Talk to most online entrepreneurs who have seen a great deal of success and they’ll all tell you one thing – mindset matters. In fact, it’s often the one thing that can make or break your success.
Self-doubt, worry, and other sabotaging emotions can prevent you from achieving your goals and building a profitable brand. So you want to not only learn about the technologies and selling strategies needed to cultivate your success, but also develop and nurture the mental fortitude to help you push through obstacles and attract affiliates and customers alike.
Cleaning Out the Self-Limiting Beliefs
Before you can spruce up your mindset, you have to clean out the clutter. That means getting rid of any limiting beliefs that can harm your potential. It’s time for a clean slate. Once you have a clean slate, you’ll either feel fully capable of your abilities as an online entrepreneur – or you’ll gain the clarity to see that you’re not cut out for this business.
It may sound counter-intuitive to hear that you need to learn whether or not you’re right for this industry, but it’s better to discover that early on than to continue pursuing a career that keeps you mired in pain.
What you may not want to admit is that much of this pain you’re experiencing as you try and fail at online marketing is self-inflicted. Once you encounter anything bad, it tends to stick around and taint any positive possibilities in the future.
And most people don’t let go of stuff easily or quickly. They like to relive it and continue the dialogue in their heads with excuses and discussions about why something happened and what they could have done to change it.
All this does is keep your mindset mired in muck. It needs to be shelved so that you can move on with a clear head and focus on what you do want to see happen. This “dirty surface” in your mind is filled with emotions that aren’t helpful.
They include things like anger, shame, guilt, frustration and confusion. You might be mad that you got ripped off in the past, ashamed that others are grasping things you’re not, guilt at not bringing in enough income for your family, frustration at being overwhelmed and so on.
Identifying Outside Mental Distractions
It’s not just mental clutter related to your online marketing journey, either. If your mind is filled with negative thoughts about your relationships, your health, finances and other areas, then it’s also going to burden you on a day to day basis and create an obstacle between you and your ultimate success.
When you’re an entrepreneur working at home, life seeps in all around you. Even if you’re still working a 9-5 job, you know there are days when your mind is on your worries and not on your work tasks.
It works in reverse, too. When things are bad at work, you take it home to your family and it taints those relationships and the potential for creating wonderful, lasting memories.
You must be willing to say to yourself (because no one else matters in this equation): “ENOUGH ALREADY! I GET IT!”
Get fed up with the mess in your mind and give it a rest already. You’ve spent hours, weeks, months – maybe even years going over and over these negative emotions and it hasn’t helped, has it?
It’s only dragged you down further into a pit of despair and hopelessness. So it’s time to clean up your act and try something new – something more powerful. Something few people understand how to accomplish.
You’ve got to be tired of this mindset in order to rid yourself of it completely. You may have spent most of your life cocooned in negativity and pain, but the rest of your life is waiting for you – and you are the sole person in charge of determining how that will unfold.
Will you stay stuck? Or will you finally allow yourself to break free from the chains of misery and blame and guilt and embrace new possibilities?
Check Yourself for a Victim Mindset
You honestly may be one of those people who enjoy being mired in these emotions. You may not admit it, but day after day you have to ring the bell and tell everyone you know about the pain you’ve gone through, who it is you blame, what you should have done differently, and so on.
The victim mindset is attractive because in most cases, it removes any blame or personal responsibility. It also elicits lots of coddling and nurturing from your friends and family who chime in with encouraging comments to try to protect you from your pain.
Understand that your future is squeaky clean. It is filled with promise. Anything you want it to be. But you have a choice to make now. Do you walk into that future with a clean mindset and decorate your future with everything you dreamed of?
Or do you track in a muddied up past of pain and blame with you, so that your future begins to look just like the past? You have the same helplessness, the same worry and discontent, and the same problems that have plagued you year after year.
This is what happens if you try to adopt a new mindset without first cleaning up the old one. You have to face the past problems and mental poison and undo their effect on you before you usher in a new future.
It is not an easy process. That’s because we want to be right and we want people to understand our side of things. So we rehash it over and over again – getting nowhere, but feeling a temporary bit of satisfaction from voicing our displeasure.
The problem is, some of the very people who you want to “get it” will never get it – so you only have to be responsible for your own enlightenment. Not anyone else’s. Trying to fix other people’s mindset is a nightmare.
There are two issues we have to clean up. The first one is that others have wronged you. It may have been a vendor (you paid for a product and it didn’t fulfill your expectations), a family member (maybe they keep taking advantage of your kindness and you’ve had it), or a significant other (trouble brewing and you’re on the verge of a split), for example.
Most people harbor ill will on these issues for what is effectively a life sentence. If you’re able to address these issues and clean your mindset to start anew, then it’s something to be very proud of.
3 Ways to Solve Your Most Pressing Problems
You have options to solve these problems. You can choose to forgive them. This may or may not be what you prefer to do, and it’s fine if you don’t want to. You might choose to set boundaries in place to protect you in the future and then forget about it – let it go. Or you might just shrug – acknowledge that it happened – and move on.
The alternative (which means hanging on to it and reopening the wound time and time again) is to drag it with you and waste even more time and energy on it. You’ll keep having to clean up the fallout from it and the mess it makes in your life.
The worst thing is, there will be no room for good things to happen. This is the saddest thing about having a mindset that is cluttered with past, painful damage. You can’t see anything with potential. You’re too busy dealing with the past.
The second issue you may have to clean up is that you wronged yourself. Nobody else did anything to you – you yourself made mistakes. Maybe you didn’t act right toward someone.
You’re ashamed at how much you foolishly spent on the wrong products and tools trying to get an online business off the ground. Or maybe it’s how much time you invested in this career with nothing to show for it.
Think about what you would tell a friend if they came to you with this problem. You’d most likely tell them to be proud of their attempts and to stop beating themselves up and fix the problem. The only time this should still be an issue is if you’re unwilling to stop the bad behavior.
As long as you’re willing to change, then you can embrace the future with a guilt-free existence. Forgive yourself and move on to see what your true potential in life – as an entrepreneur – is.
In order to clean up a cluttered mindset, you need to have a plan of action. It’s not enough to rush through and say, “Yeah, yeah, I forgive myself – let’s move on.”
It has to be genuine. So first, write it all down – the things that take up space in your head. Nothing is too big or too small, but write down the grievances you have in your mind right now. It might look something like this:
I’ve cut ties with a friend and I regret it.
I keep letting a family member take advantage of me financially.
I really hate a politician and I spend too much time ranting about it.
I focus on anger issues and wishful thinking like, “what if, I wish I had…”
I keep fuming when I come home to a messy house because nobody will help clean.
When you’re finished, mark each one as fixable, forgettable or forgivable.
Then make a plan for each issue. If you’re going to fix it – how and when will you fix it? Will you sit down with the kids and your spouse and tell them the messy house is wearing on you and give each person a chore chart that begins that day?
Will you forget it – literally shrug and be done with it and consider it ridiculous to waste your life on, like wishful thinking that you had 3 yachts and 5 Lamborghinis like some celebrity or marketing guru?
Will you forget about spending 8 hours a day getting riled up about everyone else’s opinions on social issues or politics, when all that really matters is how you yourself vote at the ballot box and how you live your life?
Or will you choose forgiveness – forgive yourself ceremonially and move into a productive future? Or forgive someone else and set boundaries in place so that you can’t allow yourself to be hurt in the future?
Prepare for the Change to Be Uncomfortable at First
You have to be prepared for backlash about how you handle things, too. Someone may not like you putting boundaries in place. They may try to question your decision to forgive and/or forget something.
All that matters is what you and your gut feel is right for you. The other people aren’t living your life – you are. Don’t be swayed by guilt or shame from others. Make your decision and be at peace and be empowered by it.
You have to be honest, too. You might look back on something – some situation you reacted to – and realize that maybe you overreacted to it – harbored a little too much ill will.
Sometimes things will be “fixable” but it might take longer than a quick “thought session” can accommodate. This is okay. As long as you have (and are working) a plan for this thing, it won’t have the same burdensome impact in your mind as it would if you were to simply ignore it and let it fester unresolved.
Without a plan in place, you’re making sure that you usher in the coming weeks and months with the same mental clutter you’ve suffered from in the past. Embrace the personal power you have to start fresh and then make it happen.
Identifying issues that are serving as obstacles to your future earnings is the first step in bringing your ideas to fruition without the mental clutter damaging your ability to succeed.
Most people drag themselves across the finish line with all of this mental baggage in tow, never fully realizing their potential. It’s like finally being able to buy a brand new house, yet bringing all kinds of clutter with you so that when you look around, it’s not quite as amazing as it could have been.
You want a clean slate. A fresh start. In order to be able to be creative and focus on your online efforts, there can’t be many (or even one) thing pulling your attention and weighing heavily on your mind.
You need to be able to sit down and actively find ways to serve your customers and clients fully. If they’re only getting a small portion of what you’re capable of sharing, then you’re cheating them out of great things and cheating yourself, too.
When you want to shift from the mindset of a constantly failing marketer to someone who visualizes success and implements it with ease, you have to be able to pinpoint the elements holding you back.
But understand that identifying them is only half the battle. If you’re not willing and able to make changes about them, then you will continue to sit on the sidelines as other, more dedicated marketers do the hard work instead.
You have it in you, if you’re willing to try. The discomfort you feel initially being honest and making changes will subside and in fact, strengthen your resolve as you see positive results materialize.
0 Comments