Banishing Beliefs Boosts Business - And Brings Back the Fun!
So you think you’re making an honest effort at running your business. You’ve had some success with your product and you have grown the business from little or nothing to employing several staff and a multi million dollar turnover. You get to take the odd afternoon off and you have a certain credibility amongst your peers. You have a healthy self-esteem and you consider yourself a competent and smart business operator.
On the other hand, there’s never any guarantee as to where the next big sale will come from and your best clients could be wooed by the competition anytime. Staying ahead of the game is a constant pressure and the demands of a family never take a break. You dream about the day when you will feel that you’ve ‘made it’ and your business is yielding a passive income - when you can take a breath and not feel vulnerable. Occasionally, when you find yourself with a relatively empty moment, you wonder if this ‘is it’. Is this all there is?
That niggling feeling is your true self looking out for your best interests - and you are one of thousands of people whose sub-conscious beliefs are limiting the ease, prosperity and joy they could be experiencing.
We are all the product of our experiences and genes. That’s an enormous amount of information which we can't possibly hold in our conscious attention. Our bodies and sub-conscious mind remember it all however and over the past 40 years a number of eminent psychiatrists and chiropractors have found how we can effectively access that vast database. It’s called kinesiology.
As an executive coach and team leader for many years I have observed that, while coaching is a powerful tool for performance development, many business people ultimately come to a point of resistance. That resistance manifests in several ways such as risk aversion, arrogance, denial and self-sabotaging behaviours or thinking patterns. They might look like this:
- The business owner agrees to a personal friend or relative doing the bookkeeping – incompetently! This leads to a lack of management reporting, greater accounting expenses, erosion of control and authority, undermining decision making and staff confusion leading to lower productivity.
- The business owner tries to do too much – they can’t/won’t delegate or bring in contracted help leading to fatigue and frustration which leads to loss of creativity and/or passion for the business and so the spiral goes.
- The business owner has a level of success but then it plateaus – he/she believes that they can’t confide in anyone or appear vulnerable at all. They spend all their time in the business so they lose touch with a broader perspective and other people/businesses/industries. Their internal dialogue (ego) has center stage and tells them that they have lost the edge or a raft of other negative statements. The business starts struggling which starts a negative spiral. There are no fresh ideas or angles being input.
- The business is fantastic as long as the owner is there to drive it. They see potential to replicate the systems via franchising or branching out but are not sure how to make that step. The business owner cannot keep their feet on the accelerator and switch gears at the same time.
Keep in mind that the ‘you standing here now’ is the visible part of an iceberg. And that each one of us has the potential for Greatness. The only thing between one and the other is our thoughts.
Resistance is your sub-conscious limiting beliefs coming to the surface. Kinesiology lets us get beneath the resistance to identify the specific beliefs and the original time of their formation. Most importantly it provides a way to release them. Once a belief is changed we change subtly in the way we act and in our openness to possibilities. The more we let go of non-serving beliefs the more our lives effortlessly harmonise – bringing ease, balance and abundance.
A couple of real life examples might serve to illustrate.
Example 1
Situation: Jo’s parents separate when she is 1yo. She grows up with no contact with her father. Her mother is fiercely independent and achieves a high level of financial and career success. By age 40, Jo has been in 3 serious relationships where she has supported her partner through full time study and/or unemployment.
Belief: Men don’t support me financially. If I am a wife and mother I must provide for the family.
Result When Cleared: Jo is now in a relationship where the partner is financially supportive allowing her to work part-time and share responsibility for her family.
Example 2
Situation: Andrew buys an existing business which operates successfully for some years. When he decides to start a new venture it struggles. All the marketing research suggests the new product is needed and wanted by the market but it doesn’t attract customers easily and chews up money. It’s a slow progress to get the new venture up and running. Shortly after his conception his father changed jobs and was feeling out of his depth. The news of his wife’s pregnancy made him feel overwhelmed and fearful of the future.
Belief: New projects create suppressed anger, uncertainty and fear about fulfilling my responsibilities and being able to do a good job.
Result When Cleared: Andrew fortuitously met someone who was impressed with the product and referred him to his first significant buyer. He found an alternate supplier for the major input at a trade show which improved the unit profit substantially. The venture gained momentum and now looks viable in the near term.
Example 3
Situation: Alan is 60yo. He has worked in the family textile business his entire career and has been the CEO for 20 years. He works 50hrs/week and is constantly running his hands through his hair. I discover his father is 89yo, senile and still holding the purse strings. All decisions must run passed the patriarch. In the early days, Alan did very well in the business. He developed a number of significant distributors but around that time his father became distant with him and treated him disdainfully. The more sales went up the more distant his father became until his father experienced a life threatening illness.
Belief: When I am successful the people I love reject me and become unhappy and ill.
Result When Cleared: While this business continued to struggle on the revenue side, downscaling improved profits and a medium term exit plan was put in place that allowed Alan to function in the business with much lower levels of stress.
As business owners we cannot divorce our selves from our business – the business is an expression and an extension of our selves. As such the health of the business is a clue to the health and integration of our being and a fabulous mirror and opportunity for identifying little and large dis-eases of body and mind.
So if you or your business have unrealized potential or if you have a niggling feeling that’s there more, have a look at your beliefs and take a stab at how they might have been formed out of your experience - they just might be the key to taking you business to the next level.
By Sharon Lenon
Sharon is a business and wholistic coach with Illuminate Wholistic Coaching.
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