One of the most intriguing things about business (and life) is how two people can have substantially the same opportunities - training, know-how, capital and experience - yet produce dramatically different results. This paradox exists everywhere.

Having the right mindset for business success goes well beyond establishing goals and being positive. In part one, we considered the importance of being aware of your reality and understanding your expectations to develop a successful mindset. In this second-part, we consider the following:

3- Responsibility. To have a success mindset you MUST acknowledge your responsibility. Highly successful people acknowledge their responsibility. Only by acknowledging your responsibility can you take control and invoke the necessary steps to be successful. Blaming others, validating failures and making excuses are simply ways of avoiding YOUR responsibility. To become more responsible:

• Acknowledge that if you want your desired outcomes to be realised, YOU solely are responsible.
• Others DO NOT share your passion for your vision. They may say they do, but ultimately only you are truly passionate about achieving your vision.
• Accept that others will not complete things to your entire satisfaction.
• Take full responsibly for outcomes. Avoid blaming others. Even when you delegate a task or use an outside business, if something is not done to satisfaction, YOU are ultimately responsible. Often when people delegate a TASK, they also try to delegate RESPONSIBILITY. This is not appropriate to successful people. YOU:
• May not have given clear enough direction;
• May not have effectively managed the process;
• May have withheld important information;
• May have varied your expectations of the outcome without informing the other party;
• May not have managed the resource well enough;
• Chose the employee/supplier in the first instance.
• Have the choice to use another person/supplier.

4- Appropriate use of Force. Highly successful people apply their time in the most leveraged areas to escalate the success of their business.

Business is diverse. As a business owner you’re required to perform an extremely diverse range of activities on a daily basis. Each individual has their strengths and weaknesses. And each has their specific area of interest. People generally do what they perceive they’re best at, or feels most comfortable. NOT what’s best for the business.

First and foremost you have to realise that YOU ARE A BUSINESS OWNER. You are not a Life Coach, an administrator, or a bookkeeper. You must put the interests of the business first. Only then will you think and act in a context that will assist you build a flourishing business. Only then will you apply force in the right areas to create maximum forward momentum toward your objective.

The most powerful question you can ask yourself (and should ask yourself SEVERAL TIMES per day) is “What is the most effective use of my time RIGHT NOW?”

Other questions you should ask yourself include:

• What tasks do you most like doing?
• What tasks do you least like doing?
• Where do you spend the majority of your time and effort?
• What tasks, if done well, would make the most significant positive impact on the success of your business?

5- Your subconscious holds a powerful key. Your subconscious has extraordinary power. Your subconscious is your hard working servant to your conscious thoughts. In fact, your subconscious mind never stops working. That’s good and bad.

Your subconscious works day and night 24/7 making your conscious thoughts become reality. What you think, you are. Unfortunately, most people consciously think limiting, negative thoughts. These negative conscious thoughts put the subconscious to work, and hence they become a reality. And then people say “See, I told you that would happen”.

Reflecting back on our comments about self concept, people that have a poor self concept in a specific area ALWAYS have poor conscious thoughts relating to that area. For instance, if you think (your self concept) you are not good at public speaking; you will find that you reinforce it through your conscious thoughts. When someone mentions public speaking you’ll think to yourself “I hate public speaking. I just can’t do it. I get really nervous and usually make a fool of myself”.

Your subconscious can not discern between positive and negative. It simply acts to bring your thoughts into reality. So when you consciously think about being bad at public speaking, guess what happens? You become bad at public speaking!

The beauty of the subconscious is that you are never aware of the diligent work it does. So it doesn’t actually feel as though you have expended any effort. So in order to invoke positive outcomes you must concentrate on having positive, effective conscious thoughts. You’ll then immediately put your subconscious to work in a positive context:

• Think in positives and always expect the best.
• Reframe all your negative conscious thoughts into positives.
• Think of your subconscious as a child that requires careful training and direction.
• Become more aware of your negative conscious self talk.
• Spend 20-minutes each night in bed before sleep thinking about positives and affirming your positive expectations.

6- The power of perseverance. Perseverance is a sum of positive attitude and persistence. Perseverance goes hand in hand with expectation. If you fully expect a certain outcome, there is no obstacle that can’t be overcome.

To the expectant, persevering mind, a challenge is an opportunity for a solution. It’s simply something that has to be worked through on the road to success. When confronted with a challenge, the expectant, persevering mind will think “That’s part of life and business, what’s the best solution?”

To the non-persevering mind a challenge is a barrier. The non-persevering mind doubts that a challenge can be overcome. They look for the worst in every situation and hence the worst often occurs. When confronted with a challenge, the non-persevering mind will think “Oh no, it’s happening again. Why does all this bad stuff have to happen to me? It always seems to happen to me and not anyone else.”

Worry is simply a negative thought caught up in procrastination. To develop a success mindset, you must develop perseverance. Because challenges confront everyone, they are not discriminatory!

7- There is someone that can do better than you. This is probably not the type of realisation that someone aiming to establish a success mindset would ordinarily have! But it’s simply reality. Once you accept that there is someone out there that could walk into your business tomorrow and do significantly better with the exact same resources, you’ll acknowledge that YOU can do more, better.

You’ll quickly realise that you have the capacity to make an extraordinary difference in your business. The thoughts you have; where you focus your attention; the assistance you seek from others; how you apply your capital; the skills you seek out to attain; all dramatically influence your success - and hence your lifestyle.

This is Part 6 of the special series “Discover the Work You Were Born to Do“, by author Nick Williams.

By the end of this article, you will have explored:

• The new entrepreneurial spirit
• Some of the common objections to becoming an entrepreneur
• The six passions behind the new entrepreneurial spirit

A new entrepreneurial spirit emerges via the work we were born to do. As we have seen, it is based on creative inspiration rather than purely on economic gain. I call working in this way being ‘an inspired entrepreneur’.

However, many people’s hearts sink when they think about turning something they love into a business. There are two major reasons for this:

Being an entrepreneur or business owner has connotations of being tough, greedy, competitive, self-serving and perhaps even exploitative: just as the word ‘work’ is negatively emotionally laden for many people, so is the word ‘business’. But it needn’t be! Both words can be redeemed when we realise that a successful business can be based on serving people without losing our integrity in the process.

‘Going commercial’ does not mean that you are suddenly transformed into an aggressive salesperson who looks at everyone with pound (or dollar or euro) signs in their eyes. However, being an inspired entrepreneur does mean being willing to ask for (and accepting) money for your work and proactively seeking financial reward. After all - if your business struggles to accept money - how can it grow to serve the world in a greater way?

Another big myth is that, by turning professional, we’ll somehow lose our love for the work as it will be reduced to a sterile business activity. We may think that amateurs ‘do it for love’ whereas professionals ‘do it for money’.

I want to turn this around and suggest that if we stay amateurs at something we love, then we actually don’t love that activity enough! As professionals we may accept money for what we do, but we also do it for the love of it. We have to love what we do, otherwise why would we want to dedicate so much of our life, time and energy to it?

We look out into the world and think, ‘But there is so much competition. What’s special about me? How am I ever going to beat the competition to find my customers? I don’t have enough to offer!’

There are various issues to understand here. Firstly, each one of us is unique and whatever we do will be unique - so customers may choose you simply because they like the unique way you approach the work.

Secondly, far from there being a shortage of opportunity, the world is overflowing with it. There are so many unmet human needs, things being done badly, and dull and uninspiring businesses out there. If we do something in a competent and inspired way, we are very likely to succeed.

And finally, the economy is always growing and people are always spending more money. So we don’t necessarily have to compete - we just need to turn up, show people what we do and - as people see what we do - they will start wanting it!

The main difference between an ordinary entrepreneur and an inspired entrepreneur is whether our focus is mainly on seeking money or serving our own heart.

The two are by no means exclusive, but the key question is which factor we are primarily motivated by. The prevailing questions for most ordinary entrepreneurs are: ‘What is hot?’ ‘Where can I make money?’ ‘What is the market hungry for?’ ‘Where is the demand?’ In contrast, the prevailing questions that guide the inspired entrepreneur are: ‘What does my heart want to do?’ ‘What am I inspired to do?’ ‘How can I help my fellow human beings?’

Inspired entrepreneurs are the motivating, central cause in their working lives - rather than being at the mercy of outside forces and dictated to by markets.

I want to help you discover what’s in your heart and then successfully take it to the marketplace - so that many people can experience the benefit of it and so you can create a successful business of your own.

You can be a force in the marketplace without selling out. When you do what you love - the money will follow - but you will need to learn how to make the money follow rather than just hoping that it will. And I can teach you that.

The Six Passions Behind the New Entrepreneurial Spirit

Whilst the new entrepreneurial spirit is not primarily about making money, many inspired entrepreneurs are very successful financially - and you can learn to ‘put out the welcome mat for money’ in the same way.

The new spirit sees business simply as a vehicle, not as an end in itself. It is a great canvas onto which to express our soul, find freedom, be creative, make a contribution and grow and evolve ourselves.

The new entrepreneurial spirit does not necessarily lead to our wanting to create a huge business; most likely it will manifest itself as a desire to be a solo professional, working in association with others - with a handful of employees at most - and often working from home.

It’s based on six principal passions:

A passion for the work you were born to do. Being an inspired entrepreneur is about doing what we love and work we’re passionate about, with a sense of purpose… it’s about serving our clients and generating the income we need and want - whilst feeling that we are doing what we came here to do. Inspired entrepreneurs get out of bed fastest and go to work happiest; they hit the ground running because they express themselves through their work and find intrinsic fulfilment in doing it.

A passion that creates something that didn’t exist before. Being an entrepreneur is not a job title, but a state of mind. The inspired entrepreneur sees business as an inherently creative act. The Latin root of the word ‘create’ is creare, meaning ‘to bring into being’; to bring a business into being means imagining it first, dreaming it into existence.
Even though the world can seem an unsafe place for our dreams, we can all find the courage and skills within ourselves to bring our dreams into existence. Inspired entrepreneurs see the creative potential and power in ideas; they love creating things and they love doing things creatively. And once they have created something, they are always wondering what is next.

A passion for freedom, individuality and interdependence. This expresses itself as a need to ‘do your own thing’ and as a tendency to take responsibility for yourself and for your business. An inspired entrepreneur has little interest in blaming her mother, the economy, or the Government, realising instead that she can only truly change herself.
The inspired entrepreneur is in charge of his own destiny, and that makes him giddy with excitement. With this spirit, we want to help change the world, not wait for the world to change. In doing so we become more fully alive, and that vitality is transmitted energetically to our customers, attracting customers who are also fully alive.

A passion for personal growth and fulfilment of your potential. As humans our nature is to keep growing, developing and unfolding into our own greatest good - so there is nothing sadder or more tragic than to have our potential go untapped. There is a greatness of spirit in everyone, and our fulfilment will come from finding and expressing that potential through our work. Our playing small does not serve the world.

Our work and business can stretch us and help us discover our creative talents and solve problems; it can enable us to satisfy continually our curiosity about all that we can become. Through it, we can discover and activate new aspects of ourselves, constantly evolving and learning. And as we grow, so the opportunities open to us increase as well. We will find ourselves presented with more exciting projects, bigger challenges and new things to master. In this way, we don’t stay as acorns, but grow into oak trees. The business we end up with may be very different from the one we start; it will always be evolving and changing as we learn, grow and understand more.

A passion for building a lifestyle, not just a business. When we are doing the work we were born to do, the delineation between work, play and life begins to blur for us. When our work is an expression of our real Self, we won’t want to get away from it, although we may well occasionally need to refresh and renew ourselves. Even when we are doing what we love, we will still want and need fun, family, friends, balance, renewal, rest and adventure, and time just to ‘be’ rather than ‘do’. But we will nevertheless become a whole person in the process, rather than someone who lives their life in compartments.

A passion for service and contribution. Service and contribution are what makes your life fulfilling, and making a difference in the world is the highest function of your business. Your own inspired business can be a great way for you to share your particular gifts and talents with people, and make your unique contribution to life, and make your difference in the world.

It can be a channel for your generosity of spirit. A passion for helping others will lead you to richer life financially, emotionally and spiritually. You can have what you want in life when you help enough other people get what they want. And one of the greatest ways of contributing is you doing what you love and working from the highest energy place within you.

If people around you, or you yourself, doubt your sanity for wanting to give up your career or secure job in order to pursue the work you were born to do, then consider the points above. Remember the reasons why you are setting out on this path and the many rewards along the way!

About the Author

Through his books, and live talks, workshops, personal coaching and on-line learning programmes, Nick Williams has inspired tens of thousands of people to discover the work they were born to do.

Website: www.nick-williams.com
Blog: http://nickwilliams100.typepad.com

One of the most intriguing things about business (and life) is how two people can have substantially the same opportunities - training, know-how, capital and experience - yet produce dramatically different results. This paradox exists everywhere.

Within the coaching industry, there are extremely successful coaches, and coaches that find it a challenge even to get clients. Yet each coach may have had substantially the same resources when they started. So what’s the difference? And how can you ensure that you’re the successful coach?

Whilst coaches may make different strategic choices at junctures in their business development, there is one overriding factor that differentiates extremely successful business people from the rest. That key differentiator is their MINDSET.

Having the right mindset for business success goes well beyond establishing goals and being positive. To develop a Success Mindset, consider the following:

1- Your reality is a mirage. Have you ever considered what your reality actually is? How it was formed? And how your perception of your reality affects outcomes in your life?

To each of us our reality feels extremely tangible and real. Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, expectations, capabilities and limitations all feel real. They feel as though they are things that happen to us over which we have little control. As though they are external forces that ultimately drive us toward our future or fate.

Yet the truth is: people with substantially the same circumstances often have extremely contrasting realities (or perceptions of their realities). When impacted by the same set of events, whether opportunities or challenges, people with much the same physical resources to deal with that event, produce dramatically different outcomes.

Consider 2 start-up coaches. Each is in their late 30’s, each just finishing a coaching qualification, each with similar start-up capital, skills and attributes. Each coach competes in the same market. They have substantially the same opportunity to create their future. And yet within 6 to 12-months one may have a prospering business turning over $10,000+ per month, and one may be struggling to get clients. This is an extremely common scenario (not just in coaching, but in business and in life).

One of the most important differentiators between the successful coach and the other is their perception of their reality. To an outside observer, each coach has the same resources and hence should have the same reality, and produce the same results. Yet, successful people are often able, through subconscious and cognitive processes, to frame their reality in such a way as to create a substantially more beneficial outcome.

They are able to see opportunity where others see adversity. When confronted by a challenge they’re able to reframe it into a positive outcome. They’re able to remain focussed on their objectives. They’re able to see the bigger picture rather than being caught up in non-productive activities.

Take some time to think about YOUR reality:

• What is your perception of your reality?
• What beliefs do you have about yourself, your capabilities or your circumstances that are limiting your capacity to achieve a better reality?
• How did you formulate those beliefs? Are they learned? Have they been reinforced by past failures? If so, why do they need to limit your future?
• Are you aware of other people, in similar circumstances to your own that have a ‘better’ reality than yours? If so, why can’t you create a reality better than the one you’re in now?
• What steps do you need to action to produce a set of belief systems that are conducive to you creating the reality you want?

2- Expectation. Expectations are the precursor of outcomes. What you expect to happen will happen. The expectations you have are extremely powerful in determining the outcomes you produce. It’s very rare indeed that we have a low expectation and produce a high outcome. Highly successful people expect to be successful. And interestingly, they expect to be successful even before they have evidence to validate such expectation.

Using the case study above, the successful coach expects (not wants, but expects) to be successful. Deep in their inner being they KNOW with absolutely certainty that they are going to be successful. They are void of doubt. They know with certainty that they will achieve their desired results. Any challenges that confront them along the way they KNOW they will overcome.

The other coach however, may WANT to be successful, but they have limiting beliefs which prohibit them from expecting to be successful. These limiting beliefs manifest in doubt and work at a subconscious level to ensure that the coach is not successful. Their ‘want’ to be successful is a conscious desire. It’s not hard coded into their being. But their doubts are hard coded, and hence overcome their conscious thoughts about success.

In both instances, the coaches are correct in their expectations!

It’s critical that if you want to be successful, and develop a success mindset, that you identify limiting beliefs and reframe them. You NEED to hard code your positive expectations and become void of limiting beliefs and doubts. Only then will you be able to develop expectations that will be realised.

• What beliefs do you have that are limiting your ability to achieve?
• I don’t have enough experience to be successful in business?
• People won’t perceive me as an expert?
• People won’t pay me enough for my services that I could be successful?
• It’s impossible for me to charge $500, or $2,500 per month for my service.
• If I ask someone to commit to a contract they won’t see value in it?
• I feel uncomfortable asking people to sign up for my service.
• I feel embarrassed talking to people about my service and about myself.
• What past or present experiences do you have that may reinforce your limiting beliefs?
• I only earn $30,000 per annum now, so it’s impossible for me to earn $100,000 per annum in business.

So WHERE does your REALITY and EXPECTATIONS come from and how can you change them? Your reality and expectations are founded in your SELF-CONCEPT. Your self concept is essentially how you perceive yourself. And your overall self concept is an average of how you perceive yourself in all areas of your life. For instance, you have a self concept of your ability as a driver, as a parent, son, business person, coach and salesperson.

Coaches with a weak Marketing Mindset, have a poor self concept of themselves as salespeople. If you ask a coach with a poor marketing mindset: “Are you good at selling your services?” or “Are you good at closing sales?” they will invariably answer “NO!” 

The paradox is that your self concept is totally subjective. Your limiting beliefs are mostly based on erroneous information. It is not founded on reality. It is ONLY a CONCEPT. In areas where you PERCEIVE you perform well, you DO perform well. In areas where you believe you perform poorly, you WILL perform poorly.

Most often limiting beliefs and poor self concepts are developed from early experiences that have resulted in poor outcomes. Often these experiences don’t even relate directly to the area of your self concept. They are often superimposed from similar experiences or simply presumed. But once they’re formed they are significant impediments to performance.

To develop a positive, effective marketing self concept you must:

• Accept that your ability to perform well at marketing is only limited by your perceived ability to so. As soon as you accept this fact you are then able to begin work on developing an effective marketing self concept.
• Actively and consciously take the necessary steps to reframe your belief systems.

The results you achieve (in marketing and business) are DIRECTLY proportional to what you perceive yourself to be worth, or deserving to achieve. And this is directly related to your self concept.

Often coaches enter the profession with a certain financial objective. Yet this objective is vastly disproportionate to what they’ve been achieving in their lives prior to entering coaching. If you’ve been earning $45,000 per annum for 10-years, then you have significant and powerful reinforcement that you are only worth $45,000 per annum. To earn substantially more than that, you must reframe your self concept or you’ll find that you’ll cap your ability to earn as a coach at $45,000 per annum.

Use AFFIRMATIONS and reinforcement strategies to reframe your limiting self concepts. Your self concept as a salesperson or business person has been established and reinforced for a LONG time.

To re-wire your beliefs takes proactive strategies and repetition. It is simply not enough to say to yourself “Ok, I’m going to be a good salesperson now”. You must invoke change at a deep subconscious level.
 
In part two (next post), we will look at how responsibility, appropriate use of force, perseverance and other factors can assist you develop a success mindset.

John started his business a few months ago and has been extremely busy since. He approaches with the following question: “I’m so busy at the moment. How do I start to get more balance in my life again?” As the coach, what can you suggest to this client?

Terry Neal, LCI Master Coach, answers…

The desire by a client to get their life into balance can come from a realisation that they are feeling tired, irritable and/or on edge a good deal of the time. 

It could also be because they have started to notice that they’re not being part of activities that they have done in the past with family and friends that they used to do regularly or because they feel that they don’t have enough time to do what they enjoy doing for themselves by themselves.

It could be simply that some aspect of what they do whether its work or otherwise related, has become the predominant aspect of their life (in this case, John’s business start-up) and they’d like to change this. However, whatever the reason is for this client coming to you, one positive feature is that they have recognised their situation and hopefully will be more easily motivated to change it.

Questions and Exercises

As the coach here I suggest you start by asking your client some questions that will help both of you to be clear about what your client sees as the problem at this time and how your client views their possible “balanced lifestyle”.

Questions like: “What do you want that you don’t seem to be able to achieve?” “What kind of person would you be if you had a more balanced life?” “What would you be doing if you were living the life that you wanted to live?” Your client’s answers to these and other questions will give you both a clearer picture of what a ‘balanced lifestyle’ means for your client.

You could then follow up with questions like: “What prevents you from having this balanced life?” “Do you really want to change your life to become more balanced?”

If the response to the second question here is YES then an activity you could do with your client is the Absolute Yes List. This involves asking your client to list activities that they currently feel they need to do on a regular basis, then deciding what activities they feel are really important to them and then to note which of your client’s current activities are not considered important and which can either be stopped, or have the amount of time allocated to them reduced.

The exercise itself involves asking your client to sit comfortably with a note book and initially to write down their responses to the following questions: “What activities that I do now are important for me to do on an ongoing regular basis?” Encourage them to write and not judge whatever they feel is important at this time.

Next ask your client: “What activities need my attention at this time in my life?” “What activities do I used to do and now haven’t done for a while?” Once again encourage them to not judge what they write down. Also ask them to consider as many different aspects of their life as they can - areas like relationships, work, community, hobbies and so forth - and to write down whatever comes up.

Once they have finished this list, ask them to nominate the top 5 activities that they feel they would like to put their energy into on a regular basis. If 5 feel too confining, they could list 10 but I suggest that this needs to be the upper limit. This list could be a mixture of those that they feel they ‘need’ to do on a regular basis and those that they feel they would like to devote time to again.

The point here is that while there will probably be some areas that your client will feel that they will still need to devote much time to, for example their career, there could be others that have not had any prominence before and now potentially will be given a higher priority by your client in their daily or weekly routine.

You could encourage your client to write out these top 5 activities on small pieces of paper and to place them in strategic positions around their home, their work area, in their car or wherever they spend amounts of time. This is because the more times they see and read them, the more likely they’ll say yes to these activities and no to a request from either someone else or even from themselves to do an activity that’s not on this list.

Conclusion

Encourage them to review this Absolute Yes List every 3 to 6 months and to note how they feel about this list of chosen activities. They could ask the questions: Is my life more in balance? Am I holding to my list of absolute yes? Do I need to amend this list?

This review will help your client to decide if a change of activities is required or if this same list can continued to be worked with until the next review time.

This coaching case study, along with many others, is available from Coaching Club’s article category ”Case Studies”.  To access these cases, start your 30-day free trial at www.coachingclub.com.au.

This is part 5 of the special series “Discover the Work You Were Born to Do”, by author Nick Williams.

By the end of this article, you will have explored:

• Be inspired to the possibility of becoming an entrepreneur.
• Discover the four major business types.
• Learn the difference between being a practitioner vs. being an entrepreneur.

The spirit that inspires us to the work we were born to do is deeply aligned to our entrepreneurial nature.

… It embodies a call to be the master of our own destiny - and thousands of people have discovered that running their own inspired business can be a fabulous vehicle for achieving this.

You may be attracted by ideas of becoming entrepreneurial - being your own boss - and gaining control of your own life - but how might this translate into a real business?

The Four Major Types of Business

What different areas of businesses are there? Below are four major types of business that our ideas could give rise to:

1. The creation and manufacture of physical products.

We might decide to create products that we love, such as jewellery, art, and inventions of all kinds. Obviously these items will need to be sold and marketed in shops, at exhibitions, one-to-one, or via the internet or mail order. We might wish to do the marketing ourselves or get someone else to do it for us.

2. Personal Services.

This is when we perform a service on someone else’s behalf, that they could do themselves, but would rather not do; such as decorating, cleaning or gardening. Alternatively, we provide a service in which we offer specialist knowledge or special skills, for example, in the areas of: coaching, massage, healing, consulting, plumbing, building, public relations, marketing and selling, etc.

3. Information.

This is known as being an infopreneur. We can package our wisdom, ideas, experience, knowledge and expertise and share them with people who’ll benefit from it.
 
We can make this an in-person exchange by giving talks, workshops, tele-seminars and courses, or we can achieve it via the creation of ‘information products’. These products can be physical items such as books, articles and CDs, or digital products such as e-books and MP3s. We can also package other people’s knowledge for profit.
 
If this appeals to you, click here to enrol on a free programme that I have developed with my friend and business partner Niki Hignett to help you understand how to create a successful information-based business.

4. Renting, leasing or becoming a landlord.

This is when we own something and let others use it in return for income, such as dress hire, car hire, a house or flat, or the props used on film sets.
 
Whilst the type of business we become involved in may be an important consideration - a more pressing issue involves the reasons why we enter business in the first place - and how it can become a vehicle for our personal freedom.
 
Creating a business of our own is not just about escaping employment or boring bosses, but relates to our freedom to create, express ourselves, make a difference, fully utilise our talents and earn money.
 
Business can be a creative enterprise in itself. When we are trying to create something that is original, that stands out from the crowd and that will, hopefully, serve some useful purpose, our efforts have meaning.
 
Above all we want to bring into being something that we can be truly proud of! I suggest that nobody goes into business purely to make money or to escape employment - if those are your sole motives then I believe you are better off not doing it. A new business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts and cause you to keep growing.
 

Being a Practitioner vs. Being an Entrepreneurial Business Owner

It is important to recognise the difference between being a practitioner of something we love and becoming an inspired entrepreneur in our chosen area.

We may love being a coach, designer, recruitment consultant, plumber, homeopath, therapist or artist, and we may be talented and very good at one of those jobs. But it is something else again to want to start our own business and generate independent income from doing what we love.

Being talented, or even brilliant at something, is no guarantee of our building a successful independent business in our chosen work.

To succeed, we need to have the mindset of an entrepreneur.

… This means knowing how to find and attract the clients whom we can best serve with our unique talents, so that we can build a sustainable business around our services. We must remember that we are running a business, even if we are the only person in that business!

About the Author

Through his books, and live talks, workshops, personal coaching and on-line learning programmes, Nick Williams has inspired tens of thousands of people to discover the work they were born to do.

Website: www.nick-williams.com
Blog: http://nickwilliams100.typepad.com