Mindset for Business

The Art and Science of Sound Decisions

Jane Turner

• Publisher: Jane Turner Coaching (Write With Jane)
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780648423065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Prise de décision

"Mindset for Business: The Art and Science of Sound Decisions" is written by the book writing coach and best-selling author of "Mindset for Authors: How to Overcome Perfectionism, Procrastination, and Self-Doubt" - Jane Turner. It looks at business from the point of view of the Hero's Journey and includes strategies to get out of a fixed mindset into a growth mindset, and how to avoid getting stuck in unresourceful states like overwhelm, confusion, and people pleasing.

Jane's inspirational story of starting her own business off the back of her first book after being made redundant at the age of 52 is truly inspirational. This book is a clarion call for anyone who is feeling like it's time for them to step up and step into their full potential.

CHAPTER 1: WHY MINDSET MATTERS

If we own our story, we get to write the ending. If we don’t, it owns us.

Brene Brown

This chapter is all about looking at the difference having a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset will make to your ability to achieve your goals. I’ve focused on this to provide you with the skills you’ll need to overcome the most common internal barriers that many people in the start-up phase in particular are likely to experience. The barriers I’m referring to here include things like perfectionism, procrastination, and self-doubt, as well as tendencies toward blame, justification and denial. The way I see it, being human involves experiencing these things, and being successful involves managing them.

FIXED vs GROWTH MINDSETS

A fundamental point you need to accept is that your ability to take responsibility for your outcomes is key. This is not an easy proposition for many people to take onboard. As Carol Dweck writes in her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, there are essentially two overarching paradigms that help us to make sense of the way we interact with the world we live in. These paradigms are known as fixed and growth mindsets. This is important because our ability to come to terms with the question of personal responsibility is determined by where we sit on the continuum from a fixed to a growth mindset. The simple truth is that you will be relying on unreliable things, like dumb luck and extreme goodwill, if you don’t hold yourself fully accountable for doing the work involved in achieving your goals.

People who primarily operate from a fixed mindset believe they are born with talents in some areas and not others. What’s more, they believe this determines what they can and cannot achieve in life. You might hear someone with a fixed mindset say something like: “I’m highly creative, so I would never be any good at business.” Or “I could never write a book, I’m just no good with words.” Most of my clients are people with at least enough of a growth mindset to have thought something like: “I know I’m going to struggle with getting a book written because writing is not really my thing, so I’m going to enlist some help to make sure the project of writing my book doesn’t sit on my bucket list forever.”

Thinking about the difference between fixed and growth mindsets reminds me of something my father said when I was just a little kid. I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but I know I wasn’t in double digits when he said words to the effect that “You can’t do anything about the cards you’re dealt, but it’s up to you to decide which cards you play.” This kind of worldview implies opportunities to grow, as well as responsibility for taking the steps needed to allow growth to happen. That could mean signing up with a business coach, taking a writing course, hiring a personal trainer, or going back to university to retrain for a new career that requires specific qualifications.

Some people are more or less textbook cases of fixed mindset thinking, but most of us are more fluid than that. What that means is we approach some areas of life from a fixed mindset, and others from a growth mindset. We’re even likely to approach certain areas of life from a fixed mindset some of the time, and from a growth mindset at others.

So let me ask you this: which mindset are you using to look at the question of how successful you can be? Are you buzzing with excitement about getting your message out into the world and feeling great about helping your clients get fantastic results? Or are you being stymied by limiting beliefs that stop you from setting your business up in a way that will enable you to live your life in a deeply satisfying way, whether that means being able to send your kids to a private school, or being able to build an orphanage in India, or being able to buy your own tropical island?

If the sentence about ‘limiting beliefs’ resonates with you more than the sentence about ‘brimming with excitement’, then you are part of the majority of people whose businesses are vulnerable to failure (if they ever get off the ground in the first place). In fact, if you resonated with the idea of brimming with excitement, then you probably wouldn’t be reading this book in the first place. I say that because you’d be busy running your successful business already. But, as you are reading this book, I want you to know that no matter how your limiting beliefs might be manifesting right now, you will be able to shift things if you really take what I’m about to say on board. That is, that what’s likely to be stymieing you a lot of the time is an unconscious need to avoid one of the most uncomfortable of all human states – vulnerability.

Avoiding vulnerability used to be my modus operandi. Needless to say, I had to learn to be comfortable with discomfort in order to do some of the amazing things I’ve done since becoming an author. These things include speaking on an international stage, appearing on television and in the press, and not only surviving but thriving within the dog-eat-dog world of the professional services market. Being able to do these things entailed breaking out of the safe and very contained mental space I had lived most of my life in. And that entailed coming to terms with the extent to which the insidious thing called Impostor Syndrome was sitting in the unconscious part of my mind. I’ve had to do some serious inner work to get to a place where I no longer feel vulnerable about being seen for who I really am. That was a big piece of the puzzle I needed to have in place to get my first book finished, and to get my introverted-self out to networking events and the like.

But that wasn’t the end of the lessons I had to learn about the consequences of having a mindset that can trip us up from time to time, in spite of the ongoing investment we make in maintaining a growth mindset. In fact, it was much later in the piece when I got comfortable with having conversations around money in general, and about talking to clients who had fallen behind in their payment plans in particular. Working on my money mindset and my people-pleasing tendencies enabled me to see that one of the things making me uncomfortable in this territory was a displaced need to be loved. It was this need that caused me to suffer from many of the classic problems that people pleasers deal with on a day-to-day basis.

PEOPLE PLEASING

According to Sherry Pagoto who is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts, “people pleasing is either driven by a fear of rejection and/or a fear of failure.” Fear of rejection often develops out of early childhood experiences that undermine our self-esteem. From an evolutionary standpoint, being shunned or rejected by the extended family group that we rely on for survival could result in death. So even though having a neglectful, or even absent parent isn’t necessarily a life-threatening situation these days, we are physiologically and psychologically wired in such a way that our response to rejection is exactly the same as it was back in the day when being accepted was literally a matter of life or death.

The companion to fear of rejection is fear of failure. Fear of failure is embedded in the belief that making a mistake will result in our looking stupid, and/or getting into trouble, which in turn will result in being rejected in one way or another. It’s the double-whammy of fear of rejection and fear of failure that bears down on a lot more people than you might imagine. Believe me – it’s not just you.

Fear of failure is most likely to develop out of experiencing harsh criticism, ridicule and/or punishment when we’re young. This can lead to experiencing anxiety and/or fear when it comes to taking on new and challenging tasks as adults. This plays out in people doing whatever it takes to avoid or mitigate the anxiety. In most cases, that means not taking on the challenging task in the first place. But if we can’t avoid taking it on, then we will put in an extraordinary amount of effort to make sure we do the job perfectly.

In addition to this section on people pleasing, you will find sections on things like perfectionism and negative beliefs as you move through the chapters that follow. All of these things are linked to the root cause, which is the avoidance of vulnerability.

Don’t get me wrong on the question of people pleasing. Wanting to do the right thing by people is not a bad thing per se. It’s only when you do it to the exclusion of your own needs that it becomes a problem. As the author of Risky is the New Safe, Randy Gage says:

Living a life of self-sacrifice enables others to take advantage of you, and when practised long enough it will ultimately destroy you if you have no other purpose in life than placating others and seeking approval which you can only earn by giving up your own happiness.

Paradoxically, people pleasing is not only a bad deal for the people pleaser, but it also backfires on the people they are trying to help as well. This is because the exhaustion and frustration that goes hand-in-hand with being a chronic people pleaser drains the energy we need to be able to operate at our very best, and thus deliver excellent service to our clients.

Sadly, extreme people pleasing tendencies played out in the early days of my business in a number of significant ways. One of them was my unwillingness to get out of my comfort zone and have difficult conversations with people who owed me money. Another was the ridiculous length of time it took me to speak up about not being provided with anywhere near the value I should have received out of a $37K investment in a business-building program I signed up for.

Importantly, I also had to come to terms with the fact that my programs weren’t going to sell themselves. In fact, in the bad old days, I felt so icky about coming across as salesy in the regular half-day workshops I ran to recruit people into my writing programs, that I didn’t even issue a call to action at the end of the event. I cringe when I think about how crazy it was to expect people to be so taken with my obvious know-how and genuine desire to help them become published authors, that they would run up to me and beg me to take them on as clients before they left the room. Of course, that didn’t happen. And over time, as my bank balance shrunk, the idea that I had to do some serious work on my hang-ups around my relationship with money, and my identity as someone with something to sell, finally sunk in. Needless to say, failing to come to terms with things like these sooner rather than later cost me dearly in terms of forestalling the results I deserved to be achieving.

An unintended and essentially unconscious consequence of this was a kind of simmering resentment, verging on passive aggression towards some of my clients. This came about because I was silently angry at the people who had welched on my invoices and/ or driven me down on the price of my programs. This hurt me both in terms of the income I was generating, and in terms of the quality of the relationships I had with the penny-pinching culprits who were in the early cohort who signed up to work with me. This was a real shame because what matters most to me is the quality of the relationships I have with my clients.

At the end of the day, what I had to do to purge myself of people pleasing tendencies was build my confidence and self-esteem. This entailed clearing out the baggage I’d developed over the course of my life. This baggage was contaminating my self-worth in general, and my beliefs around money in particular. I know there’s still a little bit of the people pleaser in me. But these days I’m aware of it, and when I catch myself lapsing into old unhelpful habits, all I need to do is tap into my purpose. Being in that state ultimately serves my clients much better than people pleasing ever could.

The thing I had to do once I had a solid foundation to move forward with, was establish healthy boundaries in my business and in my life. I have to say that the empowerment I experienced once I got around to sticking up for myself, far outweighed any of the initial discomfort I might have caused my clients by reminding them of the ground rules I put in place to make their responsibilities clear to them upfront. In fact, developing a set of ground rules about what is and isn’t included in the services I offer makes it so much easier to induct clients into my programs. I have my ex-coach Jane Copeland to thank for putting me on the straight and narrow in relation to establishing absolute clarity for my clients and myself about the boundaries in my business.

I’m incredibly grateful to be able to coach my clients who are using their book to launch a service-based business, to establish ground rules to induct their clients into their programs. It just saves so much time and potential for confusion. As Pagoto says:

We teach people how to treat us by the behavior we accept or reject from them. If someone takes advantage of you, it is only their fault once. After that it is your fault for not teaching them different.

Teaching them different in the context of running a service-based business includes setting boundaries about what you will and will not accept, and establishing clarity around what the client needs to do to achieve their goals vis-a-vis the services you are offering.

NEGATIVE BELIEFS

An important piece of the puzzle is that we all have a set of core beliefs that determine every decision we make. For most people, they are not all negative. However it’s the negative beliefs we are interested in here because they underlie people pleasing and other counterproductive things like self-sabotage. The bottom line is that carrying around a stack of negative beliefs will undermine our ability to see ourselves as successful. And in that way, they will make it difficult to make decisions that align with our values and the goals we set for ourselves.

This kind of thing is not taught in schools. And unless you’ve done some personal development work or studied psychology or coaching (either formally or by way of the books you’ve read), you might not have ever thought about what your core beliefs are. In fact, you might not have even been aware that you had any. Let me explain. Core beliefs show up in the fundamental understanding we have about ourselves, other people, and the world we live in. They reside under our conscious thoughts and impact every decision we make. For example, our core beliefs determine whether we see ourse...