I was recently in a coaching conversation with a client who is the owner of a startup in India. He is doing fairly well for himself. He has a four member team and is pretty charged up about the prospects he sees for his organization but in this particular conversation he stated “But we are a small company”. He repeated this phrase about 3 times in ten minutes.
‘You can be as small as you create yourself and you can be as big as you decide to create yourself’.
As our conversation continued I brought this up and he revealed that he was unaware that he was saying that. This is when we went even deeper to understand how the size of his company actually impacted him.
Interestingly he said, “I actually feel apologetic when I tell anyone the size of my company”. Now, mind you, this is a brilliant entrepreneur here who has fantastic ideas and an excellent vision to take his team to greater heights but the observer that he is about his company size is restricting him in many ways than one.
He further revealed, “I hold myself back when I have to make offers to organisations and due to that I have lost opportunities; I am also not comfortable making offers to potentially smart candidates because I feel they may not want to join a small organization. With the team I have, I don’t push them hard enough because I feel they may leave my organization for a bigger one.”
He went on to list out more points on how his thoughts were limiting him, however here are some points for you to consider :–
The way you think/observe about your situations, events, and people determines the actions you take.
Eg :- This coachee thought his company was small and so restricted himself in many ways from possible opportunities to excel.
2. The way you act and show up in the world gives access to others to think about you in a certain way i.e. they behave with you on the basis of how you show up to them.
Eg:- This coachee goes to a potential client with the prevalent story of being small and everything he says is in this context, then the potential client has all the reasons to put his attention on the smallness of the team and thus on the ‘in-capabilities’ this team may have and this then probably leads to lost opportunities.
So, How Small Is Small Really?
I once met a smart young Chartered Accountant who told me “You should hire me because I am young, intelligent, inexperienced as compared to many others and this is my strength because I am eager and excited to learn and gain experience; so I will provide you more services than most others.” I did not blink an eyelid before hiring him and I have not regretted it since.
The answer is pretty much out there – ‘You can be as small as you create yourself and you can be as big as you decide to create yourself’.
How are you creating yourself?
With love and warmth,
Sheeja Shaju
Leadership Coach and Somatic Leader
I Create
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