of communication “are as significant as all the other factors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussions—combined.”

The importance of psychological safety

Academic institutions aren’t the only hubs of social engineering gurus to tackle teamwork. Google has conducted their own research on what makes teams hum with efficiency.

As a pattern-seeking tech giant, Google had been surprised to find successful teams distinctly lacking common patterns. The individual success or intelligence of members didn’t matter, how meetings were run didn’t seem to matter, even leadership style, beyond getting the basics right, didn’t matter.

When they came across the research on collective IQ, Google realized that they had been missing the “it” factor. How teams create a safe space for collaboration isn’t important. What is important is that they do. Psychological safety, they determined, was the underpinning of success.

Team members needed to feel comfortable speaking up to create the communication dynamics necessary for success. It all comes down to trust, which is one of the characteristics teambuilding exercises were designed to enhance.

Finding trust in the human brain

Paul Z. Jak knows about trust.

Drawing on evidence that oxytocin signals to rats that it is safe to approach another of their species, Jak thought it might play a similar role in human interactions. He amended a popular economic game, where one participant sends money to another, who then has the option to share in whatever way they see fit, to test his theory.

Not only did participants show more oxytocin in their blood levels after a trusting interaction but administering the “moral drug” increased levels of trust and sharing. Jak was onto something. He has since spent much of his career examining how to increase natural oxytocin to enhance trust and build teams.

His most recent book, Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performing Companies, highlights lessons learned along the way. Though it concentrates more on management than teamwork, a blueprint for effective teambuilding underlies many of his management points and closely parallels previous research.

A manager can help to promote an atmosphere of psychological safety, but it is up to entire team to embrace positive norms.

Effective teambuilding today

Not all teambuilding is created equal. In line with teambuilding research, a 2009 study found that exercises designed to build interpersonal relationships and enhance solving problem abilities were most effective. How, though, are these goals best accomplished? There is more than one answer, but here are some pointers:

1) Teambuilding requires buy-in. Will your team be receptive to a professionally facilitated, official teambuilding exercise or will the suggestion be met with groans of resistance? If you don’t run a teambuilding-type operation, think outside the box. At Articulate Global, a tech firm, employees take a week to team up and work on a tech project of their own choosing during their annual Hackathon. It’s teambuilding without the stigma.

2) Steer clear of activities where people are singled out and might feel embarrassed. Awkward and embarrassing situations are exactly the opposite of the trust-building activities needed to build strong teams.

3) Effective teambuilding allows teams to tackle an achievable challenge together. This suggestion comes straight from Dr. Jak. Working through a challenge together increases oxytocin and group cohesiveness. Choosing the right challenge, however, comes back to knowing your team. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of science hacks for that.

How to Help Your Team Find Their Why

4 Questions to Supercharge Your Team’s Commitment

As leaders, we know that real growth happens only when people go beyond simply putting in time and bring their best energy to work. The problem is that team members sometimes see their job as nothing but a paycheck. In this episode, we’ll show you how to get the best effort from your people by asking four questions that clarify the purpose of their work.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

How Companywide Bonuses Can Help Everyone Feel the Float

Historically, the office wasn’t a place Americans strove to participate in endeavors larger than themselves. Go to the office to earn a living, the thinking went. Leave horizon-broadening for church and volunteer activities – or maybe a gardening club if you’re into that sort of thing.

It need not be that way. With the right incentives, many employers today are helping their teams feel like they’re contributing to something beyond themselves. And that, in turn, is helping the bottom line.

To be sure, money is an important part of the equation – for most people that’s the point of going to work. And many employers figure their workers will perform better by dangling individual, performance-based bonuses.

But companies actually can increase their own revenue by parceling out extra pay based on firms’ financial returns. It’s not a form of socialism, but good business.

When the tide started rising

The idea is actually rooted in the political realm, through the now common, even-cliched phrase, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy first used it in the 1950s to describe local economic development projects in New England. The phrase grew in prominence once JFK was ensconced in the White House and the Democratic president used it to sell his tax cut package in Congress. The Navy veteran argued through the seafaring-sounding aphorism that lower individual rates would bulge the wallets of all taxpayers, injecting more money into the economy and benefiting everyone.

Two decades later a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, offered a broadened “rising tide” take to enact his own economic package. Reagan contended Americans’ bottom lines would be best helped from a fresh money flow into the economy from slashed marginal tax rates along with pared-back government spending. Twenty years after that another GOP president, George W. Bush, conjured up the phrase again to push his economic package through Congress.

The “rising tide” metaphor these days has largely moved beyond partisan politics, relating more to the corporate realm. An expanding economy means prospective employees have more choices than ever about where to work. Companies have to figure out how to attract and then hold onto them. With many workers seeking not only a healthy paycheck but also larger sense of belonging, shared bonus programs are a key ingredient to accomplish that.

Subjective nature

Bonuses provide an obvious financial motivation for employees to perform. Giving workers opportunities to earn beyond agreed-upon salary levels means they’ll be inclined to do more than the basics outlined in their job descriptions.

But not all bonus plans are created equal. The most familiar and obvious are performance-based. Performance-based bonuses might come annually, quarterly, occasionally even monthly in select companies.

The problem with performance-based plans lies in their arbitrary and capricious nature. A boss’s favorite employee, for whatever reason, may not be the most productive. Office politics frequently intrude.

The inherently subjective nature of performance-based bonuses is bound to leave somebody – most likely a lot of people – feeling aggrieved.

Everybody benefits

Employees who receive profit-sharing bonuses have a direct stake in their organization meeting annual profitability goals. While it often can be difficult for individual workers to see how their roles directly affect the company’s bottom line, under a companywide bonus program they’ll have a broader sense that their performance contributes to the organization’s achievements.

If the entire workforce exhibits pride and diligence in all its work, each employee’s profit share is likely to rise. A broad-based bonus program can inspire better morale and more productivity.

There are plenty of ways of going about this. Giving employees buy-in to the company’s performance could include a profit-sharing program. Or a company might set aside a predetermined amount. A bonus floor could be, say, 2.5 percent.

The idea is to encourage employees to understand how their work affects the company’s performance and to provide a direct stake in improving the firm’s profitability. Having employees learn how the company makes money – and an employee’s specific role in doing so – can help it earn even more.

Under this approach, employees have an incentive to create an increasingly rising tide for the company – and themselves.

Just Say No to Goal Shaming

How to Silence Your Inner Critic Once and For All

Many leaders have bigger goals than they admit to. Criticism, fear, and naysaying give them a sense of “goal shame” and keep them playing small. Today, we’ll help you silence your inner critic once and for all so you can bust through your upper limit and finally accomplish the big achievement you’ve been dreaming of.

Stop Being Your Own Worst Critic

The Benefits of Going Positive

Does this one ring a bell? You, reader, are your own worst critic. Your penchant for nitpicking every detail and harshly critiquing your accomplishments makes it difficult for you to make progress or sometimes even get simple work done.

If it doesn’t apply to you or someone close to you, then you have a great day. If it does, then read on, Macduff.

What your inner self-critics needs to do is learn is that focusing on your strengths is a better pathway to success than fixating on weaknesses. Take these three steps and you will become your best critic and champion.

1. Realize you are more than enough

Self-criticism is normal and even healthy in small doses. But as the saying goes, the dose makes the poison. When you always approach your work with negativity, it’s paralyzing. It also makes you more susceptible to criticism from others who may not have your best interests at heart.

You need to know that much of the criticism in your head has no resemblance to what you are actually doing in real time. More often than not, you are more than enough to tackle the task at hand.

Realizing you are enough starts by applying Apple Founder Steve Jobs’s famed adage that “you can only connect [the dots] looking backward.” Often, it means looking at your past successes, as well as previous pitfalls, and how they can help you tackle the challenges ahead.

2. Stop with the negative talk

Self-criticism starts with negative words. It’s not just the I-can’ts and the not-good-enoughs. Every time you critique a meaningless detail, or nitpick a perfectly good presentation, you put yourself on the path to lifelong self-sabotage.

Simply ignoring the words of criticism isn’t enough. You must combat them with affirmations of your capacity to succeed. This starts at the end of the day by looking at the big picture of success as well as listing and reciting I cans, I ams, and even I wills — affirming your ability to achieve. By affirming these things before going to bed, you get ready for success the next day.

Another strategy is to embrace the concept of good enough. Along the lines of what Wired revealed about what consumers wanted, your colleagues expect your projects be successful, simple, economical, not perfect. Once you change your expectations of what you should do, you become less self-critical.

Finally, write down your past successes so you can reference them every now and then. Even the simplest signposted achievement can cause you to feel positive about your ability to succeed in the future. Those positive words can crowd out the negative words stuck on repeat in your head.

3. Keep building your strengths

One reason why we are so self-critical is that we become fixated on our shortcomings. It becomes easier to focus on what we lack rather on our considerable skills and successes.

This is a mistake. As entrepreneur Auren Hoffman points out, fixating on weaknesses takes precious time needed from building upon the strengths you already have.

More often than not, your shortcomings are the flip sides of those very strengths you already possess. Lacking a master’s degree, for example, may be the reason why you put so much time mastering your work. Your blunt speaking is the result of your leadership skills. Your stumbles in public speaking are matched by your considerable rhetorical skills as a writer.

Put your energy into building up your strengths. That includes learning more about your strengths as well as the key tools you will need to get better. And learn to tout these strengths instead of talking about your shortcomings.

What you say will affect how you think about yourself. At some point it will probably dawn on you that you were more than enough, after all.

Don’t Let Others Make You Small

How High-Achievers Deal With Goal Shaming

Big goals are often the seed for big success. Monica Louie knows this firsthand. The Facebook ad expert launched a new company and set an audacious goal of earning $100,000 her first year in business—despite having made only $8,000 the previous year with another venture.

It was such a big goal, in fact, that a recently hired business coach advised her against it, stating that she would likely get discouraged en route to her goal and quit well before her milestone was reached.

Louie, however, wasn’t deterred.

“I know myself, and if I don’t shoot for a big goal that seems completely out of reach, then I won’t take the kind of action I need to take in order reach my full potential,” she says. “This strategy paid off because in my first year of my new business, I ended up making $91,000 of revenue.”

Though just landed shy of her goal, Louie says that the extra $9,000 doesn’t matter. “I still proved to myself that I could make an impact with my business and help a lot of people,” she says. “Because I wasn’t afraid to dream big, I have now set my business up to be on a path to triple that impact in my second year of business.”

It’s been said that if your goals don’t scare you, they’re not big enough. But what happens when others, like Louie’s coach, try to keep you small, and discourage you from aiming for loftier goals?

Here’s what business leaders have to say.

Consider the source

When Chicago-based fighter jet engineer Adrian Mederos decided to build a travel search engine app—and set a goal of reaching one million users—he knew he’d need accountability to fuel his ambition. So he took to YouTube and uploaded a video detailing his intent.

To date, his channel is at 1,700 subscribers and growing. And increased visibility brings increased scrutiny.

“When I receive ridicule, I take a long hard look at the person ridiculing me,” Mederos says. ”What have they built? What is their legacy? Where are their goals? The answer is always underwhelming.”

In an era of anonymous internet trolls, Mederos refuses to be goal-shamed by people who aren’t even doing the work to achieve their own goals. But that doesn’t mean he ignores the naysayers completely.

“Being ridiculed is a good sign,” he says. “Own it and use it to fuel the force driving your ambition, and know that the results will show for themselves.”

Search for the positive

Echoing Mederos’s sentiment, business coach Jennifer Dawn says that it is helpful to actually thank critics for their comments. “The sting of criticism can certainly hurt at first, but there is tons of valuable information to be found if you go into it looking for the positive,” she says.

In her own career, Dawn has faced blowback from her ex-husband, former boss, and past mentor—each of whom scoffed at her plan to launch her own coaching business.

“By receiving criticism it gave me the opportunity to take an honest look at myself, my direction, and what I wanted my contribution to be,” Dawn says. “I was then able to course-correct if necessary and feel even more satisfied about my choices. This has helped me to be more self-aware and self-confident.”

Dawn adds that the ability to glean useful information from hurtful situations is a skill that all business leaders can learn. This skill leads to self-awareness, which she believes is foundational for success.

“When you can find the positive in these situations, it can really help to propel you further and keep your dreams intact,” Dawn explains.

Build relationships wisely

Quoting Mark 6:4, which reads, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home,” executive coach Glenn Davis acknowledges that the people closest to us are often the most vocal critics when we set out to break new ground.

“Family and long-time friends have the default of constantly reducing you to your past and your failures,” he says.

Davis’s own inner circle was rife with judgement when he chose to leave the corporate world in 2012 to go out on his own. To counteract the negativity, he became intentional about building relationships with those who would speak to his potential instead of his past.

Not surprisingly, that is the same advice he gives others.

“Part of my redemption to break free from this negative pattern was to give permission to those who truly believed in me to mentor me, challenge me, and push me,” Davis says. “I always say, only those who are willing to walk with you up the mountain have the right to speak into your life.”

Prepare for a difficult—but satisfying—journey

Just as fear is often the deterrent that keeps us from starting the business, writing the book, or launching the new product, it is also what leads others to discourage us from doing those things in the first place. That, in itself, is to be expected. It’s when we’ve made the mistake of placing our faith in the approval of those detractors that the search for external validation becomes dangerous.

“Sure, you must be open to feedback and debates about your ideas, but that shouldn’t be the sole criteria to define your start,” says Ketan Kapoor, who left an executive-level position with American Express to launch Mettl, an online talent assessment platform. “The more I craved for validation; the stronger the rejections I got.”

Is it easy to shut out the voices of negativity, only to find yourself navigating the uncertainty alone? No, says Kapoor. But he says that it’s more satisfying from the regret that comes from inacation.

“If you are to achieve something worthy that sets you apart, the start is going to be lonely,” says Kapoor. “People only join and appreciate when your ideas get successfully incubated. If you have a firm vision grounded in reality, the road can be rough but it’s sure to lead you to the destination.”