Is Your Mindset Holding You Back?

Entrepreneurs working in the service industry face two major challenges: running a business and expanding their knowledge and expertise in their industry as a service provider. Even if you are a great project manager, your business suffers when you can’t keep up with invoicing or can’t close sales. This tends to happen when you have developed a mindset that is preventing you from doing your best work.

There is a difference between productive failure and destructive failure. Productive failure occurs when you try something new only to be unsuccessful, however, as you work on it, you eventually become an expert in that thing. It is important to be willing to fail and learn and engage with productive failure.

Over the years, you develop a sense of your own capabilities and limitations, and this determines what you do and don’t try. Often, you are not willing to try things you aren’t already good at, however, if you are willing to lean into failure then it is possible for you to master any task. Recognise the process of improvement rather than shutting down whenever you fail. Evaluate why you failed, what didn’t work and what did work. You need to take the next step and trust that you are capable and competent at what you do – this will transform your life into the one you want to lead.

Often, people split their to-do lists into things they ‘must’ do and things they ‘want’ to do. You create intrinsic value when you are interested and want to do that thing because it connects with your ultimate goal. Extrinsic value, on the other hand, stems from the expectations of society. Common ‘musts’ include needing to make sales calls, growing your business and developing a better invoicing system. These may not be things you want to do because deep down you believe you should let them go. You need to let go of extrinsic interest and start finding a way to develop intrinsic interest. Begin doing this by learning why someone is intrinsically interested in something. You will find that there is an interesting way to do what you must do, and by understanding how others are interested in it, you will get past times when you just don’t want to do it.