When you see famous entrepreneurs strutting their stuff on stage it’s easy to see how in the groove they are. Everything about them says forward motion and invincibility. They are sure of themselves and their business, even if their ideas are wacky. They make self and business confidence look so simple.
If you’re feeling stuck in life or stuck in your business, how do you get your business mojo back?
One of the things when it comes to business is that we often have setbacks, we often have challenges and it’s really, really tough. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and we all say the same thing. If we knew how hard starting and running a business was, would we actually have started the business in the first place?
It’s often an interesting conversation internally, especially when the proverbial shit is hitting the fan, which is often. You may have even said things to yourself like, ‘why did I ever start this business? I’m just going to go back to the corporate world’.
I often talk about the first business jump, where you go from $0 to $100k. That jump is all about the hustle, where you’re in a Wild West environment, you’re testing, you’re measuring and really in that phase where there’s probably going to be a lot of micro setbacks.
I think this Wild West is a really important time to look at mojo because the employee kind of mindset you have recently come from puts certainty outside of yourself. At this stage you are probably starting out and still looking for certainty, whether it be from the boss or the heroin injection of the steady, reliable wage, and this can really affect our motivation when it comes to our own business, because in the Wild West you are out on your own, things are uncertain, there are risks. This is where your courage and commitment are tested. Rather than external certainty, you need to find something else.
When you launch your first business, you don’t have someone telling you what to do or signing off on your decisions, so you’ve got to go through this psychological transformation which is to find that certainty inside… and it is tough, especially if you’ve had that mindset where the dependency on other structures has been a consistent thing for you.
And so how do we make this transformation?
Finding Your Business Mojo
One of the things that I talk about in our programs is the breakout. And the breakout is a breakout around your psychology, and often that happens when your back is against the wall and you make that decision to commit.
That’s where business mojo comes from. It is a decision, a decision to show up. And you’ve probably had that two or three times in your life where you’ve made a decision like that and then suddenly this energy switches on, and you reach new levels of creativity, new ideas start to form.
Now what happens if you’re in a state where you’re feeling apathy, lethargy, procrastination, all of those things? Or maybe you’re terrified? How do we get ourselves back into state, how do we re-find that business mojo?
One of the things that I like to do is if I find I am in that specific state I like to get out of the business. I like to go and do something that isn’t related to business and that can often be something to do with my bucket list. I choose something that is out of my comfort zone that can really change my state and challenge me and show me what I am capable of.
Or conversely, speak with your coach. I really recommend having an amazing coach that understands you and understands your recipe for motivation, because we all have a recipe, and that could be a combination of internal representations that, when they’re fired in a certain sequence, bang, it gets you back into action very, very quickly.
It could even be if you’re stuck in the problem all you see is the problem.
When you increase emotion, you decrease intelligence
Simply having someone that is not emotionally connected to the challenge can bring back your focus on your mission, your vision, the reason why you were launching this business.
There’s a great book you have probably heard of called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Here were these poor people in these concentration camps, in the most significantly challenging situations, and Frankl could predict who would survive versus who would find a way to thrive. Those people that were getting through and thriving, were ones that had a reason and a mission that was bigger than themselves. And so he looked at the people that were dying and they were saying, ‘why is this happening to me, this isn’t fair’. Versus the people that were thriving were saying, ‘we have to survive because we have to share a message, so this never ever happens again’.
So a reason, a mission, switches the neurology on, we tap into new levels of creativity and we start to create. And so if you’re wanting to get your business mojo back, one of the things that I would look at is your environment, I would look at the support system around you. You don’t want to hang around with negative people, it will wear off on you, I guarantee it.
You want to hang out with people that are playing ten levels above you, you want to have great coaches. Get out of the business and do some activities that are going to challenge you, that are going to move you, and that are going to switch your neurology on.
I hope you can now find your business mojo again and please get out there, be disruptive, make some trouble, and we’ll catch you next time.
Matt Catling
