One mental shift that can get you unstuck and on your way to success
Just ONE mental shift Cori? You may well ask.
Well, if you’ve been round these parts for long enough, you’ll know that I happen to believe – well really, I know – that success hinges almost entirely on your mindset.
So in fact, getting to your vision of success, feeling successful, is really a series of mental shifts.
But let’s start with one important one today, shall we?
It’s a biggun.
And I’ll tell you what it is in just a sec.
A quick (and relevant) story…
But first I want to tell you about my Netflix rule.
Stay with me, it’s totally relevant. Promise.
So when I very first started working from home, back in the early days of my business. Well, before I’d even launched to be precise…
My husband asked how I was finding it, working from home.
“Do you find it easy to be productive? Don’t you get distracted by other stuff?” he asked.
“No”, I replied with a self-satisfied smile.
“I have a NO NETFLIX IN THE DAYTIME rule” was my proud declaration.
In fact, I told several people about this rule. Feeling pleased with my self-discipline.
What I later came to realise however, was that this discipline-inducing rule, was in fact, doing some harmful self-signalling.
Have you heard me talk about self-signalling before?
If not, in a nutshell it means the little messages your behaviour sends your brain which reinforce what you think about yourself.
So why was this harmful?
Well, by creating this RULE, I was telling myself that I needed a rule.
That I couldn’t be trusted to watch Netflix in the day.
That if I dared fire it up over lunch say, then I would be doomed to an unproductive afternoon sprawled on the sofa, passively consuming episode after episode of Gilmore Girls, achieving nothing.
That my business would never get off the ground.
That I would surely succumb to being an unemployed telly-addict, if it weren’t for the RULE.
So what IS this one mental shift then, that can propel you faster towards success?
The clue was in that story.
Yep, that’s right: trust.
Trusting yourself.
Let me ask you a question.
Do you trust yourself fully?
We think a fair bit about who we do and don’t trust in life. But we seem to spend very little time thinking about whether we trust ourselves.
Maybe there is an implicit assumption that we do.
But scratch the surface and often we find a very different situation.
As I just demonstrated with my Netflix rule.
The thing is, how much you trust yourself directly relates to how quickly you will achieve your vision of success.
And I’m speaking as a person who hasn’t always trusted herself, so I know.
Because little signals of self-mistrust accumulate a compound effect over time.
They corrode our self-believe.
And you better BELIEVE that self-belief is critical to your success.
So let’s just take a look at why trust is so important.
Why Trust Is So Damn Important To Your Success
1. It helps you make decisions
Want to own a successful business (whatever success means to you)?
Then you KNOW you need to get good at making decisions.
By which I do NOT mean always making the right ones.
But making them fast.
Want to get to success faster? Make decisions faster.
I’m not saying start deciding stuff all over the place with reckless abandon. Or not bothering to make an informed decision.
But decide you must.
Procrastination is one of the 3 P’s of Peril as I call them. It does you NO service.
And really, at the root of a propensity to procrastinate is a fear. Fear of making the wrong decision.
Where TRUST comes in, is in trusting yourself to make decisions.
Trusting yourself to make the decision as best you can with the information you have at the time.
AND – this is the critical one – trusting yourself to figure it out if the decision you made turns out to have been the wrong one.
THAT is the trust that will keep you moving forward, keep you on the path to success.
2. It helps you take action and consistent
Want to know the only real differences between you and someone you admire as being successful according to your definition of success?
1 // They believed it was possible for them and held on to that belief
2 // They took consistent action
Now don’t be mistaken that the consistent action has to be massive action, all hard work and effort. Most of the time, in the case of those who have achieved success in a healthy way (i.e. without burnout and massive stress), the actions which were most critical to their success were small, but – and here’s the key – CONSISTENTLY applied things.
Things like committing to performing at least one sales activity. Every single day.
Or like journaling and visualising success. Every single day.
It is the consistency that pips it.
Here’s the thing with trusting yourself.
If you feel like you have put RULES in place for yourself to achieve what you want to achieve – aka cultivating that consistency – then you aren’t trusting yourself.
And if you aren’t trusting yourself, you are telling yourself you aren’t trust-WORTHY.
There’s that worthiness thing again, did you see?
And the thing is, we tend to live up to our own expectations.
So if you don’t EXPECT yourself to show up and do those small but consistent things that will help your chances of success…
If you tell yourself you NEED rules otherwise you’ll self-sabotage…
Because you aren’t WORTHY of the trust required to just *know* you’ll do what is required…
Then you’re telling yourself that you are inherently an untrustworthy self-sabotager who doesn’t have your own interests at heart.
And that is exactly how your behaviour will pan out.
On the flip side…
If you TRUST yourself enough to listen to your inner guidance. That part of you that KNOWS what is good for you.
If you do that, then being consistent won’t be so “hard”. You will just trust yourself to become the sort of person who takes that consistent action.
Can you see how much EASIER that makes things?
Which leads me to…
3. Things are less rigid. You can relax.
Phew.
Hopefully you know me well enough by now to know that I don’t believe success has to be hard or difficult or complicated. It should NOT be an uphill struggle.
Challenging? Sure.
Fun? Even better.
So here’s the marvellous thing:
When you can TRUST yourself to do what is in your business and your own best interest.
You get to let go of the rules. The structure. The rigidity.
You can RELAX.
And guess what else?
When you relax like that, because you are trusting yourself, rather than policing yourself and wondering when you’re going to f*ck this whole thing up.
When you realise that actually, you CAN’T even f*ck this up.
Then WOW.
Because in that moment of relaxing into that feeling of trusting yourself, you open up your ability to allow success into your life so much faster.
Why?
Because you aren’t wasting an enormous amount of energy and focus on worry and fear (which are the roots of that mistrust, right?). Life feels easier, more fun.
From that ease comes flow. Which brings you great ideas, inspiration, innovation.
You can use that extra energy and focus to hone in on working SMARTER not harder in your business.
And it all snowballs in the most beautiful way from there.
Let’s Return to The Netflix Story Shall We?
So back to Netflix.
Because I still work largely from home.
And I no longer have that RULE.
So now what?
Well, now I trust myself.
I trust myself not to go down the back-to-back-episode rabbit hole day after day, laying waste to my business.
I trust myself because I know how to listen to my instinct. My intuition. My inner guidance. Inner being. Call it what you want, you know what I’m referring to, right?
Because of this, if I feel inclined to watch some Netflix in the day I can tune straight in to that inner place and know that…
… maybe I have been working hard and need 30 minutes or so of light relief to give my brain some downtime
… maybe watching an episode of something uplifting would just FEEL GOOD
… maybe I am indeed feeling like laying horizontal on the sofa and watching Gilmore Girls all day… and maybe I NEED that because I am in fact a little run down and taking that time to rest would help me.
Those are legit reasons for watching Netflix in the day.
Without the RULE, I can listen to what is good for me. I can trust my decision to watch or not watch as I see fit.
Because I trust myself fully to stay on my path to success.
And, in fact, most of the time I am too busy loving life and biz to even give the fact that Netflix is an option a thought.
Over To You
I’d love you to think about rules you have been imposing on yourself.
Or maybe you don’t have rules, but a lack of trust in yourself has been showing up as an avoidance of something altogether.
Whatever the case, start by noticing when this mistrust pops up.
Examine the fear underneath it.
See if you can re-frame that fear as something positive and more supportive.
See if you can start demonstrating trustworthy behaviour in that space to yourself.
See if you can make that mental shift.
Because – trust me (sorry, couldn’t resist) – you’ll find your path to success SOOOOO much easier if you do.
Are you feeling stuck in your business, success always feeling out of reach? Or maybe you aren’t even connected to what your own vision of success might be? Or perhaps you like the idea of cultivating a deeper trust in yourself to help your path to success but don’t know where to start?
These are all things that I can support you with (and more!) as a Success Coach.
Book yourself a FREE Discovery Call and we can chat about what’s keeping you from success and how I might be able to support you in getting there.
