Stuck in Business Growth? The 5 Mindset Blocks Entrepreneurs Must Overcome to Level Up - EP # 252

Stop spinning your wheels. Identify what’s really blocking your next level and fix it fast with a simple tool shared inside this episode.

If you’re a business owner who feels like you’re doing everything, but your growth has stalled, this episode will help you pinpoint what’s really happening.

In EP 252, Maggie shares the 5 mindset blocks she sees entrepreneurs hit at different stages of growth (including the ones that show up as “I’m not salesy,” “I’m not ready,” “no one will do it as well as me,” or “this should be working by now”).

 You’ll also learn a simple, practical tool to break through those blocks: the Future Self perspective, so you can make decisions from the identity of the leader you’re becoming.

What you’ll learn

• How mindset creates your actions—and your actions create your results
• The confidence and clarity block that keeps entrepreneurs playing small
• The “I’m not salesy” belief and what it’s really costing you
• The people-leadership mindset shift required to hire and lead a team
• How entitlement and complacency quietly sabotage momentum
• A Future Self exercise to create clarity and take action fast

If you want help identifying the specific beliefs that are slowing you down and building the CEO-level leadership to scale with more clarity and confidence, book a complimentary consultation with Maggie here - https://www.stairwaytoleadership.com/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Recently, I was asked to give a small talk about most common limiting belief and mindset that's stopping business owners, entrepreneurs from growing and getting to the next level. So I thought, what a great topic for a podcast episode right here on Diamond Effect Podcast.

And I decided to give you one tool to overcome those limiting beliefs that you might be having right now that are stopping you from getting to the next level. So welcome back to Diamond Effect Podcast. I'm so excited you are here. And first, I'm going to share with you the five most common mindset blocks that I see business owners have at different stages of growth, that I coach my clients on a regular basis, and even myself, [00:01:00] I have some version of that, and I either coach myself on it or ask for my mentors and coaches to help me go past that so I can continue growing.

Because ultimately, very often, the first step to overcoming any challenges we have in the business is to looking inwards and identifying the beliefs or the thoughts that we have through which that challenge was created, right? Because everything that's happening in our business is the result of our actions, but our actions are the result of our thinking, our decision, how we think about that.

So as famously Einstein said, "You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that c- created it. You have to change the thinking first to then find a solution to the problem." [00:02:00] So just so you know, we're our biggest problem usually in our business, but we're also our biggest solution, and it starts with identifying what is it in our thinking that potentially is creating the problem, and then figuring out how do we need to change our thinking in order to fix that problem.

Okay. So let's dive in, into five groups of limiting beliefs that I see very often,

Number one, and that happens early In your business, usually shortly when you're starting or on your way to the maybe $50,000, maybe less, and that's very often not a full belief in yourself as a business owner, as a service provider, and lack of clarity, and through that lack of [00:03:00] belief in the value of what you offer.

And how that show up is being shy in how you show up, not being consistent in your marketing, being almost apologetic when talking about your services, when talking about how you can help clients. It shows up in underpricing yourself, and just not going... Not being visible in the boldest way possible.

Sometimes it starts not right away when you start your business, because when we start our business, usually we're very excited. That usually shows up at the sign of first challenges. Depending on your business and how you started, maybe the first year or the first couple of years were successful, and you've been growing, and you didn't have a lot of those doubts.

Or maybe you started [00:04:00] and very quickly you had those doubts. But at some point in your business, that will happen, whether it's because you heard multiple no's from potential clients in a row, or maybe you had potential clients project on you their beliefs about your pricing, or what they would pay for services that you offer, or whatever that is, and that's when the doubts and those limiting beliefs tend to creep up, and usually sabotage the way we show up, sabotage our marketing and sales.

That's when you also discover that entrepreneurship can be an emotional rollercoaster, where maybe for a week you're all excited, you're all in full belief, and you're going at it, and you know that people will get so much more value, and you're able to express it. And then the following week, or sometimes day to day, because you didn't get a positive response, or you got [00:05:00] some no's, or there's no traction that you can see yet, you start doubting the value of what you offer.

You start doubting the fact that- You can be successful in business and you start thinking that maybe you're not cut out to be an entrepreneur, or that maybe people don't want what you offer.

And that up and down roller coaster is also emotionally draining, and it can drain your energy, so you can feel tired and think that you're busy and you're doing a lot of work, where a lot of the work is happening in your brain. That does drain your energy, so you feel tired from the emotional roller coaster rather than, let's say, from the amount of outreach and visibility that you're doing.

The second area where I see many business owners have limiting beliefs is around sales, and that's not just new business [00:06:00] owners. Very often also more established business owners, whether they're in high five figures or even six figures, where they tell themselves, "I am not a salesperson. I don't do sales.

I just educate client," or, "I don't wanna be salesy." So all those limiting beliefs come from either not truly understanding what sales is, and it's because with those limiting beliefs, you will never actually be proactive about thinking, hey, maybe me thinking I'm being salesy doesn't serve me, and let me explore what truly sales is, to then decide.

There are those beliefs often were subconsciously developed by us by watching movies or reading things, stories where the salesperson is very often portrayed as this [00:07:00] sleazy person trying to con the customer or sell customers something they don't want or cheat them on the price and so on. And our brain associates that with sales and therefore, of course, we don't wanna be that.

We keep thinking that we are gonna turn into that person convincing people to buy something they don't want or cheating them on the price or whatever that is. But true sales in business is not that. It's about helping the customer choose the best solution for their problem, the problem that they're already looking to solve.

And- I don't wanna make this episode about sales. I've made multiple episodes about sales and what it is and how you can lead sales conversations, so on. But I just want you to really tune inwards today and think about what are some beliefs about sales that I have [00:08:00] that are not serving me, and are they really true?

Or even if I think that they're true, can I somehow challenge them? Because I can guarantee you there are people who think very differently about sales than you, and they're probably doing better in sales, and they have more customers because of that.

And especially if your sales or the number of customers has gotten down and you're trying to figure out why is that, and maybe you're focusing a lot on marketing or some other things when the problem is with sales, but you're not recognizing it because of how you think about sales.

Then the third area of limiting beliefs that I see is about people leadership. That usually happens later on as the business owners grow their businesses maybe to six figures, and they're starting to realize that, s- just [00:09:00] streamlining processes or automation or hiring a bookkeeper to do their books is still not enough to grow.

And now they have to hire people who will either deliver the service on their behalf to the clients or help them do that in one way or another, whether they're full-time employees, part-time employees, contractors, does not matter.

And the limiting beliefs they show up in a way where you feel like, "Oh, I'm not a people manager. I don't know how to manage people. I'm scared." Or the worst one when you tell yourself, "I don't want to deal with people," and it's not really... If you asked yourself honestly why you don't want to, it's not like you don't wanna grow the business.

It's just you don't believe that you can do it, or you're scared to figure it out, and you're telling yourself you don't want to. I find that often, as humans, we tell ourselves we don't want something to just [00:10:00] rationalize the fact that we either don't believe we can achieve it or we can get it, or we don't realize that those are skillsets that we can develop, so our brain feels helpless, so it just rationalizes by, "Oh, I don't want it," rather than we truly don't want something because, let's say, it doesn't align with our values Other sneaky ways this type of leadership limiting belief shows up is you telling yourself that there are no good people out there, that nobody will be able to do the quality of work that you're doing with your customers, that it's gonna be a lot of work and a headache to manage people and so on.

When your business is more resourced, you have more options. So right now you might not have a headache, as you call it, of leading people, but you might have a headache of overworking and being [00:11:00] overwhelmed and having to turn back the customers, or being sometimes so tired and resentful of the customers because you can't keep up.

So leading people could actually solve for all these headaches, and if you learn how to do it well, it can actually be very fulfilling, and that's what one of my clients found when I, when they started working with me.

Glory is a CEO of a business that helps kids with speech challenges, so it's a speech therapy business. And when she started working with me, she had a very small team, but still taking on a lot of things that she didn't have to take on as a CEO because of her belief that, "I'm scared of leading people.

I don't wanna grow my team," and so on. But then at the same time, she did want to grow her business. And all these beliefs came from the fact that she didn't [00:12:00] even realize that people leadership skills are something you can learn and you can get good at by practicing, and not something you're born with, so you either have it or not.

So when we started coaching together, within a year she realized that being a CEO, being a people leader, is a great way to expand your mission, that there are amazing people out there whom you can empower to help your clients, and she started loving it equally to being a therapist when in the beginning she didn't even think that was possible.

But at least she was open to challenge that type of thinking, to challenge those beliefs because her vision for her business was big, and she wanted to grow the business. And then one more thing, I am going to challenge you if you're thinking, "Well, [00:13:00] yeah, Maggie, but I still don't think there are good people out there, and that even if I'm a good boss, people are not gonna be as committed as me."

And I wanna challenge you because the way we think about the others is very pr- very often a projection of how we think about ourselves. And if you do not have a good relationship with yourself, and you don't have self-love and self-compassion and seeing yourself as a person who does their best, and you're very critical of yourself, which often happens, then you will project that onto other people.

And therefore, you'll never believe that there are good people out there who can help, who can be as invested in the success of your business as you are, who can actually add value to your business beyond your imagination.

So being an entrepreneur [00:14:00] that has a growing, successful business very often comes down to challenging your deepest beliefs, even about yourself, and pushing yourself to become a better version of you that often starts with self-compassion and self-love and how you think about yourself. So if that struck a chord or made you mad, I wanna say you wanna dig deep into it.

Okay. Now, the fourth bucket of limiting beliefs that I see there is,

is an entitlement to certain results or to things going the way you want them to go exactly, or things working forever, or many other things. So As business owners, where we grow our business, we can only control a limited amount of things. But those things, [00:15:00] when we focus on them and put our energy and time into it, are the ones that have power to produce great results.

But very often, our brain, and that includes me wants to control things we don't have control over, and it's almost entitled to those things working a certain way. And we need to be onto ourselves to catch that and redirect the brain. So for example, one entitlement is, oh, the amount of work I put in, or hard work, or hours I put in into my business should automatically proportionally result in the amount of income or the clients I set.

And it should be within a reasonable amount of time, which is immediate for our brain, right? So let's say our brain wants to, if I post for [00:16:00] three months, I want to go viral and have thousands of me- or thousands of followers, otherwise it's not worth it. Or if I go to networking events for a few times, I either sign X amount of clients or it's not worth it, or whatever that is.

But that, in reality, entrepreneurship doesn't work that well, that way. You might be the lucky one that, yes, posts for three months on social media and you become viral, and, your business skyrockets. But you might be somebody like me, who's been posting on social media for four years very consistently and has seen progress and results, but nothing exponential and so on.

And if you attach your expectation or entitlement to, "Oh, I've done it for so many years consistently, and I haven't seen the [00:17:00] results that maybe other people do, and therefore it's not worth it," that entitlement will play against you. Because very often in- Creating progress in entrepreneurship and doing things that we decide are good for our business, that will bring our business, there's also a lot of small wins along the way.

But with certain entitlement, you will not even notice those wins. So for example, for me, being able to posting on social media and doing it consistently, I've grown my public speaking skills, my copywriting skills, even my design skills for graphics, but I did not have at all when I started. I've created collaborations and opportunities along the way that I would never do if I haven't started and been consistent or if I only measured [00:18:00] success of me being on social media by going viral and getting most of my clients that way.

Another way entitlement shows up is when you, for example, have one funnel or one way of signing clients coming your way and you've relied on it for some time and then it stops working. And then you're, you're almost mad at the world that somehow that way doesn't work anymore and you're mad that now you have to put in work and figure out a different way.

That's entitlement to something working just because you've done it for a while and just because it worked. And if it worked for you for years, that's great. You should be grateful for it. And at the same time, when things stop working, you gotta roll up your [00:19:00] sleeve and figure out why they haven't and understand that can be a normal thing in the business and then fix it or find a new way if that whatever is not working isn't fixable.

And entitlement in that way is linked to the fifth limiting belief or let's say limiting behavior that might be stopping you from growth is complacency. So complacency is taking things for granted, especially things that are working, and thinking that they will work forever, and losing your edge of being innovative and always looking to add new things and test new things as an entrepreneur.

And if you haven't listened to my interview with Jennifer Estall, which is an episode right before this one, 251, you should listen to that great episode. [00:20:00] Because in there,

Jennifer shares a golden nugget of wisdom where she says she realized or learned to fear success more than failure, which is very powerful. Because when success happens, when we finally start getting results, it's very easy to put the foot off the gas pedal and coast. And there's nothing wrong with doing it for a little bit, to just enjoy and take a breather from going after a certain level and certain results.

But if you do it for too long, you become complacent, you lose your edge, and that's where trouble starts happening in your business. You do not want to be complacent. Because then with complacency, when things not start not working, you either miss the early signs, and by the time you realize, it's very late and sometimes it's very [00:21:00] hard to things arou- to turn things around.

Or the entitlement kicks in and you resist implementing changes, which also slows you down. Because you keep thinking, "Well, but it should be working. It's worked for us for years, and I shouldn't have to do that because I didn't have to do it for years." Okay? One of my, one of my clients actually experienced a little bit of that, where they're an established brand in what they do in the area for many, many years.

So their, whatever they were doing in marketing and sales up to recently has been working really well for them. However, in the new economy, a little bit of a slowdown.

And also a good chunk of their clients getting into the stages where they're selling their business when they're retiring- Put them in a [00:22:00] position when the sales started to slow down, and as I coached my client to implement new strategies to increase the sales,

her brain resisted a little bit in the beginning. Not too much because she's an established multiple seven figures entrepreneur, so she knows, you have to be open to innovation and so on. And of course, that's why she hired me. But it did resist in the beginning because it, it- she's been telling me, "But we've never had to do that, so it's interesting," and so on.

And yet, because she was open to challenge these thoughts, we've implemented new strategies, and just this past month, she had the best month in sales ever in her business, even though the economy is slower, even though the first quarter wasn't going exactly how she [00:23:00] wanted. But because she was willing to see where her thinking was preventing her from solving the problem, and she was willing to change that thinking.

Now, of course, the first step to solving any problems in your business is to be able to identify the thinking that created them, right? And that's very hard to do, and that's why coaching is so powerful because it helps you practice that, and I act as a mirror and I see your thinking way faster and way better than you will ever see until you develop that skill set of being onto yourself, being onto your brain.

It's one thing to learn what needs to happen and what to do from the podcast. It's a whole different thing to actually implement that and turn it into a skill. But let's just assume you're identified [00:24:00] the thinking that is creating your problems, but your brain is still resistant to changing it, and it's not sure how to go about it and how to address it so that the problem is solved.

So here is the simplest exercise that can be very transformational and can help you. The exercise is to put on your future self identity hat. So now imagine yourself three years from now, who is at the next level you're trying to achieve now in her business, and- She, your future self, or he, your future self, overcame all the problems you're going through right now, found solutions, and is successful, reached that next level.

How would they go about solving those problems? What would [00:25:00] actually matter for them and what wouldn't matter? Would they get stuck on your way of current thinking or would they get to work and did A, B, or C to solve the problems, right? So putting on your future self-perspective, it's a very simple and yet powerful tool to help you overcome your current limiting beliefs and stop- start taking steps so that you can get to the next level.

Try it and you will thank me later, I promise. Now, if you want somebody to help you identify the specific beliefs that are limiting you, help you adopt a different perspective that will serve you, not slow you down, and help you figure out actually practical business solutions [00:26:00] to solve your problems once you change your thinking so you can implement them, I'm here for you.

All you need to do is book a free consultation with me so we can talk more about how I can help you, and I promise you, you'll grow so much faster and so much easier with the help, So I'll put a link to my consultation in the show notes. Talk to you soon, either on a consult or in the next episode.

Bye-bye.