When Religion Mediates Your Entrepreneurial Id — Religion Pushed Entrepreneur

It isn’t a lot of a stretch to contemplate that failure poses a risk to our identification as entrepreneurs. When we have now poured time, abilities, and treasures right into a enterprise solely to observe it crash, it’s comprehensible that we begin questioning the validity of our declare to be “entrepreneurs.” Then again, entrepreneurs additionally confronted identification threats within the face of utmost success, the place they had been tempted to view their entrepreneurial success—and due to this fact their entrepreneurial identification—as preeminent, tending dangerously towards pleasure. 

Our findings revealed one crucially essential element of those entrepreneurs’ religion that served as a counter-balance that stabilized their identification within the face of threats: a private relationship with God (and figuring out through that relationship). Recognizing their relational identification with God and selecting to establish with it was the distinction for every of our interviewees. Briefly, a relational identification with God allowed entrepreneurs to mitigate how the highs and lows of entrepreneurship affected their identification.

Our respondents described two distinct phenomena that helped regulate entrepreneurial identification threats within the wake of success and failure: humbling and affirmation. Humbling refers to an entrepreneur’s aware acceptance of his or her relational identification with God as the final word victory. Entrepreneurs defined that their course of for remaining humble included a reframing of their definition of success to be about obedience fairly than monetary or reputational achieve, attributing their success and alternatives to the Lord fairly than themselves, and selecting to provide God the glory for the result. 

On the opposite finish of the spectrum, enduring and recovering within the wake of entrepreneurial failure necessitated identification affirming. Entrepreneurs used their relationship with God to affirm their identification by redefining failure, acknowledging that generally the Lord had protected them from success (eg. “I might not have been in a position to deal with [success], I wasn’t prepared”), and by trying again and remembering the previous provision of the Lord and His faithfulness to help and look after His kids. 

Each of those methods serve to take the main target off of the entrepreneur and the outcomes of our work and to shine the sunshine on the glory and love of the Father. However affirming and humbling will not be “one and executed” practices; entrepreneurs continually consider and interact in each, as typically as wanted to navigate the chaos of entrepreneurship. 

The reality is, our identification is safe, acquired fairly than achieved and rooted within the work of a God who selected us and calls us His kids, His masterpieces. And but, the temptation to depend on our entrepreneurial—work-based—identification will be extremely robust. We imagine that understanding and counting on our relational identification with God can function a counterbalance or countervailing drive for entrepreneurs to control their identification. On condition that actuality, we had been all for how Christian entrepreneurs of assorted fields understood and engaged their relational identification with God within the excessive highs and low lows of entrepreneurship. Counting on our identification as beloved kids of God reminds us that no matter our skilled endeavors—or some other for that matter—our value, worth, and standing are unchanging. Being adopted into God’s household invokes an identification that’s acquired fairly than achieved and due to this fact, is unconditional and unchanging. From this place, out of this everlasting relational identification, we are able to press on towards the aim and run the race set earlier than us, rooted in a love that we by no means need to earn however are blessed to stroll in with nice, humble confidence.