In the entrepreneurial space, we hear the word “mindset” bandied about a lot. It’s become a bit of a buzzword. 

But why does mindset actually matter in business? 

It matters because being an entrepreneur (business owner/CEO or whatever term you resonate with) is pretty much one massive headfuck after the next. Pitfalls, challenges and fails are part of the course.

There’s lots of awesome stuff too of course - doing the thing you love, creating a positive impact on your clients’ lives and making a tonne of money. But ultimately it’s an emotional rollercoaster. 

And that’s where your mindset comes in. If you imagine you’re at Point A, and success (whatever that looks like to you) is Point B, the journey from A to B is full of peaks and troughs. Your mindset is the thing that carries you through. It’s not your skillset or your qualifications, it’s your ability to manage challenges. 

If you’re not resilient in the face of those challenges, they can floor you. Put that resilience first and you’ll know that whatever comes your way, you can get up, dust yourself off, and keep going. 

In this blog post, I’m sharing 8 mindsets that I see mirrored in all of my most successful clients. They’re mindsets that I hold myself too. These are ways of thinking about the challenges of running your own business in a more resilient way - and that will ultimately make your business a success. 

1: Get used to challenging your comfort zone

You don’t achieve your biggest hairiest goals by staying comfortable every day. To achieve next level success, look for the stuff just outside your comfort zone and ensure you’re constantly challenging yourself. The key word here being' ‘just outside’ - it’s pretty difficult to run a business if you’re constantly in fight-or-flight mode or utter panic.

James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) gives the example of playing tennis against a 4-year-old; it would be insanely frustrating as their skill level would be too low. But then in walks Roger Federer. Now you’ve got the opposite problem: you’re feeling totally demoralised because you’re trying to play against the best tennis player in the world. The ideal tennis partner is someone who is just right - they’re just in the middle of those two extremes. The same is true of running your business. Clear calls this The Goldilocks Rule.

So as a business owner, always seek out the next opportunity for growth. If you don’t do this, it’s like lifting the same weight again and again and again. You’ll see an immediate benefit, but you’ll quickly plateau. The entrepreneurs who are most willing to face that discomfort and embrace the learning that comes with it are among my most successful clients. 

2: Celebrate your wins like your life depends on it

In my free Facebook group Mummy’s Got Clients, one of my favourite things we do is to ring the bell when we have something to celebrate. The idea for this came from my last job. I managed a team in customer retention and every time we got a client renewal we did a metaphorical happy dance. The little flamenco emoji appeared a lot in our messages to one another.  

I really wanted to bring this positivity to my group. So many Facebook groups that I see are very against their members promoting themselves and shouting about how great they are (that’s reserved for the group leader eh?). I wanted to do things differently. 

Celebrating your wins is the most important part of being successful in your business - it’s those wins - however big or small - that will keep you going when the going gets tough. It’s another point backed up by James Clear, who says that in order to stay motivated, your brain needs you to measure incremental progress. So you need to be writing down every single win, no matter how big or small. 

Wrote your first post on FB even though it scared the crap out of you? Write it down.

Got a new lead from someone you’ve never met before? Write it down.

Whether it’s a Trello board, a notebook, or a text to your coach, keep a record of these wins. The more you do that, the more your brain is going to feel motivated to seek out more of those wins. 

3: Take responsibility for your actions and see yourself as a vehicle for change

This comes down to the difference between what Carol Dweck terms a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Essentially, it’s time to go of victim mentality and seeing everything as outside of your control and instead take radical responsibility for your progress.

If you ever hear yourself say “My industry is so crowded, how am I ever going to stand out? No one’s ever gonna buy my services” you’re buying into a fixed mindset. You’re seeing the situation you’re in as static and deciding that you can’t change it. You’re telling yourself that you have no power. 

Stop that right now. Own your power. You are a vehicle for change, which means you are responsible for changing your current situation. If you feel that your industry is crowded, go out there and shine. If you feel like you have nothing to say, refine your message. Get excited about your own point of view so that when you show up, your passion shines through. 

Remember that no one else is going to build this business for you. So all this responsibility falls to you. Don’t want to do it? Go and get a job (tough love) because then someone else will take responsibility for it. 

My most successful clients take responsibility for every action. Wherever they see a lack that makes them feel uncomfortable, they go and change it. So if this is something you’re seeing, do more learning. Immerse yourself in the thing that’s lacking until you become the master of that thing. 

4: Be willing to experiment and fail

When you’re ‘in’ your business, every action you take can feel huge. No one responds to your offer? FAIL. No one signs up to your workshop? FAIL. No one engages in a post which took you hours? FAIL.

It’s easy to take these ‘failures’ and start to draw conclusions about your worth as a business owner. Stop that shit right now.

Instead, I want you to treat your business as one big science experiment. Thomas Edison and his associates worked on over 3,000 different theories to develop an efficient lightbulb. When challenged on how painful all those failures must’ve been he said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work”? BOOM! Lesson: be more like Thomas Edison.

Super important addition: my most successful clients are kind and compassionate to themselves when stuff doesn’t work out. They don’t take their ‘failures’ and beat themselves over the head with it. They also don’t equate things that didn’t work out with their self worth or their ability to be a successful business owner. Instead, they pick themselves up and try the next thing. They find the learning and then seek out the next opportunity to put that learning into practice. 

One of my favourite quotes about failure is “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate”. If you want to succeed, go out there and try the 10,000 things that won’t work so that you can finally get to the thing that does work.

5: See personal development as a way of life 

It’s very hard to be in the online business world and not see people banging on about personal development. Whether it’s books they’re reading, journaling, morning routines, affirmations, the list goes on. Thing is, people bang on about this stuff because it really works. 

As Jim Rohn says, “Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become”.

The version of you that has smashed your goals is not the version of you that is standing here today. I know that the person I’ll be in a year is different from the person I am now because I have to continually push my comfort zone (just to a manageable level of difficulty) so that I grow. 

Personal development is not optional. You should always be learning. It’s one of the reasons I love my membership so much: it’s a continual opportunity to learn. For example, every Monday morning I give a quick pep talk, usually based on a book I’m reading or a recent learning I’ve had. It’s a reminder to my members not to allow themselves to stagnate. It’s 5 minutes for them to learn something, be inspired, and take that inspiration into their week. 

How are you continually developing yourself?

6: Recognise that there is enough right now

Here’s another jargony term for you: scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset. It’s so easy to fall into a scarcity mindset. It comes from stories you tell yourself like “I don’t have enough money in my bank account”, “There aren’t enough clients” or “I’m not very good at sales”. 

You might be reading that and thinking “but all of those ARE true” and my answer to you is: only if you decide it’s true. 

What you focus on your amplify. So if you’re focusing on the lack in your business right now, that is what you will create. If you’re only thinking about how you don’t have enough clients, you’re going to amplify that and put it out into the world. Instead I want you to believe - from the bottom of your heart - that what you have right now is enough. 

So often we look for the data that shows us we have enough - the number of clients on your roster, the amount of money in the bank - but that is not the stuff that matters. That’s the cherry on the cake! An abundance mindset comes from being happy, grateful, and accepting of what you have right now.

Have you got a roof over your head, people who love you and a shit tonne to be grateful for? Then you’ve got enough.

If you want to create more ‘results’ in your business, do that from a place of abundance. Choose to serve more deeply, choose to experiment more and fail faster, choose to create more clients in a positive way rather than to fill a gap. 

7: Listen to your gut

This one is huge. The amount of advice and opinions out there about how to run a business makes it easy to think everyone else knows more than you. It can lead you to feel like you need to follow the path that someone else took. 

But your gut is the truest definition of your path. Your instincts don’t just come out of nowhere: it’s your intuition and you know your business better than anyone else. You do want to make informed decisions, but it’s also important to listen to what your gut is telling you. 

In my first year of business I was advised not to focus on a lower-end offering. And there’s a huge amount of sense in this - if you want to hit your income goals faster, it’s a lot easier to do this with a higher-end audience (especially if you have a small audience). But at that time my gut was telling me more than anything that a membership model was right for me. 

I could see how engaged my FB group Mummy’s Got Clients had become and I was confident that if I set up a membership I’d be able to get 50 people to sign up. I ran a challenge with 150 people, and of those 150, I got 50 signups. That’s an awesome conversion rate and I truly believe that the success happened because I listened to my gut. 

Intuition is everything, so don’t be fooled into thinking you don’t know what’s right for your business. 

8: Take imperfect action 

The most important point on this list, and a rule that I live and die by. 

Perfectionism is the death of progress. You will never be ready, so catch yourself whenever you say “I will do this when...”. Whether it’s another training course or another qualification, it’s likely keeping you in your comfort zone and behind the scenes. 

Instead, take messy imperfect action. Move forward before you are ready. This is the driver of your business success. 

My most successful clients - and the most successful business owners that you’ll find anywhere online - have taken action before they felt ready. They’ve put out content that was rough and ready. They’ve launched offers before they’ve created the content. They’ve showed up on their lowest days, when they really don’t want to. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been learning and refining as they go, it just means they’ve taken imperfect action instead of waiting for an undefined point in the future when ‘ready’ occurs.

So there you have it! Eight mindsets that will see you through the ups and downs of running your business. Mindsets that have served me well since I started my own journey, and that I’ve watched my clients adopt right before their businesses began to soar.

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