Cultivating the Right Mindset to be an Online Entrepreneur
Ask any six or seven-figure marketer, and they’ll tell you that mindset is everything when it comes to determining your success or failure. And it’s not something that happens – it’s not something you’re born with, it’s a series of events that occurs when you work your hardest.
You have to cultivate it – make it happen. You do this by planting the right seeds and nurturing the right mindset as you weed out a vision that doesn’t align with what you want.
The first step is to analyse what’s wrong with your current mindset. No one has a perfect one. Even if you’re all rainbows and unicorns every minute of every day, there would be a fault with that because you have to predict things that will go wrong.
For most people, it’s not all happiness when you’re building your own business. You have things like:
- Self-doubt in your abilities
- Fear of failure
- Self-esteem issues
- Confusion and frustration
- Envy of others…and so on
You need to have a long hard look at your innermost thoughts – as well as what you verbalise because your natural self-talk can have a significant impact on whether or not you succeed or fail.
If possible, try to be aware on a daily basis of your emotional state. Are you feeling intimidated? Ugly? Worried you won’t get something right? Keep a journal of emotions for about a week and see if any overwhelming mindset issues creep up on you day after day.
To fix the issue, you have to be honest. Ask your spouse or others if they notice any mindset issues with your efforts. Sometimes it’s easier for them to pick up on your lack of confidence than it is for you to see it.
Make a note of how often you use certain debilitating words, like:
Should
Can’t
Won’t
There’s an old saying that goes, “Don’t should on yourself.” It means you’re crippling your efforts to succeed when your self-talk is so full of doubt and regret. “I should be able to handle this, but I’m not.”
Look back on past blog posts and social media posts as well as emails between yourself and others to see what your raw emotions were before you were making an effort to be aware of them.
Look at the mindset of those you admire. Being aware of the right mindset to have is very important in allowing yourself to soak up the experiences of others. Have you ever heard that phrase, “You are who you keep company with?”
That’s true in Internet Marketing, too. When you’re around a bunch of whiny, negative Nellies all day, reading their posts in forums about how bad they’re being victimised or how often they’re unable to get things done, it rubs off on you.
Change that pattern! Block out those people – at least until you fortify your mindset – and start making it a point to engage with successful people every day. It doesn’t have to take long.
Read one of their blog posts or social networking entries. Follow them on Twitter. Watch their YouTube videos. People who are truly successful and who have a passion for helping will share their knowledge.
Order a book that promises to improve your outlook. Each day, you should read a chapter or a small section of a mindset-changing motivational book. Many are excellent for Internet Marketers, including:
Time Warrior by Steve Chandler
The Power of Story by Jim Loehr
These are just a few, ranging from no-nonsense slants (Time Warrior) to gentle, healing content (The Power of Story) that can help you begin altering the victimisation viewpoint you’ve had of this experience and start feeling empowered to make things happen your way.
Because you’re looking for streamlined success, that means efficient learning and training. Not getting bogged down in trying to absorb dozens of concepts and hundreds of pages all at once.
You should slowly dig into these resources, whether it’s people or books – and do small snippets every day for a little dose of inspiration. Spend no more than 10 minutes on each one – enough to rev you up for whatever is next on your to-do list.
Embrace daily mantras to retrain your brain. Mantras are something that a lot of people feel are hokey, but others embrace. Even if you think it’s “not for you,” you should give it a try.
This is because your brain is wired with your conscious and subconscious mind, and it’s the subconscious mind that we’re working on changing with the mantras. When your subconscious mind hears or reads these positive sayings day after day, it gets ingrained so that even when you’re not actively thinking about it, your brain retrieves this message and helps you avoid sinking into despair.
Some people have a hard time grasping what the subconscious mindset is. They understand their conscious state because they’re observing it in action. So let’s compare it to your body.
When you think of your body, you think of your skin, head, arms, legs, and so on. The stuff you can see. But inside, a lot is going on at a cellular level. Things so tiny you wouldn’t even know they were happening unless you had access to a microscope.
What those cells do is extremely important to your life. It’s the same with a subconscious mindset. The conscious mind is what you observe right now – but behind the scenes, hidden to you, is your subconscious mind – and even though you can’t see it in action, it’s there, working for or against you regarding your online success.
And just as you want to eat the right things and exercise to help your body at a cellular level, you also want to nourish your subconscious mindset so that it benefits you and doesn’t contribute to your mental despair.
Practice one new mindset strengthening exercise each day. So here are a few ideas for this issue. Keep a specific journal for what went right – not what all happened that went wrong.
Write at least three things that went right. It doesn’t have to be impressive things that happened – small things are okay. Maybe you successfully interacted with someone you admire in the online business arena, or you got your inbox cleared out. Even something such as “Contributed six full hours to my business today” is positive.
If you don’t have anything positive business-wise (think hard), then start with things in your personal life that went right. Maybe you spent time colouring with your child or got all of your holiday decorations put up.
The key is to start training your brain to focus on the good, not the bad. Over time, this will become your new routine and you won’t see life as a struggle anymore. This exercise should only take a couple of minutes – no need to write pages about it, just jot down a phrase or sentence saying what went right.
Have a system to learn from failures. Not having a system is a big mistake many marketers do. They fail and want to run so far from it that they never look back to see what happened. Not planning is an invitation to fail more.
If you don’t take a moment to figure out what happened, you’ll likely repeat the same errors. It is like spinning your wheels in the mud. First, look at what happened and see if you can brainstorm what went wrong.
Was it a price point? Your graphics? Did you fail to secure affiliates or JV partners? Once you have some idea, try the approach again, with the corrections in mind. If it still fails, and you exhaust your ideas of why things aren’t working, then reach out to someone and let them know what you hoped to achieve, what you did, and why you think it went wrong.
An excellent place to ask is in a marketing forum, or on social networking sites, such as in a Facebook group. Don’t be whiny about it, though – marketers love to help go-getters, they are repulsed by people who see themselves as a constant victim.
Let’s get blunt here, too – if they think you’re whiny, they may not help. Why? Because people who play the victim role latch onto other marketers and then email them continually wanting hand holding.
If you approach your request for help with confidence and professionalism, you’ll get more answers because people will know you’re independent. And they do understand that we all need a helping hand once in awhile.
All of these small, limited time exercises will help you cultivate the right mindset. Don’t expect to wake up tomorrow feeling like you can rule the world. Give it time, and focus on making an effort to become a confident, success-minded marketer.