Using Your Inner Voice To Grow Your Business

A ten-minute exercise for results

Awareness
Becoming aware of the stories we tell ourselves can help us overcome issues. Is your inner voice friendly and helpful or a critic and hurtful?  Paying attention to our own stories, we notice our limiting beliefs. Whatever these are, they are holding us back.

Skill Up
All business skills are learnable.

What is the one skill, that if you had a magic wand and had mastered right now, would improve your business?

Whatever that is, ask yourself why you haven’t mastered this? Write your thoughts on paper. This way you capture your own stories.  If you don’t believe all business skills are learnable and you can improve on any skill, I’d ask you to open your mind to what others have achieved. I don’t believe people were born with business skills.

Whether its communication skills or confidence to speak up in the boardroom or make a presentation to a group of people, you can improve over time.

Business Growth
Whether you’re self-employed or working for someone else, you will only overcome obstacles and achieve more when you act to improve on your weakest link.

I firmly believe your income will be determined by your skills. Improving them consistently is the key to growing both your business and personally.

Personal story….
I was told in school I ‘could do better’. I was told in my working life by people I looked up to and trusted, that I hadn’t got certain skills. No suggestions to improve (…or perhaps I didn’t hear them!).

Once criticised, I retreated into my own personal bubble of continuously criticising myself (for years). I was, and still can be, harder on myself than anyone who criticises me. When others make mistakes, I insist they realise that we are all human and mistakes happen. Yet I realised by listening to my own critic, I didn’t give myself a break.

I let people’s criticism and opinions form my own internal dialogue for a long time. I didn’t realise skills to help my business were learnable and by acknowledging where I felt I was lacking, and working on these, I could improve on them.

There are people from all sorts of backgrounds, people born with very little that you can look to for inspiration if you struggle with internal issues of confidence or have limiting beliefs.

Challenge yourself to look at their stories, find more and more that will help you realise we are what we decide to become.
Your internal story will determine how much you achieve.

‘WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU WILL BE’

I was invited to attend a lunch hosted by The Executive Institute last Friday. The guest speaker was Christina Noble (see here or here for her amazing work).

The interview with Christina was more than inspiring. Listening to Christina, it’s clear she was and still at 74, is determined to fight for the vulnerable children she cares for and what she believes in.

Putting it mildly, she had a very tough childhood. With pure determination, grit, understanding what she wanted and letting no one’s opinion stand in her way, she has now had a positive impact on more than one million lives.

This is a story of an amazing woman and you might think it can’t happen for me. All I ask today is we listen to that little voice and notice if it’s helping or hurting us and our business.

Take ten minutes out today, write your answer to the question above on paper and challenge your own limiting beliefs.

Have a great week

Wendy

[26 August 2019]