What are some of the biggest barriers in your way right now?
Time?
Money?
Family drama?
Sure. I get you. These are huge barriers and they plague most entrepreneurs.
There is one that most folks miss, however.
It’s a lurker. You probably don’t even know it’s there.
It’s been following you..
Tracing you and getting stronger your entire life.
It’s creepy.
IT’S YOURSELF.
No joke. YOU are probably your biggest barrier.
OKOKOK stay here, keep reading. I’m not writing a blog so that I can lecture you and point fingers. I’m here to share some wisdom that I’ve been learning, and to recommend a life-changing book.
I won’t completely spoil the book, but summarize instead.
Whatever it is that you believe about yourself has been learned through experience throughout your life, reinforced, and has grown stronger every day. You even use language that shows your identity with your belief, “I am a poor reader” or “I am shy…” fill in the blanks.
Furthermore, we shape our behaviour to support this belief, we stop practicing the skills that would make us a better reader for example, or a better public speaker.
It’s subconscious, it’s sneaky, but you can totally change it.
One quick way, is to allow for room to grow by assessing and immediately changing your language to reflect the person you want to be, “I am getting better at reading” or “I am a developing public speaker”.
Also assess and immediately change the mental image that you have of yourself. What does your current self look like to you?
What do you want it to look like?
Answer honestly!
Answer these questions and use the answers to shape a NEW picture of yourself:
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What kind of person do you want to be?
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What does this person wear?
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How does this person walk?
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How do others see this person?
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How does this person interact with others?
The answers to this question will form a picture of someone that is possibly quite unlike your current self. If you can change how you speak about yourself, how you picture yourself, and how you conduct yourself to reflect the person that you WANT to be.
Chances are that it’ll work and one day this new self will be reality.
As you practice this new self the brain literally gets better at being this new self. Just like when you practice your baseball swing, your brain gets better and better at running a certain pathway of neuron firing when you think in certain patterns. The connections between neurons get stronger and they fire faster.
SO, Mr. Small-town-shy-kid from the middle of no-where Saskatchewan, it may feel like a stretch to envision this outgoing, dynamite, entrepreneur and business owner that looks a bit like you. With practice, however, you’ll start to become that guy.
Amy Cuddy said, in her TED talk, “Fake it until you make it”. When making your goal happen requires you to be completely out of your comfort zone, getting up on stage, reaching out to prospects, leading a team, and speaking in public may leave you quaking in your boots.
Practice, and then just full on diving in as if it wasn’t a problem at all, will actually get you to the point where it is no longer an issue.
And you’ll have grown into such an incredible new person because of it.
“Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz is a resource that is CHALK full of wisdom that will not only challenge you, but change how you think about yourself in every way. He calls this process “dehypnosis and rehypnosis”.
We must literally de-hypnotize ourselves from our previous beliefs, and re-hypnotize ourselves to believe the new ones.
Also, watch Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk on Power-Posing to learn about how your body language shapes who you are!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWZluriQUzE
I don’t run my business as a mindset coach, however. My job is to serve you as entrepreneurs to get your business off the ground and prospering. Some of that is in book recommendations and Ted Talks, but these are some soft-skills that I am working on right along side of you.
The hard-skills are in marketing. I’ll get your business booming using online lead strategies. Ad campaigns that take advantage of our culture’s obsession with the internet, and that represent your bad-ass-business-boss-self like a champ.
Let's chat!
