Why Knowing What To Do and How To Do It Is Not Enough
This e-zine continues with the theme of building the bedrock foundation of your business–you!
Why Jill Had Trouble Succeeding
Jill returned to her business after attending an exciting conference held by her franchise. The conference had wonderful, exciting speakers who gave her detailed information about how to make her business a great success. It was all there; step-by-step. All she had to do is follow their plan to get great results.
She started out great guns, but now, after four months, she seemed to lose her focus. There seemed to be so many urgent things that distracted her from the main things she was supposed to do. Now she was again working too many hours. She felt stressed.
Feeling stressed was especially bothersome to Jill. She had learned that stress made you grow older faster. She read a scientific study that said, “Study confirms that stress helps speed aging. Scientists have identified the first direct link between stress and aging, a finding that could explain why intense, long-term emotional strain can make people get sick and grow old before their time.”
Jill felt disappointed because she wasn’t sustaining her success and was feeling high stress.
Obviously, Jill knew what to do to run her business successfully. She had times when she ran her business extremely well. Now she seems to have lost her touch. She was working long hours and making less money. What was happening? Why isn’t she maintaining and sustaining her success? Why would she sabotage herself this way?
The Answer to Jill’s Problem
The answer lay in her beliefs and attitudes about herself. Jill is comfortable only at a medium level of success. This is the infamous “comfort zone”.
Jill was wasting her hard-earned education and training. In addition to knowledge and skills, you need the right mindset. This includes believing in yourself, feeling worthy and deserving of success, being confident, having high levels of energy, and a strong desire. Believing that you are great and that others are great will give you the best results over the long run. Those that believe they are better than other people often succeed, but at the cost of having poor relationships. Obviously, those that believe they are not as good as others do not do well.
Let’s call all those things I just mentioned, your self-perception. If you rate yourself a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low and ten is high, your level of success will be medium. If you start performing better than that, let’s say at level 8, you will start to feel uncomfortable and start performing at a level that causes you to slide back to a five. Which is exactly what Jill did.
How well you perform in the outside world is regulated by your inner self-perception. As others have said, you create success from the inside out. Napoleon Hill understood this (only he did not express it in quite this way) when he wrote his famous book, “Think and Grow Rich”.
For long lasting, stress-free success, you not only have to invest in outside skills like delegating, time management, selling techniques, etc., you also need to invest in improving your inside– your self perception.
So, ask yourself:
1. What percentage of your time do you spend on improving your mental attitude, emotional attitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors?
2. What percentage of success in life and business do you believe is due to mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors?
Compare your answers to these two questions. Does the amount of time you spend on improving your mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and habit mastery reflect what you really believe?
Summary
The success of your business rests on you. To build a life and the business of your dreams, you have to have the right mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors. No matter how learned or how skillful you are, your self-perception determines how successful you can become. The higher your self-perception, the higher your level of success.
© 2006 Stan Mann.