The successful entrepeneur's mindset

My approach to this topic comes from three ideas:

• starting your own business and being successful both commercially and personally requires lots of energy (because there are no shortcuts or easy solutions)
• energy comes from your personal motivation (why are you doing this?)
• and also your personal approach to entrepeneurship on a day to day basis (what you enjoy doing)

So what is the the entrepeneur's mindset?

It comes from three beliefs:

• maintaining my energy is key to my success
• the business purpose needs to be personally meaningful (you can test this with questions like - would you do this if you weren't getting paid? or would you be happy if this was all you did for the rest of your working life?)
• I need to approach my work in a way that works for me so that I enjoy what I'm doing day to day

There are many societal pressures and beliefs that impinge on this such as:

you don't know what you're doing, you need to follow an expert

don't trust your intuition

work is supposed to be hard, that is normal

To be clear, I am not saying that you shouldn't study (the experts) and understand what it takes to establish a business from finding your ideal customer; testing your product; building a brand etc.

BUT this is more an art than a science so how you tackle these challenges is personal and reflects your life journey and experiences. You are unique and bringing your uniqueness to the challenge is what will make you susccessful.

Overcoming these critical voices; trusting yourself; allowing your path to emerge and managing the strong desire to rush or force things; are key for success.

Donella Meadows has some clues as to how to establish this mindset (she was a world renowned Systems Thinker).

The world is full of (eco)systems and each of us is an ecosystem.

Donella identified 12 leverage points in any system in increasing order of impact.

The top one is to change the mindset or paradigm (goals, power structure, rules, culture) out of which the system arises.

We live in a (Western) culture which has arisen out of a desire to control the natural world rather than recognizing we are actually part of the natural world

We are nature

I write about this and how this ties back to your success in my forthcoming book, Grow Your Own Guru.

You can get a preview of this part of the book in my article and podcast

How to start a business that will be successful personally as well as financially

(subscribe for free and I will give you access to this article and all the other paid articles for one month)