Exclusive to Innovation America
by Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute
I started a new blog this week called Trepability. It’s for treps – a.k.a. entrepreneurs – and the people who love them. And while getting the word out, I learned that not everyone knows what a trep is. Even some entrepreneurs.
The most interesting thread in the comments I got from people was that they associated ‘trep’ with trepidation.
Let me distinguish those two words with a bit more precision.
Trep: an entrepreneur, one who incites, energizes, and/or leads an enterprise into existence, generally with great initiative and high tolerance for risk. My kinda people.
Trepidation: tremulous fear, alarm, or agitation; perturbation. Or as some might be wont to define it, scared s**tless.
These are, in fact, mutually exclusive terms.
Being a trepidation-less trep doesn’t ensure you’ll be a successful one, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. And it’s not a bad idea to know where you stand. Here’s my user-friendly trep[idation] test. Just read the three choices and decide which applies most to you.
a) The only thing I can really focus on is fear.
b) I totally ignore fear.
c) It’s there, but so what?
That wasn’t too hard, was it? (If you are still vacillating, your answer is probably a).
And here’s your ‘Fear Factor’:
If you chose a), you aren’t focusing, you’re obsessing. Getting caught in the cycle of fearful rumination is incredibly bad for innovation.
If you chose b), you’re missing the kind of awareness that is essential for effectively delegating the handling of risk to someone who can worry without getting ‘stuck’, and can actually do something about it. Risk might not kill you, but why take unnecessary chances without a safety net?
If you chose c), you’ve got the awareness that fear can be and should be managed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean by you. Having gotten that far, you probably also know that you need to be spending as much of your time as possible, doing what only you can do, so you are willing to trust the right person to make sure the roof stays put, the power stays on, and there are plenty of ramen noodles in the supply closet.
Trepidation will never really go away. But treps accept that it is ‘built-in’ to what we do, and that with the right team, we can free ourselves to fly!
Dr. Janice Presser loves to meet InnovationDAILY readers. You can reach her through her corporate website, https://www.thegabrielinstitute.com and follow her as @DrJanice on Twitter.