How to improve your thinking and enjoy better results in your business
This one big thing could be stopping you from achieving your goals, and it might not be what you expect..
As a one person business owner you have the blessing and the curse of being the only person truly responsible for all that happens in your business.
The buck stops with you. All of the time.
This can be really tiring and overwhelming when things are going wrong or if you’re in a bad place mentally. When things are going well on the other hand, when you’re feeling yourself, you’re bossing it and feeling fab… it’s very rewarding.
I am privy to the inner monologues of the clients I support through coaching. I can see what’s going on under the hood, so to speak. Over the years I’ve noticed one of the biggest influences on someone’s trajectory is their own mindset. Specifically, the thoughts they are having about their own chance of success.
Because Thoughts impact our Feelings, which impact our Actions which impact our Results. That’s the impact of a psychological model known as TFAR, at play.
Today, I am sharing how the TFAR model plays out and three examples of the inner chatter that you want to avoid, which could accidentally be sabotaging your prospects. For each example you’ll get some tools you can use to overcome the negativity once and for all.
As you may know all too well, negative thought patterns are a common and expected part of being human. There is no way you’ll ever eradicate negative thoughts entirely, and of course, many of them are just trying to protect us.
But let’s explore three relatively common thought patterns which can undermine your chances of success if they are left unchecked.
I’ll share some remedies for each, that are typical of the tools I use in client sessions to help course correct into a more productive place, pronto!
The “this will never work” thought.
Pessimism about your future is a sure fire way to avoid success. You might see your own pessimistic thoughts as simply ‘realistic’ or ‘pragmatic’ so as to prevent disappointment, but they can be way more damaging when compounded. There are no shortages of opportunities for disappointment in the one person business building journey and so if you look for them, you may just find them.
You’ve heard of the expression ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. This psychological phenomenon says that higher expectations lead to increased performance. Studies in the field of education have shown that when teachers hold high expectations for their students, those students tend to perform better academically.
Remember the TFAR model? If you don’t think something will work, you will feel unmotivated to try, your actions will be minimal, and the end result will be disappointing. E.g.:
So if you don’t expect your cold outreach to work you might not put the effort into it to secure success.
If you don’t think your new client prospect will go ahead with you, you won’t put your best foot forward for the call.
If you don’t think you have an interesting story to tell you won’t pitch your business for that PR opportunity… because what’s the point? We won’t get it anyway.
Thankfully, most entrepreneurs are optimistics, and idealistic about what they can achieve. Still, I have certainly seen my fair share of pessimism pop up in client sessions. Especially when something outside of a client’s comfort zone comes up, or they are testing a new hypothesis. Our thoughts are able to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit with our worldview and distort things to fit our current point of view.
Take a client, Adam for example (name changed) who was launching a new offer - both new for the market and new for him. He hoped, as many might, that just mentioning it once or twice would drive sign ups to the programme. However as the seasoned entrepreneur knows all too well… build it and they rarely come! Adam had a fantastic offer. It was branded brilliantly, and had been tested with thorough market research.
We had bi-weekly coaching sessions at this point, and between putting it out there, and the next session, Adam’s energy had completely changed.
The conversation went a little something like this..
I’ve come to this call to ask you what we should do now, he told me. Since it’s not working, I’m not really sure what we can use these sessions for.
I asked Adam what he meant, and he said that no one had taken him up on the offer, so in his mind, there was zero point in doing anything more and efforts so far had been wasted. Upon my inquiry, there had actually been one buyer, a family member, whom Adam had discounted. I asked if they were in the target market and he confirmed that they were. Wow, I said - there is interest! This person wouldn’t just buy this from you as a favour, they are investing their time too. He reluctantly agreed.
So, I posed... If you can get one person to buy, do you think you can get more? Adam looked doubtful but we leaned into the discomfort until he said that yes, there are probably others too.
We put together an outreach plan to contact people individually and share the offer. This can be time consuming, and feel scary and vulnerable to do, but it's a tactic I know works. And it did. Sign ups came in thick and fast. The pessimism and doubt were replaced with hope and ultimately, excitement and pride.
He messaged me mid way through:
Those 10 paid customers became 12 by the final hour. Not bad indeed.
Left unchecked, Adam’s trajectory may have looked very different. He may have dropped the idea altogether and started a new business or given up entrepreneurial ambitions altogether.
Adam, like many people I work with, is not ‘pessimistic’ in most walks of life. It was in this window of time that pessimism had the chance to build and nearly ruined chances of success.
I don’t want your pessimism, however small, to block your progress or make you ever feel like you have lost before you’ve even started.
Try these out for size if your pessimism is getting in the way:
Energy Investment Model. Typically used in teams to identify motivation levels of employees, these same four personas could be showing up in you as a one person business: Players, Spectators, Cynics and Deadwood. This shows us how our past might be influencing current behaviour and can shine a light on how we are showing up. Full explanation here.
List reasons it is working. I like to say to clients “It is already working” when I can see evidence that it is. So for you, I encourage you to write a list of 10 or more reasons something is already working out for you, however small, to build that encouragement back up.
Book a one off session with me (50 or 90 minutes) to unblock an area you are feeling pessimistic about. Interested? We start with a 15 minute chat to ensure this session is a fit, and I’ll send you details from there. Book in a chat.
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The “this has to be perfect” thought
In some ways we are all a little bit perfectionist. It may show up in work, our home, towards our beauty regime or in relationships. A perfectionist tendency can often bring positive rewards – driving us to achieve more, be more productive, have higher standards and encourage the same in others.
But the dark side of perfectionism is the browbeating voice in our heads that tells us we are never quite good enough. That we can always do better.
Perfectionism has been proven to increase levels of depression due to the unrealistic expectations it places upon us. Source.
Makes sense, they say happiness is about closing the gap between your expectations and your reality, and if you expect things to be perfect it's hard to be happy about many things. As a little girl I always felt this about my birthday parties - much to my parent’s dismay! Crying during party games? Me? Never.
Back to you…
If we take the TFAR model: If you think something has to be perfect to be worth putting out there, e.g a blog post, you will feel afraid about the quality of your work/others perceptions of it, and you will take forever to finish it or not put it out at all. The result? A lot of wasted time and energy on a task, ultimately slowing down your progress.
When I see perfectionist tendencies with my clients’ it is often disguised by traits like indecision, procrastination, a desire to ‘learn more’ first, or just not doing anything new or different.
In small doses, this is normal and, again, can have positive consequences. But in bigger doses is a huge trap that means progress is far too slow to be meaningful and a lot of potential and talent is wasted – overthinking, editing or revising ideas and decisions.
Take a client, let’s call her Jo.
Jo came to me wanting to break out of her client day rate work, unsure of what the ‘route out’ would be. She knew she had all of these ideas, and plans, but that in the past two years nothing had really worked out and she was ready for a step change.
Coaching started with some analysis of her current situation and it turned out she had been investing literally thousands of pounds into courses and education. Amazing. She really knew her stuff.
Except… all of these courses were languishing in her dropbox folder and not being put into action. Jo’s challenge was that she a) couldn’t decide what kind of work and business ideas to move forward with and b) every idea she did have, she felt not ‘ready’ enough to explore further.
We looked at her many options - she had a lot of knowledge about the space she was in - and came up with a shortlist of ideas. Over the three months of coaching together, this one idea became increasingly attractive. Jo was pumped and energised, and came to sessions with lots of insight about how she could market it and turn it into a service for her ideal customer. So we worked out a list of who that customer would be, exactly, and she had lots of those contacts already.
Jo had literally everything she needed for this next stage, including a day off each week to work on it.
But as we’d meet in sessions, I would hear very little progress made. There was always a reason each week why the messages couldn’t be sent, or the pitch deck wasn’t finalised, or the social media post didn’t get posted. Perfectionism was keeping Jo trapped. Remember TFAR - Jo’s progress was almost non-existent.
Sometimes in coaching sessions the mode of support I provide slips into more ‘active mentor’ or even execution. We pulled up the shared screen and started to make real time changes to things and I then worked with Jo to actually press ‘send’ on emails / posts. She was unable to fight the excuses under such duress! Of course, with her permission! Jo was fed up with not doing the ‘thing’ and needed that extra layer of accountability to get it done. With her skillset and reputation, the replies and inquiries soon started to come through. This unlocked a sense of confidence and ability to push past the discomfort.
A more helpful thought? “I am ready and this does not need to be perfect in order to see progress” — leads to feelings of adequacy, actions of momentum and better results, ultimately.
Try these tasks to overcome your perfectionism:
The inner boardroom exercise. Often when we fear we are not ready or something is not ‘perfect’ enough we have to recall whose voice we are listening to, REALLY. Often it’s someone else we have met in our lifetime who's impacting us subconsciously. Draw a boardroom table with stick figures, each one is a person of influence over you – past or present. Your parents, school teacher, boss, mentor or friend may show their face. Consider how much weight their opinion is holding on you right now, and how relevant they are to what you are trying to ultimately do.
Deliberately reduce the standard of what you are doing. This is a hypothesis test about what will happen when you ‘fail’ to do something perfectly on a small scale and then see what happens. Did the world stop turning? If you are able to see that your business success doesn’t depend on something being delivered perfectly each time, you begin to trust that you can act without all the shame and judgment holding you back
Get accountability. With someone else holding you accountable to a deadline, you will have to ‘ship’ regardless. Whether it’s your new website, a blog post, an email or your next presentation, tell your coach or business buddy when you are going to finish by. Create some kind of punishment e.g. £20 to a group you don’t support, if you don’t get it done. That’s an incentive!
The “I am not good enough” thought
Also known as Imposter Syndrome, the difference between this thought and the perfectionist thought, is that Imposter Syndrome is a deeper identity-level one. It’s a thought you as a person are not capable of achieving something, or be worthy of an opportunity. You fear being found out as a fake, you rarely acknowledge your accomplishments and you attribute success to luck.
Psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden says:
“Of all the ingredients we pass in life, none is more important than the judgement we pass on ourselves”.
As the TFAR model shows us, the thought that you are not good enough can be really damaging. If I don’t think I am good enough, that I am too stupid/lazy/boring [insert damaging thought here] then I will feel bad and remain unmotivated to do things that are going to actually help me improve in those areas.
If you want to charge higher fees for example, your imposter syndrome might tell you you can’t, so you continue to offer low fees. You don’t get the chance to see yourself as the person who charges higher fees, and who has to step up and deliver a higher level service and take on that identity. You continue playing small.
Imposter syndrome keeps people feeling left on the shelf, professionally speaking. As though others are racing past them and taking the opportunities. If it’s pervasive, you might convince others around you that you are not good enough either, and that self-fulfilling prophecy is enacted because you will literally be passed up for someone else. And so the cycle continues.
There’s a reason ‘fake it until you make it.’ is a pervasive message in our culture. We hear of the likes of Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé's alter-ego, taking stage for her when she doesn’t feel like the queen that she is. We’ve all worked under bosses and thought ‘how did you get there!?’ and then see their self confidence and understand this fact: if you believe you can, you often can.
I worked with a client, let’s call him Fred, who was running a business that was going well. It had started as his own one person consulting shop that had grown organically as demand for the service increased, he had hired a team of six and counting. When we worked together Fred’s anxiety and lack of confidence were cited as his reason for getting in touch. He knew all about imposter syndrome, having read the books and done some online courses but nothing stuck.
It was creating strange situations in his business, for example, big clients would enquire about working with him and the team. Fred would sit on those emails for weeks, not replying. He knew he was leaving money on the table and that it was doing him and the business a disservice to continue in this way but he struggled to break the pattern.
In our first session, Fred shared the history of the business. It turned out there was something that had happened years earlier that he hadn’t fully processed. He’d been rejected for funding and told that his business wasn’t right for this investor. What shouldn’t matter on the surface (his business was doing well without funding) had put a big dent in his ego.
Every time he ‘won’ e.g an award, revenue growth, incredible team members wanting to join the business, a new contract etc… Fred deep down didn’t feel worthy. He felt so unworthy of the success he had, that seeking more growth or success felt so scary. That’s why he ignored those emails.
You can only handle what you are capable of handling emotionally, physically and mentally. And until we addressed this block, Fred was actually unable to handle this success. We had one of those coaching ‘lightbulb’ moments in this session.
To cut a long story short, we addressed these feelings of inadequacy and re- built Fred’s confidence in his identity as a person who could handle success, as a leader and as an extraordinary business owner (he was!). Fred landed a contract with a global brand, worth nearly £1m, started his personal newsletter and hosted an industry event. A lot of the visualisation exercises we did together became true.
Proud coach doesn’t do it justice!
Do you feel ‘not good enough’ for the success you seek? Try some of these coaching tools on yourself to boost self-belief.
Stand up in a room, imagining that a timeline of your career is in front of you. Move to different parts of the timeline and recount experiences that have shaped you and what you learnt. Especially the ones you are proud of. Feel into the emotions and memory of your accomplishments. When you then finish the timeline, identify the highlights and the realisations you have about your career. You can even walk back, and do it the opposite direction again, to find anything you might have forgotten the first time around. Make a note once you are done.
Seek feedback from those around you. Ask 5 questions to 5 people asking “what do you value about me, what is my biggest strength, how would you describe me, what could I do differently for my own benefit, and what do you think my biggest achievement is”?. You’ll be surprised at the consistency of these answers and the confidence boost it can give you.
A magazine interview, with you, by your favourite publication. Imagine you are a journalist, meeting yourself. Write up the interview that journalist you would write about real you. Recount your story, achievements and why you took the path you did, as well as your beliefs and principles. This helps you to see yourself through another’s eyes.
As we’ve seen, your thoughts hold a significant sway over the success in your one-person business building journey. Managing both the responsibility and rewards of entrepreneurship can be challenging, made even more so with a negative mindset.
The TFAR model is a helpful rubric to remind us of the trajectory that follows negative thinking:
Pessimism can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, hampering your motivation. Embracing a positive outlook and high expectations is essential.
Perfectionism can lead to procrastination. To overcome it, accept imperfections and focus on progress.
Imposter Syndrome strikes at your core identity. Overcoming it requires self-acceptance and recognising accomplishments.
The stories of clients I’ve worked with like Adam, Jo, and Fred reveal the transformative power of changing these thought patterns. By addressing pessimism , embracing imperfection, and combating Imposter Syndrome, you can unlock your true potential and find the success you deserve in your one person business.
Remember that your thoughts shape your reality - a positive and empowered mindset makes your path to success clearer and more attainable.
If you are struggling with any of these thought patterns and not able to move past them yet, you might wish to consider coaching. Schedule a no obligation consultation with me to explore how we could work together and change your circumstances for the better.
