Running your own business can trigger every negative emotion and limiting belief in you. It’s the most amazing rollercoaster journey, and one that helps to shape you over time. To better serve your clients, you must work on your limiting beliefs and release the labels you attach to yourself.

What are your labels?

Have you ever stopped to think about how you label yourself? You might label yourself a husband, a wife, a mum, a business owner or things like fat, lazy, energetic and so on.

How you label yourself can significantly affect how you act and behave in life and business. You might label yourself a failure in business or tell yourself that you are technologically challenged. What you tell yourself can result in your behaviours matching your beliefs.

Stop sabotaging yourself

You might start sabotaging your efforts which results in failure, or you may not take action on that Instagram post (insert your own block here) because you have evidence to prove it didn’t work last time. One of my biggies was that I was officially Facebook Ad challenged! I no longer use social media for my marketing strategy, so have no use for that label anymore.

How do you label yourself? You might tell yourself that you aren’t good enough to charge for your services or aren’t good enough because you’re new to the industry. You might be an established coach/mentor and still call yourself unsuccessful because you don’t have as many paying clients as you currently desire.

Create new empowering labels

It’s unlikely that your negative labels are supporting you in your business. What empowering labels or statements could you turn them into?

Take a pen and paper and write down all the labels you use for yourself in business and life.

What do you notice when you review your list?

Firstly, you might think you do this work with your clients. I’m sure you do, but how often do you take the time to do this work on yourself?

Back to the list – Is it a kind list, or are you being harsh? If you showed it to someone else, what might they think about what you’ve written? What things on your list would you like to change?

Work on your own limiting beliefs

If you’ve got many positive words, then fantastic. Celebrate those. You may find that you have negative things on your list too.  They’re the ones you need to work on, as they might be holding you back from being the fabulous version of you that you can be. To help clients, you must also work on your own limiting beliefs.

You could continue to label yourself in those old, unhelpful ways and potentially set up some new limiting beliefs around what you do, or you could start to reframe things and get a fresh perspective.

Identify old, unhelpful labels

It’s important to identify those labels that work for you and those that don’t. I remember working with a coach in the early days of my coaching, and I said, ‘I don’t know if my clients are getting the results they need from my sessions’. She pointed out numerous counts of results I’d helped clients achieve. I was labelling myself as a newbie coach and got stuck in the fear that I wasn’t as good as coaches with more experience. As my coach pointed out, I had the coaching skills, plus lots of work and life experience that I was also bringing to the table. She then asked how many years I needed to have under my belt before I would deem myself a ‘proper coach’.  Great question!

Challenge your assumptions

Challenge your assumptions of yourself and your coaching/mentoring. Challenge those labels and work with someone on your own limiting beliefs. You will be better able to serve your clients when you work on yourself.

Notice your inner talk

This week’s call to action is to listen to your inner talk and start to notice those times when you’re limiting yourself by saying that you’re not good enough, brave enough, successful enough etc. Start to pull together examples of when you are.

Mindset is one of the biggest things that stand in your way when running your own business. Let go of your limiting beliefs. They could be costing you clients. 

You work with clients on ways to improve their mindset, but what about yours?

One more to come.

Meet Ruby McGuireBusiness & Mindset Queen| Master Coach | Mentor |Trainer | Speaker | Author – MCIPD, AMC, NLP Coach & Practitioner, EFT Practitioner, Time Line Therapist and Mind Your Mind Practitioner.

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