COACHING INSIGHTS

WHAT BLOCKS YOU FROM GREATER SUCCESS?

All business and sales success (or lack of it) starts in your head. Think about it. All your ideas, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and motivation are generated in that 3-pound concentrated mass of neurons that’s housed inside your skull.

Unfortunately, we all have certain tendencies or conflicts inside our heads that get in the way of our doing or attaining what we want. I call these “personal demons.”

Having coached hundreds of people at all levels of success, I can tell you I have never met a single soul who doesn’t have demons in some form or fashion. It’s simply part of the human condition. I’ve found that there are 3 basic kinds of demons that block people in their business success:

  • Limiting beliefs – Many people secretly harbor disempowering beliefs, like “I’m not good enough,” “I don’t deserve success,” “making a lot of money is somehow bad or wrong,” “I’m a fake, fraud or phony,” “Selling is bad,” “People can’t be trusted.” The list goes on and on.
  •  Monkey brain – Many people experience a constant chatter of self-doubting thoughts—for example, “I can’t do this,” “Who am I to be successful?” “I suck at sales,” “What if I screw up?” etc.
  • Unresolved negative emotions – Many people have unresolved fear, anger, or shame from the past that holds them back from being all they can be.

As I said before, we all have our demons, but for many people they remain largely unconscious. Our demons linger in the background, undermining our ideas, plans, and actions. Our demons hamper our outlook and energy and cause us to put constraints on what we do and how we do it.

If you have a pattern of procrastination, self-sabotage, or a threshold of success or income that you can’t seem to rise above, it’s likely that there are personal demons at play, even if you’re unaware of them.

If you’ve read my report, The Business Breakthrough Primer (available at CoachPhil.com), you’ve seen that one of the 4 building blocks needed to create greater success is to work on your mindset. A big part of that is eliminating or taming your demons. Fortunately, there are some very fast and effective techniques for doing this, and they don’t involve months or years of psychotherapy.

One of my clients is a financial advisor who was stuck at the same level of performance for almost 9 years. Most of his accounts were relatively small, valued between $10K and $500K in assets. He had wanted to work with wealthier clients for years, but he just couldn’t seem to do what it took to meet and engage them. As we talked about what was holding him back, we discovered that he had an unconscious belief that he wasn’t good enough to deal with “bigger players.” He had always seen himself as a perpetual “minor leaguer.”

In a single meeting, I helped him eliminate the “not good enough” blocker that had been dogging him his entire career. It was as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He became instantly energized. Since that meeting, he has put some powerful networking and marketing strategies into place in order to get in front of wealthier individuals. As a result, he just brought on a 5 million dollar account—the largest of his career. He is feeling more empowered in his business than ever before.

Another one of my clients had a debilitating fear of public speaking. The very thought of speaking in front of a group of people was enough to cause him to break out in a sweat. Recently, he was assigned to give a speech to a local business group. In our coaching session, I helped him work through his fear. It turned out he had a longstanding belief that what he had to say was unimportant. Before our meeting, he knew that he was afraid of public speaking but he didn’t know what was behind his fear. In our meeting, we zapped his limiting belief. A week later he gave his speech. He invited me to come watch him. He not only did a great job, he was also totally at ease. No one would have guessed that only a week before he had a desperate fear of public speaking.

There is no shame or weakness in having demons. As I said before, we all have them. It’s part of being human. I know. Not only have I seen my clients’ demons in action, I’ve seen my own. A few years back, I hired a coach to take me through the same demon-busting process I use with my clients.

We all have mental/emotional blockers that stifle us in our quest for greater success. The question is: are you going to let them undermine you and your goals, or is it time to flush them up and out, so you can be all you can and want to be?

If you want to find out how you can tame your demons, drop me an email. Maybe it’s time to take a weight off your shoulders and see what can happen.