Author Simon J Benn discusses how entrepreneurs can combat self-doubt in the pursuit of happiness. 

“I get stressed out like I can’t tell you… It’s difficult to deal with on Saturday night after a bad result”

These are the words of Harry Redknapp. He’s been in the news in the last few months. Would England have done better at Euro 2012 under him? We’ll never know. There are a lot of parallels between sport and business; winning and losing, and how that affects our moods.

There’s a conflict here. What drives us to succeed also stresses us out. Have you heard the saying “if you’re driven, then somebody else is at the wheel”? I recently heard the Scottish billionaire Sir Tom Hunter saying that mega successful people like him are driven by a chronic case of self-doubt. There are a few things I can draw from that.

They’re looking for money to cure the self-doubt. But they’re billionaires and it hasn’t cured them yet! And money isn’t going to cure them. It’s like trying to put a plaster on cancer. For as long as they’re using the wrong cure, they won’t be healed. As long as they think money will assuage self-doubt, they’ll always doubt themselves. They wouldn’t choose to doubt themselves would they? So logically then, they’re not choosing this worry. Something else is choosing for them, and it’s something from their past.

Here’s a summary of what hundreds of entrepreneurs have told me about how they feel: Their past success has failed to give them the buzz they expected; in fact it’s been a bit of an anticlimax. They’re frustrated because their profits aren't as high as they'd like. They lose sleep worrying about their businesses. So it’s all about money? We want money for things it can buy. We want those things for the feelings we think they will give us. What if we could skip to the end result of being happy? Wouldn’t that be quicker and better? Wouldn’t we be in a better place to achieve more? You bet we would.

But how can we do that? By understanding what gets in the way of happiness so we can put that to one side more often and stop listening to those negative voices in our head. 

To be continued. 

See also: Women business leaders question government business fund