The secret enemy to your online success

As anyone who has attempted to start their own business knows it’s never a bed of roses and before you see the results of a successful business there will be plenty of blood, sweat and tears. That’s the reason why so many people settle for employment. It offers a steady paycheck and regular hours. You can plan your life around your job and there is a certain amount of confidence to be gained in regular employment. The uncertainty which comes with a self employed business can be too much to bear for many. Often though, it isn’t necessarily a choice to become self employed. It comes about from either necessity or an unwillingness to accept what else is available or on offer.

For many, employment is the natural order of things and it is generally accepted that getting a steady job is something you have to do at one time or another in life. For those who have lost their job after years of hard service, or have never found something which satisfies, or never earned enough from employment, self employment offers a means to achieve something which doesn’t have the same restraints of a normal job. An online business offers anyone with drive and determination, the ability to work for themselves and free themselves of the time constraints and limitations of a normal job. However you do have to earn the privilege and only a small percentage of people actually turn their online pursuits into a viable and profitable way of life. Of the thousands who attempt an online business many fail and by failure I mean they give up!

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” ~Henry Ford

Two commonly sited reasons for failure with an online business are:

  1. an entitlement attitude
  2. a failure to develop the owner not the business.

As the owner of an online business, or any business for that matter, you as the owner must accept full responsibility for your business results. If you are not getting the results you desire, you and you alone are to blame. It is never the fault of the business, particularly when others have made the same model successful. Our attitude is something we carry through life and in certain businesses it can help us. However it can also hinder us, especially if we fail to see ourselves as a problem. The developing of the self is a fundamental part of any success and particularly an online business. If we fail to see ourselves as a part of our business then we can easily blame others, the business model or our individual circumstances for not making the grade.

See yourself as a work in progress, not the finished product. As we go through life we come up against problems. It is the way we deal with these problems which determines our long term outcomes. If we give up and fail to see the benefit of overcoming our problems, we remain where we are or fall to a more difficult situation. It is as much an inward journey as it is an outer one if we include our own self growth in our business. Look at your potential, not the results. Looking at the potential allows for change. If we look to ourselves always as the finished product and the results as what we can continue to expect, our response can be pessimistic. Looking to our potential offers the possibility of change.

The secret enemy to our online success lies in our own minds. Our limited thinking and perceived reality can hold us in a situation or circumstance which limits us. We cannot see our own attitudes but we can not escape them without becoming more aware of them and eventually changing them to greater serve our own lives. If you see yourself as a down trodden ‘struggling’ character, you will perpetuate this internal image into your results. Carrying a ‘poor me’ image or a ‘barely surviving’ persona will have a  huge impact on your results. We invest so much in our image of ourselves but it is of our own creation. Only by overcoming and surpassing our own limited image of ourselves will we create a new and better circumstance in our lives.

Notice how much of your words, thoughts and actions are empowered by a mental ‘image’ of yourself. How do you speak to yourself and of yourself to others. What company do you keep? How do they think of you? Noticing how you speak can often hold the key and we can easily dis-empower ourselves with our negative self talk.

In the word of Jay Kubassek one of my business mentors, ‘You can’t grow beyond your self image’.

To learn more about starting your own online business and developing yourself on the journey take a look at Stuarts Ross’s video here and subscribe to the free video series.