A frustrating roadblock I see solopreneurs and small business owners face when they are setting goals is their reluctance to be visibly audacious.
Teeing up a big target - millions of dollars of revenue, market domination, etc. - can feel like bragging. It can feel aggressively ambitious. And if there’s one thing many of us (cough women cough cough) are taught from a young age, it’s that we are supposed to be humble. We are supposed to be modest. And we are definitely not supposed to be aggressive OR ambitious.
Well, I’m here to tell you to knock that off. I want you to be as aggressive as you want to be, because other people are. Be ambitious. Be audacious.
Take.
Up.
Space.
To this day, I’ve never had a young man in one of my college classes ask me how to balance being assertive with being aggressive, or how to seem ambitious without seeming TOO ambitious. Young women ask me that stuff all the time, and it makes me want to rage. Not at them, but at the world we’ve created, where half the population has been taught to make their dreams small enough to fit into some sort of socially-acceptable container.
Big dreams push us. Aggressive targets force us to think bigger and work out how we’re going to get there sooner. I’m not saying everyone has to want to be a billionaire, or to own a billion-dollar company. What I am saying is that you shouldn’t shrink your dream because you are afraid of how you might appear to someone else.