7 Essentials for Overcoming Mental Barriers to Exceptional Success What you can't control can make you fail but only you can make yourself quit.
By Sherrie Campbell Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Extraordinary success requires emotional competence, mental clarity and a willingness to disrupt the status quo. You must release low-level thinking that holds you back. To be a standout, you must cultivate your strengths and work through fear and doubt to manifest your ideas.
Emotional competence and mental clarity come from using those two warriors, time and patience, to your advantage.
1. Emotional management.
To be successful, invest in your internal growth and personal development. You have to be your own best manager. When mistakes happen deal with the emotional consequences. Mistakes are the first steps in learning what has to change within you to achieve emotional balance and self-management. The better your self-knowledge, the more successful you will be.
Fear makes can prompt you to act too soon. Balance is when you can manage your impulse to please or be cutting.
Knowing yourself helps you to know your limits. If you are so flexible you give yourself away, time and again, you will hinder movement forward at the speed you want. Others will steal your ideas and run with them at the pace you wish you could. If you are rigid you cannot remain open to all the possibilities ahead of you, greatly limiting your potential.
Emotional management is a fine balance. Successful entrepreneurs know when to be flexible and when to set limits. That emotional monitoring will make you an exceptional decision maker.
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2. Have a purpose.
To be successful you need a purpose you will, without a shadow of a doubt, follow through to closure. A strong mission provides the motivation and unwavering belief required to be a standout success story. When you are clear about why you are investing your blood, sweat, tears, time and energy there is no room for laziness or complacency.
Time and patience keep you in touch with your commitment to succeed at all costs. Giving yourself time clears your mind and keeps you more tightly grounded to your overall purpose. It prevents you from being an impulsive decision maker.
Time and patience supply your deep will to pull-it-from-where-you- don't-have-it to stay the course no matter how hard things get or what challenges you face. You have to believe deeply that building your business is your opportunity to greatly change or influence the world.
3. Rise above conformity.
Exceptional entrepreneurs are nonconformists in a world that needs new ideas, new thoughts and new inventions. They are unafraid to face the ridicule, nay-sayers and rejections they will undoubtedly confront as they put their ideas to work.
Conformity can only get you where people and ideas have already been. You have to think differently. Study other entrepreneurs to learn what they did to get to where they are. Take seminars and learn to manage the worry and unconscious ways you sabotage your own dream. Trust that it could be your idea that revolutionizes a whole new realm of invention for meeting consumer needs.
Unless you can make it exceptionally better there is no need to repeat what already exists. Find the courage to take ideas you may think are crazy and make them possible.
4. Renew yourself.
It is easy to be passionate when you are starting out, but successful entrepreneurs commit to keeping their energy levels high when they hit the inevitable, frustrating roadblocks. To be successful you have to care for yourself physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
It is also important not to take things too seriously. That weakens your own emotional reserves. You have to bring a revitalized sense of renewed life into your business daily.
Your brain needs quality sleep, good nutrition and physical exercise to manage your thoughts and emotions at high levels. You have to keep your energy up. Taking time-out is crucial to staying fresh.
Stay healthy and focused. Keep in mind there is a one-to-one relationship between what you believe and what you receive. Never allow giving up to be an option.
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5. Walk your talk.
You can talk about what you want to do so much that you develop an imaginary belief you have actually achieved your dream. To live your commitments you must understand that "trying" is unmoved energy. It is a form of the fatalistic thinking pattern of "potential."
If you don't know how to do what you want to do, then take the time to learn more, but at the end of the day you are the dependent variable in making something happen or not. Remember, there is no such thing as being totally "ready." There is always risk, so you must commit and put yourself in a situation where you have to make it work.
There is one way to succeed: Do what you say. Talk is cheap. Any type of stalling takes a dream and shrinks it to a "thought." Excuses are dream-stealers that appear to have good intentions.
6. Remain curious.
Curiosity is a form of innocence and a protection from fear. Curiosity gives you the courage to start a business that will breach status quo, possibly creating disruption. To find the courage to follow you curiosity about breaking boundaries, worries of consequences are placed to the side. Passionate curiosity is stronger than the fears of disruption.
The "what if" state-of-mind has a natural energetic drive that helps you to take risks you normally would not. Oftentimes, the more we are told "no" the more curious we become to see what would happen if we did it anyway.
Curiosity allows you to take your idea and go for it. You commit to deal with any consequences after the fact. Curiosity makes the possibility of failure secondary. With curiosity you have the approach you are just testing an idea out. Success and disruption are equally possible, so why not risk it? The more curious we become the more inspired we are to test limits.
7. Doubt as motivation.
A little bit of doubt is healthy. When you are in doubt it means you are pushing yourself to the very edges of your comfort zone. True innovation pushes the boundaries of status quo. Being pushed to the edge is the place of discovery. Uncharted territory is always a mixture of excitement and doubt. Doubt helps you to see the unforeseen and to dig deeper in to something you want to pursue.
Never believe any idea has reached its limit. Great entrepreneurs push past doubts, take what already exists and make it better or create something new altogether.
To be a standout success you must be radical enough to make up your own rules, be willing to rise above the status quo, and have the willingness to take great risk to secure your unique place in the business world.
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