Neglecting to implement mindset tools that can strengthen your emotional health could be a business owner’s biggest mistake. If you determine your business growth strategy but fail to do the inner work of healing, you’re stifling your potential. However, by becoming intentional about your inner healing, your spiritual health becomes both the fuel and the accelerator of your business growth. In doing so, the business you grow turns out to be a vehicle towards even greater freedom and possibility. 

When I launched my coaching business, I left all childhood trauma healing untouched and, instead, focused on getting clients because…money! It wasn’t until I got triggered by something that a potential male client said to me, that I believed my coach when she urged me to look at my childhood wounds. Surrendering to the needs of my inner child, and acquiring mindset tools to strengthen my spiritual health was a turning point for me and my business.

Since, I’ve found there to be 5 main questions any nomad entrepreneur wants to be sitting with regularly to spot any limiting beliefs or sabotaging behavior. Doing so will strengthen your emotional and spiritual strength in a way that supports mental and financial growth. Which question will you sit with during your next journaling session?

Are you being authentic, or are you abandoning yourself?

Easy question to answer as an entrepreneur, isn’t it? Of course! I wouldn’t be in business for myself otherwise, would I? Let’s sit with this. Put simply, at any one point, we can either be in people-pleasing mode or authenticity mode. These modes are entirely mutually exclusive. While you may be pursuing a business vision that is authentic to you, your everyday actions may be acts of self-abandonment, a less pretty word for people-pleasing. 

For example, you may be falling into the trap of catering to a potential client’s schedule, simply in the hopes of signing that client. Or, you might be hoping to serve ‘anybody’ for so long as they are willing to pay you. This could result in your messaging being vague and not speaking to anybody at all.  

That said, people-pleasing isn’t something you can just switch off. Often, it’s a behavior learned as a child in order to stay safe or gain recognition and validation. You, too, might have learned to people-please as a survival strategy. Stepping outside of people-pleasing requires you to remember and re-train your inner child. That little one needs to know that you will be safe, safest, by honoring yourself completely. 

From a pure business perspective, I’ve found that people-pleasing tends to result in burnout of the mind and crickets on the bank account. This is because people won’t pay money to someone who’s in self-abandonment. And that, in turn, is because a people-pleaser, ultimately, is unable to serve powerfully. And powerful service is what people are willing to pay handsome money for. 

Ask yourself:

What would happen if you stopped abandoning yourself for others’ needs, and started serving your client’s needs instead? 

are you following a current OR OUTDATED version of your dream?

Once in a while, you might be following dreams that either weren’t yours to begin with or were childhood dreams that are no longer aligned. This is a common, yet more subtle, form of people-pleasing. Continuing to get that one specific job, or working day and night to pursue that one client you’ve had on your vision board for the past 5 years, are just two examples.

When we pursue an outdated dream we tend to camouflage that misalignment with healed-sounding words such as “commitment”, or “following through”. In fact, when using these words to describe otherwise unexamined thought patterns and goals, you might be engaging in utter gaslighting or, you guessed it, in self-abandonment.

The work required to uncover misaligned goals is best laid out by Robert Holden, in his book, “Authentic Success“. There is no virtue in remaining committed to a dream that, upon deeper reflection, takes up space from a more aligned pursuit. Like with any strategy in business, sometimes, also the underlying dream or goal requires updating. When I sit with clients, broaching this topic often feels tender. We then engage in visualizations and guided conversations with the client’s inner child, led by gratitude, self-love, and acceptance. In order to change the outside reality, sometimes our inside dreams have to change, first.

Ask yourself:

Is there a childhood dream you pursue that no longer feels aligned to your current desires and definition of freedom? What would letting go of that dream create space for?

are you knee-jerking your business decisions?

Service-based businesses are a blunt mirror reflection of the soul. That is, your inner traumas, insecurities, and limiting beliefs. It’s your inner world that guides your outer business decisions and strategies. When a client brings up a situation from work that activated their emotions, I tend to ask one specific question: “Who does this person remind you if?” The answer is usually a family member, ex, or former boss. Left unchecked, such triggers can quickly begin to guide our actions, and that’s no good thing. It typically leads to a knee-jerk reaction. Again, there’s a fancy term we could use to describe such behavior: ‘boundaries’. In reality, when we set a boundary from a triggered place, it’s not going to lead to any improvement, neither for yourself nor for the receiving party…or your business, for that matter.

Yes, some people might talk about acting from ego here. However, in my opinion, ego has gotten a bad rep over the years. The ego is simply a created image of Self that appears to be separate from the Self that is soul and, as such, deeply connected with life itself. We all have it. When you say, ‘That was my ego‘, you’re thus really saying that you were acting from a place of resentment, pain, trauma, or judgment. It’s an invitation to engage in self-love, healing, and forgiveness…another mindset tool. Ultimately, as you learn to set boundaries from a healed place, boundaries will be just another way to teach people how to love you even more.

Ask yourself:

What is recent business decision you made while feeling strong emotions? In hindsight, what does this remind you of?

Remember that engaging in the above question will help you return to a place of true and profound service only if you allow yourself to work through the triggering root-event.

are you seeking validation in the external, or are you celebrating yourself unabashedly?

Seeking external validation is another cousin of people-pleasing, really quite an aggressive one. One I’ve myself dealt with lovingly and intensely over the years. There was a time when I’d go for jobs to show my dad I could do it anyway. Later, there was a time when I’d edit my newsletter and social media posts hoping my mom would approve of them, or at least not be offended. Finally, I realized I was engaging in marketing strategies that I thought my former (!?!) coach would approve of. Other’s validation felt like oxygen for me. But what it did was the opposite: It suffocated myself, my soul, and my business growth. 

Noticing when you’re making business decisions from that place of seeking external validation can be a make-it-or-break-it type of acknowledgment. So listen up! Instead of hoping that a product will be loved by your audience, YOU want to be the first to rave about it. Now, that’s easier said than done when your livelihood depends on it, isn’t it? The key here is moving into a practice of radical self-acceptance. And that is quite different from hailing yourself as someone who makes no mistakes. Self-acceptance is the practice of loving yourself no matter what. No matter if your last post lost you 50 followers, no matter if your last launch yielded no sales, no matter if your dad doesn’t get why you’re traveling.

Listen up! Your self-worth is inherent to YOU, now. It’s nothing that anyone, including yourself, can diminish. It’s a birthright. Your work here is not to increase your self-worth. Your work is to recognize and embrace it. There are many ways we could approach this in a coaching session, however, one mindset tool that has helped me tremendously over the years is Emotional Freedom Technique. It’s basically acupuncture without needles and for the mind. In this video, Julie Schiffman taps around self-acceptance.

Ask yourself:

Am I in a place of deeply and unconditionally loving my business and its every aspect and offers? If not, which shifts would I be able to make if I was in complete self-acceptance?

What’s the money story you’re operating on?

An oldie but a goodie. How you relate to money is how you create and manage it. If you relate to money as being something dirty, you’ll repel it at every corner. Any surplus that comes into your life will be spent or otherwise lost. If you think of money as being a trade-in for long hours worked and health sacrificed, you won’t allow money to come in easily or buy you that weekly massage. If you think of money as coming with obligations towards family members, you won’t even notice when you’re becoming the ATM for certain family members.

On the flip side, when you think of money as being a source of freedom and impact, you’ll attract more of it and begin to manage and give it in prosperous ways. If you think of money as being a reflection of your smarts and impact, you’ll be able to gain your time back as you make more of it. See how learning to relate to money in a positive way can be a game-changer mindset tool?

Personally, I used to run on a money story that asking for more than I absolutely necessarily needed was greedy. It kept me stuck in a loop where I barely made rent for a while before I was able to liberate myself from that belief and replace it with this one instead: The more money I bring in, the more time, money, and energy I will be able to generously give. Money is a marker both of love given and received.

A book I return to about once a year is written by Barbara Stanny, “Overcoming Underearning“. It works miracles IF, and only if, you do the exercises she offers.

Ask yourself:

What beliefs about money did pick up from my parents/guardians between the ages of 3 and 10? For each of these beliefs, ask yourself if you still want to have these thoughts. If not, which ones do you want to grow into, instead?

COncluding

Understanding how your mind, heart, and soul operate your business is a crucial mindset tool you get to acquire as a business owner. Without building emotional stamina through these mindset tools, your business will not grow to its highest potential. Or it may…and you’ll end up disliking it. However, you want to beware of falling victim to only doing the inner work. Many ‘make-money-quick’ ‘gurus’ would have you know that manifestation work is all that’s required to attain prosperity. On the other hand, there are also marketing coaches around that won’t touch healing matters. If you work with them, just be sure that you have support for your inner world someplace else.

If you combine the hard work of doing the inner healing with the hard work of determining the best strategy for your business, you’re in for a gigantically purpose-aligned business. How? Read this next and you shall find out. 😉