“Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe.” – Oprah Winfrey
When it comes to being a successful entrepreneur, personal transformation has been illuminated as a key element for over a century with the works of Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Earl Nightingale, just to name a few. Our understanding of these transformational principles has continued to grow; enriching our lives and creating depth of purpose in business and in life.
Having knowledge of basic business principles, engaging in more effective time-management techniques and having healthy habits are all necessities in creating a successful business. To create a business that is fulfilling, rooted in depth of purpose and meaning, takes an exploration into you. You are to be evolving as an entrepreneur, because you are destined to evolve as a human being. You can take your business to a level beyond your own human capacity as you take the inner journey to connect to your spirit. When your business becomes the vehicle for your personal evolution, you ride upon the strength of your spiritual purpose. You will never feel more on course and supported by the universe than when you are connected and aligned with your spirit.
In order to fully align with your spiritual purpose, discovering and clearing what is keeping you misaligned is imperative. Your business is one way you can find those misalignments. You can start by looking at what you believe about success. Do you believe that successful people are greedy? That it isn’t spiritual to charge higher prices? That success only happens for other people and not you? That you are too old, too young, or not educated enough? There can be hundreds of beliefs systems, BS for short, that you are conscious of roaming around in your mind.
From early childhood, you’ve been conditioned with beliefs by your family, society, culture and humanity. You don’t see them because you grew up in them and they are all that you know. You think that is reality, and it is, but it’s not the only reality in which you can live. You can create the reality you want when you have the awareness that a different reality can exist for you.
Has anyone ever told you, you don’t have what it takes? I worked with an 86-year old man who would always apologize when he spoke up in my workshops. He would say he was stupid and didn’t have a lot to offer, all of which wasn’t true. I asked him why he would think that about himself. He answered that his dad always told him growing up that he was stupid because he was dyslexic.
It is important to have a strong filter when other people’s beliefs are coming your way, often times they are actually projections of how they feel about themselves. Pay attention to whom you allow into your space. Especially as women, we often have an open door policy and allow too many unhealthy opinions and people into our lives. Healthy boundaries keep healthy relationships intact, and unhealthy relationships out.
In my 11 years of working with entrepreneurs, it’s not their business acumen that holds them back, it’s their mindset. What holds you back from fully stepping into your potential? Fear of failure? Fear of being judged? Fear that you will make other people feel less about themselves? It does not serve anyone for you to play small, you will only hurt yourself by doing so and end up being filled with regret later on.
Not all of your misaligned beliefs are in your conscious awareness, some of those beliefs are hiding out in the dark regions of your subconscious and are the types of obstacles that can keep you from achieving what your spirit set out to achieve. When you discover and dismantle those beliefs you will align with those beliefs that liberate you and align you with your spirit and your purpose.
Years ago, I was engaged in a written exercise when I discovered a belief I had no idea was inside me. After listing out several of my beliefs on paper, came my subconscious belief, “I’ll die early if I’m successful.” You see my dad was a very successful businessman. Over time, his health issues increased and he died of a heart attack at the young age of 58. I was thirty when he passed and throughout my thirties I struggled financially. Somewhere along the line, on a subconscious level, I had connected my dad’s success with his death and didn’t even know it. My subconscious was computing it as, “I don’t want to die, so I better not be successful.” That was a huge discovery for me. That awareness started me on the right track to dismantle that belief so I could create the success that would eventually change my life, and in turn, change the lives of so many others.
Discovering your subconscious beliefs is much like being a detective in pursuit of solving a mystery. You first need to search for clues. Your business is filled with clues. Your results, like them or not, are valuable feedback providing you with all sorts of clues. Your beliefs eventually manifest in your outer world. Your belief system is the dominant force creating your success, or lack of it. A belief holds your creative energy, which magnetizes its like to itself, therefore your results are a vibrational match to your beliefs.
For example, if your results show up as “not enough”, whether it’s clients, money, or time, check and see if that is what you believe about you, that YOU are not enough? It doesn’t mean it’s true, it’s just what you believe and feel. It’s time to stop buying into these beliefs as if they are true; they are thoughts, they are feelings, they are energy. If you keep resisting them, you will continue to strengthen them and trap them inside which will then become a stronger magnet to the “not enough” results you attract in your business.
Clues are also found by paying attention to what you complain about. Put your detective to work and pay attention to what comes out of your mouth. You might find you say things like, life isn’t fair, people are hard to work with, or no matter what I do, I can’t get ahead. How about a disempowering statement like, I’m so stupid. Is that what you want to continue to affirm? If so, then keep saying it. If not, then quit saying it. How about having a standby answer of, I don’t know. Common amongst teenagers and adults alike, it can be used as a fallback answer. What if you stretch yourself and act as if you do know, because some part of you DOES know. Every time you say you don’t know, you disconnect from the part of you that knows. Pay attention to these clues to discover what’s going on inside you and what it is that you are continuing to affirm and strengthen in your life.
Once you have uncovered your misaligned beliefs, you can now move toward real solutions. How have you gone about solving your problems in the past? Have you been more outer-directed by trying to change things in your outer world? For example, if you procrastinate, you may have taken time-management classes or downloaded the latest app to solve your procrastination problem, just to find you put that off too. The real problem is not procrastination, that is just the clue. The real problem may lie in the belief that if you were to stop procrastinating and pursue your dreams – you will fail. This is what is keeping you from moving forward and realizing your dreams and your greatness.
You don’t just believe something because you think it, you believe something because you have an emotional investment in it – positive or negative. Beliefs are nothing more than thoughts and feelings that marry together. Think of your thoughts as seeds, and your emotions as the soil where those seeds are being planted. Your negative thoughts will find their way into negative, sometimes toxic, emotions. Over a period of time, this becomes your own personal self-sabotaging belief. Positive beliefs, on the other hand, are positive thoughts that live in positive emotions. Are you ready to become a conscious gardener when it comes to your beliefs?
There is work involved in aligning with your spirit, and here’s why. Your brain is wired to go toward pleasure to avoid pain. In doing so, on the other side of the pleasure is pain. When you go into the pain to process it, on the other side is pleasure. As Rumi said, “The cure for pain is in the pain.” You are up against a lot of things that are hard-wired biologically and conditioned environmentally within you. Hence, this is why you are to be evolving; growing beyond the part of you that is driven by fear and survival. Say hello to your ego. By identifying and negotiating with your ego, you can start edging your way out of your comfort zone so you can grow and evolve as a spirit-driven entrepreneur.
To come back into alignment with your spirit, you can first make the distinction that you are not your feelings. Too often you identify with your feelings as if that’s who you are, when nothing could be further from the truth. You can feel like a failure and you can fail, that does not mean you ARE a failure. You are a spiritual being having a human experience, therefore, you are so much greater than any feelings you can have.
Believe it or not, your negative beliefs and emotions are the gateway to your spirit. By going into your negative emotions and processing them, you release them and make your way to the other side where your beautiful spirit is waiting. As you consistently go through the emotional clearing process, it weakens those beliefs that keep you misaligned with your spirit. You weaken the power your ego has had over you and you strengthen your connection to the power your spirit has had all along. You achieve more powerful results because you are evolving into the spirit-driven entrepreneur you were always meant to be.