Today, I want to talk about the top five mindset blocks of scaling your business from zero to a million dollars. Now, as engineers and business owners, it's sometimes hard to invest in coaching or invest in your website or decide to invest in even some sales coaching. But I find that the coaching and especially for therapy for me has been very helpful in overcoming these mindset blocks. It has been helpful in investing in my business to get to the next level. Now these are the top five mindset blocks.
How are they affecting you in your business?
The first one is not loving yourself. This one's a hard one for me. It's taking me a lot of therapy, coaching, and spiritual work to believe that I am loved and to feel it.
How does that impact your day to day? You often complete work from a place of dissatisfaction with who you are now and feeling like the work is not good enough. So don't use your business to heal your core wounds of not loving yourself. When you do love yourself, life becomes a lot easier. Relationships become easier and work becomes easier to do.
Say to yourself, I love and accept myself every step of the way.
You might self-sabotage when you don't love yourself because your head and your heart are not coherent. I found that in my spirituality work that I am loved and I hope this helps with shifting your mindset. Remember that when you have those hiccups and when you have a failure, it's a data. It's a data point, not a loss of momentum or a time to go into a phase of self-hatred. Just see failure as another lesson to be learned with.
Winston Churchill said, Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. And there's the courage to continue that counts.
The second mindset block is not feeling worthy of success. After having an employee mindset and hitting a few bumps along the way, you can lose your self-confidence.
Don't have the failures in your past hold you back and have that as evidence that things won't be successful in the future. Don't stop believing in yourself if you believe that you aren't worthy of success. This will hold you back and almost all your projects and even your daily work.
Say to yourself, I worthy of present and future success. I have learned from my past and I've had wins in my past, present and future.
Think of how far you've come on your entrepreneurial journey. Think of all the wins you had, all the successes you have. Don't give up on yourself.
Your mind attracts more of what it pays attention to. So pay attention to your successes and wins and have gratitude. Lean towards optimism.
Another mindset block is having an identity block. So in transitioning from an employee to a business owner, you're transitioning from one identity to the next. But you can get stuck in your daily decision making if you're making your decisions from the mindset of an employee instead of your business owner. Watch for that.
To illustrate, in the beginning we niche down to IT companies. Wediscovered that didn't work for us, so we broaden the scope of our niche to technical services companies. We also found our niche to not just doing marketing and sales, but being a business growth partner and lead generation for technical service companies.
Remember that there is going to be some conflict. As you grow into your new role as business owner, there will be some conflict between your old identity as an employee and your new identity as technical services business owner.
Accept yourself and all your idiosyncrasies.
Say to yourself, “I have a variety of roles. I am business owner, mother, daughter, wife, and I'm okay with that.”
You're more than just the business owner. You're multi-dimensional being inside and outside of work. Respect yourself and love yourself for that.
The fourth mindset block is a fear of movement. In other words, a fear of success and failure. Some common worries is that if I successful, I treat people differently. What other people treat me differently? Will I give up on my most important relationships?
Conversely, there is the fear of failure. How will my family be with me if I fail? We associate failure with being wrong or making the wrong choices. So we want to get away from failure as fast as possible.
Hence, we stay in between success and failure and stuck in mediocrity with little to no movement in between.
Say to yourself, “I don't have to undermine my own success. I'll learn from failure.”
Failure is merely an experiment to collect more data points. As engineers and scientists, we love to collect more data points. Failure is just another science experiment. Remember too that success is also not permanent. So you want to enjoy your success when it comes. Find the right marketing and sales strategies so you can succeed and continue to grow your company regardless of what the economy is doing.
And the fifth and final mindset block is having imposter syndrome. So if you're feeling like you're not enough, even if you've been very successful, you're not alone. You might be feeling like you have a lot of self-doubt on what to do next or if you're making the right choices. It is connected to perfectionism and some cases.
So common language that you might be using when you're feeling imposter syndrome is, “I feel like a fake” or “I must not fail.” Another one is, “Success is not a big deal.”
It's hard, but accept the compliments that come with success. Success is a big deal. So enjoy it.
Instead of feeling imposter syndrome, say to yourself, “I'm competing with myself. I'm getting better every day. I'm getting better and better.”
So the more you acknowledge your successes, strengths, and the more you focus on improving your product and services and getting your marketing and sales right, the perfect client will come to your technical services business.
So focus on getting better and better each day. Focus on the most important things in your day. So when I'm feeling imposter syndrome, it feels like I'm leveling up and I'm bringing better experience and to my clients on my prospective clients.
Remember that everything will turn out fine.
According to John Lennon, everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.
These are the five major mindset shifts you'll need to make as you scale from zero to $1 million. And what has your experience been? Comment below. I'd love to get to know your thoughts.