 Whenever you start doing something new, you can easily see your progress. But once you reach a certain skill level, you plateau. Your growth appears to slow down and you feel like you’re stagnating. Imagine you’re learning a new language. Just starting out, every day you learn how to say something new. But after a few months, you’re not sure how to make progress in leaps and bounds anymore. It feels like you’re not improving. You can plateau in anything – your diet, your business, learning a musical instrument. How do you overcome this frustrating situation? Time for a Change of Strategy When you hit a plateau, it’s time for a change of strategy. What has worked until now to spur growth isn’t working anymore. To put it in a positive way, you’ve become too good at what you’re doing. In order to grow, we have to steadily meet appropriate challenges. Right now, the challenges aren’t challenging enough. It means you need to do something new. Maybe it’s time to launch products in a new category. Maybe you’ve done all you can with your current audience and it’s time to branch out. Look into some new marketing channels or add a new strategy to your mix. Look for a Change Perhaps there’s been some change that has occurred without you realizing it. Look at demographics, sales, or traffic over the last year. See if something has happened that has caused your business to stagnate. What could you do to overcome this? The reason for your plateau may not be something you’re doing. Maybe something has changed in the world or market that’s impeding your growth. What change can you make in order to adapt to what’s going on? Track Your Progress You may be growing but just not seeing it. It’s easy to see how you’re learning when you just start out, but harder as you get better at it. Go back and look at the milestones you’ve achieved. Write these down somewhere and track your progress so you can remind yourself how far you’ve come. Ditch the Echo Chamber Sometimes plateauing is just a matter of perception. You may be surrounded by people who pat you on the back and encourage you, but what you need is some stern criticism and productive feedback. Identify people who are at the next level where you want to be and spend some time around them. Adopt the Growth Mindset You can prevent and deal with plateauing best if you adopt the growth mindset. This is a set of beliefs that sees humans as dynamic beings that evolve and develop over time, not as something static or fixed. It helps you to overcome the limiting beliefs that are holding you back. Do you want to learn more about success habits? Check out the course, BUSINESS SUCCESS HABITS, which teaches you the A to Z of adopting habits for business success and helps you achieve your business goals. HERE About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.
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 The growth mindset demands that you adopt a new attitude toward making mistakes. We have to welcome failure because it’s a key part of the learning process. In fact, you learn more from messing up than from doing things right. However, this attitude is not second nature for most of us. Here are some ideas on how to overcome your fear of making mistakes so that you can grow and take action. Who Says You Shouldn’t Make Mistakes? What keeps many of us from getting over this fear of making mistakes is perceived pressure from outside. Maybe you yourself don’t think it’s such a big deal, but you worry that others will ridicule and judge you. It could be pressure from outside that makes you unable to take risks. If so, it might help to realize that no one is judging you. In fact, those around you will more likely be impressed to see you taking risk, even if you don’t succeed. What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Many people find it helpful to think about the worst that could happen if they try something and fail. This helps to dispel the fear because you realize the worst-case scenario is not so bad after all. Will you wreck your business? How much money will you lose? Will there be permanent damage that can’t be undone? Once you consider the worst that could happen, visualize the best that could happen. Often by comparing these too, we can see that the potential reward far outweighs the risk. Shut Down Your Inner Critic Your inner critic is the voice inside your head that shoots you down before you even get started. When setting goals, we all want to be realistic. Your inner critic goes far beyond “realistic” and simply prevents you from taking action. When you’re about to take a risk or try something new, this voice stops you by focusing on mistakes you could make. You can dispel your inner critic by identifying it and calling it out, literally. Speak the positive to yourself…out loud. Learn to recognize when you’re being self-defeating. Once you know this is happening, you can remember that succeed or fail, you’ll learn something valuable, and ignore it. Welcome Your Mistakes It may be helpful to realize that you are definitely going to make mistakes and welcome them. This is an essential part of growing and you will learn from whatever mistakes you make. People who seem brave don’t have any more courage than the rest of us. They are afraid and take action anyway. You can too by making this a habit. Reframe with Positive Language The language you use is very important in forming how you think about what you do. Learn to frame things using positive phrases rather than negative, and it will change your attitude as well. For example, you just launched a product that didn’t sell because you didn’t do your targeting well. Instead of saying you didn’t do it right, reframe it to say, “I need to work more on my targeting next time.” You’re focused on how you can improve rather than how you failed. Do you want to learn more about adopting the good business habits? Check out the course, Business Success Habits, which teaches you the ABC’s of developing habits for business success HERE. About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.  The growth mindset is a way of thinking that says we evolve and develop over time. It states that we are not fixed and static. To be successful at business, you need to adopt this mindset so that you can continue to learn and grow. An important element of this mindset is charting your own progress. A Feedback Loop for Success How do you know if you’re growing? One of the key ways is to chart your progress. This means identifying each milestone and recognizing when you’ve reached it. This milestone offers proof that you’re growing and shows that you can change over time, while at the same time showing that you’re making progress towards achieving your goals. It serves as a kind of positive feedback loop. Each milestone provides you more evidence of your growth; this in turn helps you keep pushing ahead and setting the next milestone. Create a Digital Success Folder How do you chart your progress? When teaching students to learn with the growth mindset, teachers encourage them to keep a success folder. You can do this too with a digital success folder. Save screenshots or files somewhere for completed projects you’ve done. Include anything you consider an achievement. You can use this material for motivation when you need it. It offers evidence of how far you’ve come. Learn to Set Better Goals The way you set your goals can make a difference in your development. When you set goals for yourself, it is important those goals motivate you: this means making sure that they are important to you, and that there is value in achieving them. Motivation is one key to achieving your business goals. Making an action plan is also a key to goal achievement and an often overlooked step in the process. When you write the steps to achieving the goal and cross them off as you reach those milestones, it becomes a motivator in itself. With clearly defined milestones, you’ll know for sure when you reach them, and they’ll be more effective in both reaching your goals and charting your progress. Reframe How You View Mistakes A key to the growth mindset is reframing how you think about mistakes. Mistakes aren’t failures; they’re learning experiences. They don’t impede your growth. They’re a necessary part of growth just like successes. If you understand this, you can take action toward goals and more easily reach your milestones. Charting Your Progress Is Important Work Successful people chart their progress as a matter of course. It becomes a habit. But if you want to adopt the growth mindset, you have to make it an intentional part of your business. This means setting aside time for strategic planning and taking the time to learn new skills and techniques. Put time on your calendar to set goals, review results, and remind yourself how far you’ve come by referring back to your digital success file. Do you want to learn more about growing your business? Check out Innovate Academy For Entrepreneurs, which teaches you the A to Z of the growing your business and achieving your goals HERE. About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.  Change is the only constant in life. So why do we fear it so much? We often see change as something negative or risky, failing to see that it is also a great opportunity. In fact, there is no growth without change.
Why We Need to Embrace Change We grow through facing challenges and handling them in creative ways. Whether it brings short-term advantages or disadvantages, in the long term, each change is just one step in our development. In addition to the opportunities it offers, change also presents a challenge to your skills. To be successful in business, you must be flexible and adaptable. Your negative limiting beliefs tell you this is bad because it’s a shift away from the status quo. How you meet these challenges can determine how you meet each challenge after that one. You’ll have a list of successes you can draw on for motivation when you face the next obstacle. Embracing change and seeing it as something positive is essential for cultivating a success mindset. There are specific techniques you can employ to help you make this shift. Make a List of Successes and Positive Changes Go back over big changes you’ve faced in the past. Look at how they impacted you. You’ll find a few that you wish would never have happened. But most likely, the majority ended up benefiting you in some way in the long term. Begin to write down a list of the positive results of changes and successes you’ve had meeting challenges. Refer to this list whenever you find yourself facing a new challenge you’re not sure you can overcome. Predict and Prepare Sudden unexpected change is shocking. So, take a proactive approach and get ahead of any potential challenges you might face. Set aside time regularly to strategize. Consider anything that might happen and develop a plan to deal with each contingency. When there is a big change, even something negative, you’ll be able to face it prepared and with confidence. Banish Your Inner Critic Get rid of any negative self-talk and limiting beliefs that are destroying your confidence. We each have an inner critic who tells us we can’t do it. When you’re facing a sudden change, it’s a perfect situation for this inner critic to come along and derail you. This is a bad habit of thinking and like any other habit, you can break it and replace it with another. First, learn to recognize when you’re being an inner critic. Then, create some positive affirmations that you can use to combat the “inner critic”. Once recognized, you can rephrase negative thoughts into positive ones. In fact, take it a step further and speak the positive affirmations. You can’t speak and think at the same time so this will replace the thought with positive words of affirmation. Surround Yourself with Positive People How we feel about change is an essential part of our mindset. The way we think rubs off on others, so surround yourself with people who are success and growth minded and approach change positively. You can draw on their positivity for inspiration whenever you need it. Look at the Big Picture Change is usually just a bump in the road. It means you might have a tough time this week, this month, or this quarter. But if you look at the big picture, you will often see that this change opens the door to new opportunities. Try to foster this perspective the moment change strikes, and you’ll deal with it more calmly. Do you want to learn the ABC’s of business and help to achieve your business goals in a self-paced learning environment? Would you appreciate an affordable way to learn more about how to grow your business? Innovate Membership Academy For Entrepreneurs may be the solutions for you. Take a look around Innovate Membership Academy For Entrepreneurs HERE About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. |
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