Whether you are established in business or you’re new to business, at some point you’re going to be faced with a situation that terrifies you. It could be that clients running for the hills, maybe you are having a problem with the manufacturer, maybe your website crashed.

Whatever it happens to be, you’re going to be stuck in a moment of fear. And when that happens, it is so common for business owners to make fear-based decisions.

Now, feeling fear is natural.

Our brains want to protect us. They want to keep us safe, and fear is a very common response to a great many situations.

But, making the decisions out of fear in those situations can be really detrimental to the future of your business. What tends to happen when we are faced with a situation where, let’s say, clients are running for the hills, is we tend to overcompensate by taking on the wrong clients.

So, we go back to our early roots as business owners, and we take on customers or clients that are not a good fit for us. We take on the kind of clients that we would have had when we were just getting started, maybe a couple months in business, and we go back to them because they feel safe, because it feels normal, and because, quite frankly, we are terrified.

But, this is a horrible thing to do. Because when that happens, you get stuck with clients who are not meant for you.

You get stuck with clients who take advantage of you, who cross boundaries, maybe they’re emotionally abusive, they don’t pay on time, they call you at three in the morning, whatever it happens to be… you get stuck with the wrong clients out of fear.

Maybe you are an e-commerce and you’re having a problem with your manufacturer. What a lot of business owners will do in this situation is they will flee that manufacturer, and they will find another manufacturer, and they will do it in a very short window of time. And when that happens, they tend not to do their due diligence.

They tend not to figure out exactly who that manufacturer is, what their reputation is. And in that situation, you can get stuck with a manufacturer who doesn’t actually do what it is that you need. They’re just telling you so that they can close the sale.

Or maybe your website went down. So if you’re on something like Joomla or WordPress and your website got hacked, it’s natural to go, “Well, I can’t have that anymore,” and you ditch it, and you go to Squarespace, or Wix, or Weebly, or one of those DIY site builders.

This can horrible for your business because those are not designed to grow your business in the same way as a content management system like WordPress or Joomla.

So, you’re making that choice out of fear, feeling as though, “If this is what I do, I’m going to get my business back online. Everything’s going to be fine,” but you’re not thinking about the long-term ramifications, and that is really the crux of the matter.

Whether you lost your client, your manufacturer, or your website, whatever it is, when you’re in those situations where every single thing in your business feels scary, you tend to make fear-based decisions that are all about the short term. You don’t look at the long term. You don’t make the right choices for the right reasons. You’re just looking at getting out of the situation as quickly as possible because your brain is acting entirely out of fear.

One of the big side effects of making fear-based decisions is you stop creating and your business, so you stop working on money-making activities. You stop creating content. You stop making programs. You go into survival mode, and we believe that survival mode is not one of creativity. It is not one where we create content or programs.

It is not one where we create sales funnels to work with clients, and we tend to just go back to what we believe are the core basic components of our business.

But, it’s 2020.

Working online, having any sort of online presence, you have to be creating. You have to have content. You have to have blog posts, social media posts, sales funnels. You need to be creating in your business in order to get out of that situation where you’re feeling like everything is a failure. When you are just making your decisions out of fear, that creativity goes to the wayside.

You only focus on things like converting old leads into new customers, working on closing a sale, and maybe even something like firing people or shutting down different systems in your business.

Now, when you are trying to grow your business online, if you’re trying to build your wherever business, like so many people who come to me are, you need those things.

So just because you’re faced with a scary situation doesn’t mean that you should get rid of your social media scheduler. It doesn’t mean that you should get rid of your podcasts server, or you should get rid of your website server, because those are going to have long-term effects on your business. So if at all possible, look at how your business is structured and in other places where you could cut back so that you can survive, get that new client, create new content, attract more people, and then get out of this situation where you are just living in fear.

I would love to hear about it. If you’re making any fear-based decisions right now, or if you’ve made any in the past and they’ve had a detrimental effect on your business, or if it had a good effect on your business, let me know in the comments.