In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the fact that business is NOT just about having an epic strategy. We’re also going to check in on your entrepreneurial mindset.
Let’s dive right in…
You probably know that I am a big lover of an EPIC business strategy.
I love talking about all the different parts of business strategy, marketing, sales, and all the different ways that we can reach new people and convert them into clients.
I adore business strategy and that is why it is the core focus of my business and why I love mentoring people about their business strategy and marketing in particular.
However, I also know that for a lot of people when it comes to putting a strategy in place, implementing it AND seeing the results from that strategy, the thing that often lets them down is themself.
I know how powerful a great strategy can be for business growth. But I also know that when I have clients in my programs and working with me one-to-one, those who have consistent mindset support – as well as working with me on their strategy – are the ones who get the best results.
That’s why I wanted to talk today about your entrepreneurial mindset.
I’ve got six tips and pieces of advice that you might be interested in exploring to see if you need to get some extra support with your mindset.
I also have a really epic resource for you at the end of today’s episode, so make sure you stay tuned for that.
1. Understand that having your own business is personal development
Being an entrepreneur is one of the biggest personal development journeys you could ever go on.
Simply by acknowledging this, we actually open ourselves up to a lot more lessons, and gain the ability to pay attention to what’s going on between our ears when we are engaging in business activities and trying to grow our business.
Think about it: When you start your own business, you are the person with whom the buck stops.
If you set yourself a goal or a task and you don’t do it, in most cases, there’s no one else to blame. It is just you and your thoughts that you are left with at the end of the day.
It is something that really brings up a lot for us, and we need to pay attention to that, be mindful of it and have some strategies and processes to work through it.
Trust me, if you’ve got a gap in your personal development, if you’ve got some blocks around being seen, saying yes to money, asking for what you want, or any of the core activities that go hand in hand with having a business, they will show up.
Just by acknowledging that starting a business and growing a business is a very big personal development journey, I think it just ticks you off on the right track.
You just know that you are open to it and you’re keeping an eye out for those things as they pop up.
2. Accept and acknowledge that YOU’RE the boss
Boss nametag to support entrepreneurial mindset
For most people, they go from being in a standard job to being their own boss in their business.
When that happens, you instantly lose the person you normally revert to. You have no safety net of knowing that:
- Someone will tell you what to do
- Someone will be able to help you decide which thing you should be focusing on
- If a particular idea or strategy doesn’t work, at least you’re still getting paid because it’s not your business
- Someone will be able to direct you on what you should be doing instead
There’s always someone else to revert to.
What this does when we start our businesses, is it often puts us in the space where we look for that role to be fulfilled by other people.
When I first started my business, I went to my partner and told him about all my strategies. Whenever I decided I was going to do something, I would talk it over with him. It was almost as though I was waiting for him to tick it off like a boss would, and approve my idea so that I could go and try it.
He had no idea about online business. He was not at all in the space where he could advise me on that, but I just needed someone to give me that permission slip, and he was very good at asking a few questions and then just telling me to do what I thought.
That was great that he played that role for me, but at some point, I needed to take responsibility and say that I no longer want my partner giving me advice on my business or asking for permission from him.
That’s not what I’m here to do, and that’s not the role that he’s here to play.
If you have a parent who has their own business, you can sometimes fall into the habit of asking for their advice on everything that you do and needing permission from them. It can be anyone really. You just look for someone to fill the role of a boss for you.
Sometimes you hire a coach and you don’t do anything without their permission. You give them an undue sense of responsibility for your business and then start to divert responsibility into their hands.
This ends up leaving you in a dependent relationship with a business coach or a mentor.
You may even sometimes make your clients the boss.
This happens because you don’t have that normal role to revert to, you decide that actually the clients are the bosses. You then become beholden to THEIR beliefs, THEIR decisions and THEIR opinions about what you should be doing in your business.
None of those situations are particularly healthy, so we want to make sure that we have that personal development journey and entrepreneurial mindset to be able to recognise where we are handing over that sense of power and control.
We want to take that authority and position of responsibility in our business. Don’t try and look for a boss or create a boss in a place where you shouldn’t.
Accept and acknowledge that you’re the boss.
Part B to that is to make the decision to be a GOOD boss to yourself.
When I was working in jobs and had bosses, the roles where I was the most effective and where I did the best work, were not the ones where my boss was completely mean to me. They were the ones where my boss was really supportive and created the environment that I needed to thrive. They gave me great resources and were very encouraging to me.
Yet when I started my business, I was the worst boss in the world. I was mean, I was nitpicky, I was overly critical, I didn’t allow myself breaks during the day, and I made myself work long hours. Even when things went right, I just moved on to the next thing, never stopping to celebrate my successes. When things went wrong, I blamed myself and went into a really bad spiral of negative thoughts, shaming myself and feeling guilty.
It took a lot of personal development and recognising my own thoughts about myself and how I was treating myself, for me to change that behaviour and my entrepreneurial mindset.
Part B of accepting that you’re the boss with your entrepreneurial mindset, is recognising what makes a good boss for you.
What environment makes you thrive and be the good boss that you need? Because YOU are the boss of yourself in your business.
3. Notice any unconscious patterns
We can get away with a lot of unconscious patterns when we’re working in a job because someone else sets our price, tells us what we’re going to be paid, helps us work out our priorities, and calls us out when we haven’t hit a deadline.
Whereas when we’re working for ourselves, sometimes these unconscious patterns come to the surface because we need to be mindful of these things.
They show up big time when you have your own business.
It could be something like leaving tasks to the last minute. When you’re working for someone else, you might have strategies and ways that you work to ensure that you don’t leave things to the last minute or that if you do, you do it in a productive way. But if you haven’t been conscious of that, when you start a business, become an entrepreneur and start working for yourself, those unconscious patterns all of a sudden come racing to the front of the screen and you can absolutely see them playing out when you stop and pay attention.
They become impossible to ignore.
I had unconscious patterns of:
- Being mean to myself
- Working twice as hard to fix things when they weren’t going to plan rather than working a little bit smarter
- Thinking that I needed to work really hard in order to deserve the money that I was earning in my business
- Never wanting anyone to see me trying to do something, I only ever wanted them to see/shared the result
When I was growing my business, it was really challenging because I didn’t want to put posts up on social media talking about the fact that I was starting a business and not having success stories yet. Yet that’s what I needed to do in order to start building an audience and bringing people along on the journey with me.
It took a lot of mindset work for me to acknowledge that I was trying to go from starting a business quietly to being successful in business overnight (and only then was I allowed to share things on social media). I needed to embrace sharing the journey, sharing the mistakes and sharing starting my business even if it didn’t quite go to plan.
Lots of unconscious patterns come to the surface when you are starting a business. It’s our job as part of our entrepreneurial mindset work to pay attention to those patterns and to notice them without judgement.
4. Uncovering your blocks
This one is a big one for me. I didn’t realise how many blocks I had to success. If you’d have asked me when I first started my business what the negative consequences of me having a successful business are, I would have been completely baffled that you thought there could possibly be any. I would have told you that I don’t have any blocks to receiving or making money. That I don’t have any blocks to being seen because I’m a total exhibitionist extrovert. I was made for the entrepreneurial journey.
But goodness me did some hidden blocks come up when I first started my business.
My fear of asking for what I want, of being seen as failing at something, of being seen as a try-hard, of following up with people when they were late with a payment or had a default on their payments. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. My fear of being seen as salesy or aggressive in my marketing strategies.
I had so many blocks – money blocks, visibility blocks, action taking blocks, results blocks. I had all the blocks. It was just that I had learned to adapt in the corporate environment so that I could thrive even with these blocks. But when I started my business, I needed to really uncover and clear them.
Understanding how many blocks come up for us and all the ways that we unconsciously and subconsciously sabotage ourselves was a big one for me. Not just in terms of sabotaging the results, but even sabotaging ourselves and stopping ourselves from even taking action.
I don’t know how many times in the last seven years since starting my business I have known exactly what to do and yet just not done it, and I could not figure out WHY I wasn’t doing it.
That is a huge clue that there are some blocks popping up.
5. No mindset shifts happen based on theory alone
It’s not until we actually take the action of booking in a sales conversation and totally fudging up that sales conversation that we realise that we have blocks about asking for the sale.
It’s not until we are about to do a Facebook Live or we set up a launch plan that includes lots of Facebook Lives and we go to click record that we realise that we’re really blocked about being seen on video and being unscripted. Or there may be some visibility blocks popping up for you there.
It’s not just about theoretically working out where you might be blocking yourself based on what’s happened to you in the past, or just sitting meditating on it and working out what the blocks are and then healing them.
We need to actually (and this is point number 6) pair our entrepreneurial mindset work with our strategy work.
If you’re not going out there and taking the action, then you’re never stepping outside of that comfort zone, therefore, you never really see where those blocks might be showing up.
It’s not until you do a launch and it’s a flop that you realise you’ve got blocks around asking for the money because it was too easy.
It’s not until you actually take that action and pair the strategy and entrepreneurial mindset work side by side, that you have those mindset growth areas revealed and therefore you know what to work on.
6. Pair mindset work with strategy work
We want to make sure that these two pieces of work go side by side.
I know a lot of mindset specialists who would love to say that it’s 80% mindset and 20% action/strategy, but I don’t agree with that.
Typically what I like to do in my business is that I try to aim for a 50/50 balance.
50% of the money that I invest in learning is learning business strategy, and 50% is in learning mindset work or getting support from mindset practitioners.
50% of the time that I invest in my business is working on the strategy and implementing the strategy, ie. marketing, social media, delivery, client calls, and 50% of the time that I put in is working on my entrepreneurial mindset
That might seem a bit excessive to a lot of people and even the mindset practitioners that I hear saying it’s 80% mindset, don’t put 80% of their time working on their mindset. They’re still putting 80% of their time working on the strategy and 20% of their time working on their mindset because they think that they’re really fast and effective at it.
I actually think it’s a 50/50 thing.
But I want to be really clear about this, for me going and doing yoga is a mindset practice, so I include that in my mindset time. When I’m waking up in the morning, going for a long walk, listening to great podcasts, pumping myself up, listening to great music, and getting myself in the right headspace for the day – that’s all mindset work.
Working with a practitioner, doing my EFT in the mornings and tapping in the shower, that is mindset work.
Getting advice and support from someone who specialises in money blocks or visibility or some of the self-sabotage that’s coming up, that is mindset work as well.
I aim for 50% of my time, my money and my energy to be dedicated to my business strategy and implementing strategy, and 50% of my time, my energy and my money goes into my mindset, and working on and implementing entrepreneurial mindset work.
That’s how I find that balance and get it working side by side.
It has really served me well as I’ve grown my business over the years.
There are my 6 points on growing your entrepreneurial mindset:
- Understand that having your own business is personal development
- Accept and acknowledge that YOU’RE the boss
- Notice any unconscious patterns
- Uncovering your blocks
- No mindset shifts happen based on theory alone
- Pair mindset work with strategy work
I did promise you at the end of this episode that I have a special resource for you.
It’s my new Udemy course, the 30-day Business Blast!
If you are looking to pair mindset and strategy, it is the perfect balance because every second day is strategy work, and every other day is mindset work.
This program is one in which you set yourself a nice juicy stretch income goal (and I’m going to show you how to do that) for a 30 day period. Then over 30 days, you do one teensy module a day and it alternates between strategy and mindset over the course of the 30 days.
The strategy work includes:
- How to improve yourself
- How to follow up with people
- Conversations
- How to articulate your message more effectively
- How to get out and reach more people on social media
The mindset work is about:
- Uncovering the different blocks
- Modalities and strategies I use for mindset work
- Journaling tips
- Ways that you can expand your capacity to receive
It’s a real powerhouse combination of strategy and mindset.
Go check that out and thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
