You cannot have a business without a personal development journey

Every stage of business should come with a warning sign – it’s going to get harder before it gets easier. It’s like a rollercoaster ride that never ends. Highs and lows, plunges and cliff faces’. They don’t tell you that when you board entrepreneur train.

Running your own business is its own self-development journey of managing your mind, kicking your butt and showing up for yourself and your business on a consistent basis.

We look to those who have come before us, search out other success stories to learn how they did it and hope to find some resemblance of whatever problem we’re experiencing at the time, to find answers. And often we have to turn back to ourselves and work it out on our own.

No one is going to show up and save you. No one is going to have the magic answer or do all the hard work for you. So, you eventually come to the conclusion that you have to rely on yourself and the strength of you mindset.

It’s no hidden secret that the entrepreneur with the strongest mindset, one of growth, one of resilience, one of determination, will always win.

In every stage we must up level our mindset if we want to up level our business to achieve and continue our success.

One of the first to overcome is often the Imposter syndrome. It sneaks in just as we start to get exciting opportunities and the first taste of success just to push us enough to see if we’re going to have the strength to show up for ourselves and believe in your own abilities. The feeling of being found out to be a fraud, shows up at every stage of up leveling your business, especially if it’s a major growth period or getting recognized for your success (or lack thereof; says the Imposter Syndrome).

Dealing with overwhelm and procrastination is like a daily occurrence in the entrepreneurial world and if you don’t learn to deal with them and work through them then you’ll never get anything done. I’ve learnt to recognize the patterns of procrastination and have injected exercise and breaks in at just the right times in my day to combat those. Overwhelm though is a funny one, you think you’ve got it and you’re doing all the things and saying yes to all the opportunities and then bam, it’s all too much. Or sometimes it’s because you’ve put off that important or uncomfortable task. Like that phone call or website update, and realize you’ve bitten off more than you can chew and you just have to bite bullet and get it done.

Push that overwhelm aside and do the one thing that will let go all the tension, and everything goes back the normal level of whelm.

Self-doubt, well hello my old friend, you know where the kettle is, let’s sit down for a cup of tea and remember all the times we doubted ourselves and failed. All those times where things didn’t work out the way we wanted them to and all the times where we stuffed up, didn’t work out the way we wanted them to all the times where we stuffed up, didn’t speak up or fell flat on our face. Yep, I know, I know, I don’t think I can do it either, but if we don’t, we’re just going to still here while our cup of tea gets cold in a week, a month and a year.

So we have to keep pushing past our limiting beliefs and the fear of success and the fear of failure, sometimes you’re not even sure which fear is the one that’s holding you back so you just do the work on all of them. Then there are the money beliefs that debilitate our earning potential and keep us turning over the same revenue with no reason understanding as to why this keeps happening.

But alas, we keep putting ourselves out there, keep trying new things. One foot in front of the other to do anything to keep pushing the boundaries of our comfort zone.

Because what else is there, a job, pfft, come on, like that’s an option. There’s no going back now. Let’s do this.