As Dani learned, stunning eyes, a great smile, and an excellent service are not quite enough to make you a successful entrepreneur or small business manager. You also have to have guts!
Getting past those fears that stop you from being great.
Success comes from gaining the fearlessness to try experiments, learn from mistakes, and face criticism from friends and family who mean well, but fear for your emotional and financial safety. It is not easy starting your own business facing fears like these. If it were, everyone would do it.
Feel the Fear But Do It Anyway
This past weekend at The Weekly Wisdom Games, we helped one of our players, Dani, face her fears and begin to get past them and into action.
Every new business owner, or even new manager, faces doubts and emotional uncertainties. However, the people who are successful don’t let fear stop them from acting. The fastest and surest way to win at the game of life is to try an action and then learn and grow from the results. Sometimes you get what you want, but most times you keep making adjustments as rapidly as necessary to achieve the results you are committed to.
Powerful Intention Is Emotional
The Weekly Wisdom Games this weekend was about setting your positive intention and moving toward it. By the word “Intention” we mean your aim or goal or plan, and the emotional set that affirms your commitment to that goal. Our game players discovered that intention is more than a mind game; there is a strong emotional component to the determination to getting your desired outcome.
If you don’t have the right emotional mindset, attitude, and mood, then it is difficult to muster the courage to face what you fear and do what you have to do to feel the fear and do it anyway.
Jedi Entrepreneur Tricks
To strengthen Dani’s toolkit for facing her particular challenges, we built her a
“Circle of Determination.” This is a cognitive-behavioral technique that uses stimulus-response conditioning to provide new pathways in the mind and emotional sets in the body.
Then we created a performance state of excellence exactly in the contexts where Dani needed her powerful positive emotions so she can successfully face her challenges. For Dani, her challenges had to do with fears of friends thinking and saying deflating things to her as she makes the move from the safe environment of working for other people to the exciting but risky environment of being her own business owner. She wanted more determination, more strength of commitment, and more fun and playfulness so that she can respond positively and creatively when criticisms come up or when she feels at risk personally.
We had her access memories of times when she was feeling powerfully committed and doing the hard stuff. We asked her to feel them really strongly, as if she were back living that memory in her body again right now, at this instant. Then when Dani could really remember and feel the positive emotions fully in core of her stomach and chest, we had her carry those positive resources into her “green Circle of Determination” by stepping forward into the circle she had imagined. Each time she stepped in to that circle, we showed her how to ramp up the emotions so that she was beaming with energy and empowerment.
After just a few repetitions of this, the pattern was set— her mind and body had learned to associate that imaginary green circle with those positive powerful emotions. We could see the change on her face and in her breathing and posture when she stepped into her Circle of Determination. Her demeanor was so different, so powerful, and so joyous.
Programming the Future
Next we had her imagine some situations where she might like to use this Circle of Determination to successfully face challenges and take productive action. Each time she thought of a situation that in the past might have stopped her, we had her step forward into her imaginary circle and feel all those positive emotions and imagine taking action without regard for fear or concern. This was a sort of mental rehearsal that helps to program the behavior to occur more automatically when we face similar real-life situations.
We could see that this had a powerful effect on Dani. She is an extremely competent professional with a lot to offer her clients. Her courage to face each learning experiment and grow through it to success will make or break her entrepreneurial adventures. While most new businesses don’t make it, with the right attitude Dani is off to a great start, and her commitment to do whatever it takes to learn to be her own boss puts her on the right footing.
Not Just For Entrepreneurs
If you, like Dani, have a project that’s really worth creating in the world, you might enjoy coming to play Wisdom Games with us each Saturday. We are a group of consciously-minded players who use games and exercises to grow ourselves and improve our communities. We would love to have you join us!
Wisdom Game Meetup Registration: http://wisdomgamecr.com/
WisdomGameCR page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WisdomGameCR
