Are you progressing in life? Do you think you can do better than what you currently have? Are you trapped in your comfort zone ?
A good way to imagine a comfort zone is to stand up and draw a large imaginary circle around yourself.
Whilst you stand in this comfort zone, everything feels safe and secure. Most people live within their comfort zone most of the time and without realizing it. This is a dangerous trap !
However, success does not come from standing in your comfort zone ! Success come from challenging yourself, from stretching yourself and from feeling uncomfortable.
Fears & Limiting Beliefs
Fear is the enemy of entrepreneurs. It lives within our mind. Fear goes hand in hand with self doubt and is simply the emotion that’s triggered from the doubts in our mind. All fears, no matter how small, are magnified when we are alone. Our mind, as well as being our greatest asset, when gripped with fear, can be our worst enemy.
Think of a few examples of your own fears. Perhaps you can relate to one of these, fear of starting your own business, fear of making phone calls to new prospects, fear of public speaking or fear of leaving your existing job.
Fear expresses itself in many ways, but the most common manifestation is lack of action. For example, not making decisions, procrastinating, avoiding the very thing that causes fear in the first place, indeed lack of action in doing anything other than confronting your fear head on, which by the way is the best way to conquer it.
Fear is the biggest reason most people don’t become entrepreneurs. It is the fear that they wouldn’t succeed, or in other words, it is the fear of failure. For example, fear stops you making the necessary phone calls, stops you saying no instead of yes, or could even stop you making the decision to fire a troublesome member of your team.
It is this type of fear that leads to direct negative impact on your sales and therefore, your cash flow. And as we know, from insufficientcash flow comes business failure.
Successful entrepreneurs comes from facing and conquering fears of the future, and overcome limiting beliefs about your past head-on. They realise that there is no room for fear or crippling self doubt in the making of an successful entrepreneur.
Success comes from doing the things you do not want to do. Successful entrepreneurs have a healthy respect for the challenges they take on, and at times it may feel uncomfortable, but those who achieve success have one key weapon against fear, this weapon is Action.
Direct action against your fear is the fundamental method of conquering it. A popular approach to conquer fear is to ICE your fears. That’s to Identify, Confront and Eliminate them. What’s needed however, is courage and mental strength.
Closely coupled with fear are limiting beliefs. A limiting belief, as the name suggests, is a belief that limits your success. It is your view of the past that puts constraints on your future achievements.
A classic example of this is back in the 1950s, when it was believed that no human could run a mile in under 4 minutes. This was a self imposed limiting belief that many world class athletes measured themselves by. This belief lasted until the mid 1950s. However,in May 1954 on an Oxford race track, history was made. Roger Bannister believed that a mile could be run in less than 4 minutes and he broke the 4 minutes mile barrier and shattered the limiting belief that held others back.
Within the year, 37 other people had broken the 4 minutes mile barrier and in the following year, another 300 people had got the better of their limiting beliefs. At the start of the new millennium, the world record stands at 3 minutes 26 seconds, over half a minute faster that 50 years ago.
Although fear of the future may stop you from taking action, limiting beliefd built around your past impose the boundaries on your future success. It doesn’t matter how successfulyou are as an entrepreneur, you may still have limiting beliefs about how successful you can become in the future. Like fear, limiting beliefsmust be eliminated in order to achievethe true level of success that you aspire to.
A constraint which holds us back from achieving more is the concept of comfort zones. Most people operate witin their natural boundaries and refuse to stretch themselves beyond that, even though they are blessed with an abundance of ability and natural talent. It’s their reluctance to step outside ther comfort zone that limits their success. An example of this may be starting a new business or building an additional income stream, both of these however require you to stretch yourself to new limits and will feel uncomfortable.
As an entrepreneur, you must do the very thing which scares you. You must sow a seed of opportunity everyday by do one thing everyday that makes you feel uncomfortable. This may be making a phone call to a high profile prospect, making a speech to an audience of 500 people or closing the door on one chapter of your life to pursue a new future.
Whatever it is, you know when your are stepping outside your comfort zone as you get a feeling in your stomach. If you want to become successful, then it’s only when you are stretching yourself that you are moving forward and challenging yourself as true entrepreneurs do.
This is a good feeling, is it means you are doing something that other people are not prepared to do. It also means that you are getting closer to reaching your goals.
It was Eleanor Roosevelt who famously said that you should do one thing each day that scares you. What do you do each day that scares you?
“I don’t run away from a challenge because I am afraid. Instead, I run towards it because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your foot”—Nadia Comaneci
My 642 Arsenal of Success 