About this episode.
Believe it or not, your mindset might just be the thing that's holding you back. Self doubt, fear of being visible, of judgement and of failure are some of the reasons I see business owners struggle. It's never because they haven't been following the right strategy or the right framework - it all comes down to the thoughts that they are having around their business.
When you embrace a growth mindset everything changes, it's the difference between taking a leap of faith or playing it safe, between showing up and giving it your all or believing that it's all too hard and you'll never achieve what you want.
Mindset is everything when it comes to business.
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Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Business of Perfectionism.
My name is Kristy and I am a mindset and marketing coach helping creative entrepreneurs build businesses that feel good for them so they can create impact and income doing what they love.
Today I wanted to chat with you about why mindset is so important.
Depending on how long you’ve been listening to this podcast you will know that the areas I really focus on are Marketing and Mindset.
And in particular, I spend a lot of time focusing on the perfectionist mindset which involves a lot of overthinking, self doubt, procrastination, fear of being visible, of being seen and a really strong fear around failure or what failure looks like and means to that person.
So, why is mindset so important?
Your mindset plays a critical role in your business, and your life.
It determines the actions you take, the thoughts you have, your self belief.
Your mindset will determine if you give up or persist, whether or not to embrace or avoid challenges that arise and will be the difference between you showing up and giving it a shot vs you deciding that its too hard and you’re not cut out for it.
I can honestly say I never imagined how important mindset would be, or how big of a role it would play in what I do when I left my 9-5 at the start of 2015.
So this is not something that I’m out here preaching however never had to do the work myself, this is something that I first did the work on myself and then went
Holy shit - more people need to know about this!
So, in 2015 - my first year self employed I big some big roadblocks and I was really struggling with some really big mindset - lets call them hurdles…
I launched one of my businesses which was an online children's clothing store, while at the same time running a marketing consulting business.
Now in the start, the marketing consulting business find work was relatively easy, all of my work came through people in my network, word of mouth, people I had worked with before and it didn’t even cross my mind to have a website or have a social media presence.
I looked at it kind of like a side hustle while I built up my online store.
I guess you could say one of the first red flags I really had when it came to my business mindset, that honestly I paid no attention to, was when I launched my store I basically refused to tell anyone about it.
A few of my close friends knew along with my parents.
But I didn’t tell my broader friendship group.
I never announced it on my personal social media accounts and asked people to support me.
I never put it in my linkedin profile
And I never showed my face - not on the website or my socials. And I am not saying that this is the be all and end all, however I really avoided owning it. In declaring it as my own.
I was so afraid of what people would think, of the things they’d say, I was terrified of people finding the business and knowing it was mine, I just wanted to hide the fact it was mine because I was so wrapped up in self doubt and the fear of it being both a failure and a success.
A failure because of what I would make that mean about myself.
And a success because I was so afraid of being visible, of people then knowing it was me and I don’t know, maybe being called out for being a fraud, of not being good enough.
So long story short….
The whole time I was running the store I was also doing my marketing consulting - and it actually turned out that this was the work I loved most - and I kind of fought it for a while because is was just supposed to be my side gig, the thing that supported me financially however I ended up loving it more.
And so I decided that I wanted to do more of this - and I kept both businesses running - the online store kind of just plodding along because my ego wouldn’t just let it go.
But it was here, once I fully embraced that consulting business that more mindset red flags started to appear.
All of a sudden I knew I wanted to make a bigger impact, to help more people, to really dive into peoples business and to help them grow
However I was so afraid to market myself. I chose a business name at the time and not my own so I could hide behind it.
I knew I had to show my face so I stepped into that however I prayed that no one would find me, that my friends and family would never see me posting photos of myself on the internet - in case you’re wondering that never worked and a lot of them now follow me.
And I basically went through the same cycle again. I don't know if I am smart enough, I don’t know if I am good enough, can I really help people, what is someone I used to work with sees this? What will people think. What will people say….
And all these thoughts completely stopped me from taking the action that I needed to.
They stopped me from creating video.
The stopped me from saying yes to incredible opportunities
Those thoughts stopped me dead in my tracks at doing all of the things I needed to do to grow my business.
And the more I worked with other businesses while I was consulting for them the more I began to relaise how common this was but it’s incredible when you’re in it and you’re having these thoughts you don’t realisae that anyone else is going through it or has gone through it too.
The people you see creating incredible videos or jumping on Instagram stories everyday who seem really real and authentic, so many of them face the same mindset struggles daily too - they might just be working on them or they’ve been working on them for some time which is why they’re able to do the things that you see them do.
The difference between your business when you do the mindset work, when you embrace a growth mindset won’t even be comparable.
You will not recognise your business, maybe even yourself once you do the mindset work.
So why is mindset work so important in business.
Theres a model called the NLP Communication model - so NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic programming, I believe the model was originally created by the creators of NLP however I know other life coaching practices also refer to it.
Basically it states that
our thoughts determine our state
Our state, or our emotions determine our behaviour
Our behaviour or our actions then determine our results.
So if we’re working backwards, the results we want are directly impacted by the actions we take. The actions we took were a direct reflection of our state or our emotions which all came back to the things we were thinking, the way in which we were thinking.
When you do the mindset work, the deep mindset work, the goal is to change your thoughts. It’s to improve the quality of your thoughts - for an example, we’re changing “i don’t know if I can do this’ to ‘anything is possible for me’.
To do the mindset work, We really have to be willing to step back and take a look at our beliefs, the things we believe to be true about ourselves and rewrite those stories if they’re holding you back, if they’re not serving you.
You’re changing your thoughts or our beliefs from I’m not good enough for this to I already have everything I need, I will do this, I can do this, I am this - which ultimately leads to a state change, a greater level of confidence or just a higher level of courage
That catapults us into taking the action that we need to in order to get the results that we want.
And I love to use this for myself when I find myself sitting and procrastinating… Understanding the thoughts I’m having, and almost always, I’m doubting myself, I’m comparing myself to someone else, I’m thinking that I should be further along than what I am - they are never thoughts that serve me.
We think that in order to be something - we have to do something to get something else in order to be who we want to be.
We need to work hard to earn a lot of money so that we can be happy - for example.
But there is another model that’s spoken about an this one I love.
Rather than do, have, be - it’s based on Be, Do, Have.
It tells us that in order to create the result we want we need to embody now the person we are, the person that already has these results and then we will do what is required to have the results we want.
And you can already see how much more empowering that is.
This is more of the work on the identity level. When you can step into that new identity, that higher level identity allows you to instantly shift your mindset and will empower you to step up.
So, are you still asking why the mindset work is so important?
Because it doesn't matter what you do, what strategy you have or what framework you design - none of this will work without the right mindset.
You have to be willing to follow through, all the way through to see anything work and to truly reap the rewards,
And if you don’t have the right mindset..
If you’re afraid of judgement, of what others think, if you don’t think you have what it takes, you’re filled with self doubt and afraid to be seen, to be visible, the strategy won’t matter, because you won’t fully commit to it and you won’t do the work.
Or you’ll only half do the work, you’ll do some of it but you want go all in, you won’t leap - you won’t take those risks, you will keep playing small.
And that is why, mindset is so important.
And I might leave it there today.
I really hope you found this episode helpful.
If you have any questions at all or would like to reach out to me, you can do so by heading over to Instagram, you can find me at kristypask and please feel free to shoot me a DM, or head to my website and follow the links there to email me
I will also leave all of those details below for you in the show notes.
Thank you once again for joining me today, I look forward to chatting with you again soon.
Learn more about my 12 week, 1:1 coaching program: The Holistic Marketing Method
Connect with me on Instagram: @kristypask
Book in a 1:1 single session with me here.
