There are many obstacles that can prevent us from starting a business.
What many fail to realize, is it often has nothing to do with money, business, or anything happening in the outside world.
We possess internal processes that, when left unattended to, can plague our thinking, emotion, and motivation.
They act as roadblocks along our journey to success.
In this article, I’m going to share 2 short but powerful exercises that will enable you to identify huge opportunities to take yourself, and your business success, to the next level.
Each activity only takes about 5-10 minutes to complete, but they’ll allow you to free up your attention and energy so you can launch the coaching business you’ve been dreaming about.
Exercise 1: Clear Your Mental Clutter
This powerful exercise was taught to me by my mentor, Jerry Ballenger.
If you’re working in the real world and your desk is a mess, you can’t work efficiently. You can’t find things through the clutter.
It works similarly in your mind.
If your mind is cluttered with too many thoughts and worries running amok and consuming its resources, you can’t focus or work efficiently.
The Exercise
1.) Take 10 minutes to write down everything that you worry about. Think about what weighs on your mind as you get into bed at night, and the first worrying thoughts that pop into your mind when you wake up. Write a big list of everything you’re concerned about in your life.
Note: If you like to write by hand, get a new journal or grab a piece of paper. I recommend dedicating an entire journal to your personal development for these exercises. If you prefer to work electronically, create a file and then type this out, but remember to keep it in a folder where you’ll remember it and where you can compile future exercises.
Hint: you’ll know that you’ve finished when your list is so long that you start laughing.
Once you’ve finished, take a look at your list. That’s a lot of stuff to think about, right?
2.) Now, go through the list and put a circle next to everything that is outside of your control and a star next to everything that is within your control.
3.) Take everything that has a star next to it, the items that are in your control, that are important to you, and that will get you big results in the future if you focus on them, and transfer them to another list or document in priority order.
Note: If you have more than 10 items on your list with stars, you have too many. Cut it down to 10 max, but ideally 5-7.
These are the areas you’ll want to work on over the next few weeks, months, and even in the next few years of your life. They represent the big opportunities for growth.
4.) Go back to the other items on your list, with the circle next to them, everything that is outside of your control. Consciously decide to let them go.
Point by point, ask yourself, “Can I let this one go? Yes, I can release that.”
And do it.
This is a powerful exercise that affects you emotionally. You wrote down your worries, you see that it’s something outside of your control, and then you look at it and consciously choose to let it go.
One of the biggest energy robbers in our lives is thinking about, worrying about, and trying to fix things we don’t have control over.
By getting clear on which elements we can control, and which we can’t, we can free up a lot of wasted emotional energy, thought power, and attention.
Exercise 2: Tie Up Loose Ends
This exercise will help you free up even more emotional energy and get some closure on important areas in your life.
The loose ends flying around untied cost us emotionally. We feel them as physical burdens we carry around with us.
Maybe you had a fight with someone 2 years ago that was never resolved. Maybe you started building a model plane as a hobby and never completed it. These are all open loops we need to close.
The Exercise:
1.) Take 5-10 mins to make a list of each area of your life, each issue, project, relationships, conflict, and commitment where you are incomplete. This should be at least 1 page long.
Write down anything that bothers you at some level, even if it’s small, because it is contributing in robbing you of emotional energy.
2.) Prioritize the top 2-3 that will give you back the most energy, and do what it takes to complete them. You have two options: get closure or release it to the Universe.
Note: if it’s an emotional wound, such as a conflict with a friend or family member, you usually can’t just let go. You have to go and get closure. You’ll find it’s hard, but empowering. When finished, you can feel the emotional weight lifted off your shoulders.
Hint: when we have incompleteness in our life, we tend to go into avoidance.
We don’t want to look at it and eventually the incompleteness becomes too painful to think about. We say “I’ll get to it later,” over and over, but we never do. We have to be honest with ourselves and face the things in our life that are burdening us.
It might be a little scary to look at this list of what you’ve left incomplete in your life. Some of the things might be physical things you need to take action on. Others might be emotional, yet others logical.
Maybe you bought something online and the person never sent it to you, it’s been 3 months, and you can’t get a hold of them. Make a decision.
Either you’re going to hire an attorney to go after them, or you’re going to let it go because it’s not worth it.
It might take overcoming a little bit of ego, because we often seek justice when we have been wronged. We would rather hold the grudge and carry the burden. But this comes at the cost of our energy and life.
Do what it takes to close the loop. Tie it up once and for all, and let it fade into your past.
The two exercises you’ve just completed are called high lifetime value activities. They’re the activities that you do once but they keep paying you back in the long term.
When you eliminate the unnecessary worries and energy-robbers in your life, you clear the path to what really matters: launching your successful coaching business.
Have you signed up for my free training How To Become A Virtual Coach yet? If you know that you want to make an impact and create a full time income by becoming a coach, click the link below to sign up.
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In the training you’ll also learn:
- The step-by-step plan to getting started (especially if you’re new to coaching) – even if you’re completely “unknown” and even if you have no list!
- Why coaching is one of the most opportunistic professions in the world to go into and could be for generations to come.
- How to find your perfect clients and instantly build trust with them, so they start coming to you and already know they want to work with you.
- Discover what the #1 Skill of High-Paid Coaches is, and what the “sweet spot” is for pricing – and how it could allow you to help a lot more people and earn an income several times higher than the average coach.
- I’ll show you a proven and very counterintuitive approach to get 5-10x more clients than regular coaches.
- Only long-time coaches can charge a lot, right? Wrong! I’ll show you a simple positioning tactic that you can use to start charging over $200 per hour (or more) right out of the gate with your coaching business.
- All of the technical things can be overwhelming. Email software, setting up webinars, and landing page creation can leave you not knowing where to begin. You only actually need a couple simple tools to get started…discover what you need, even if you’re a total tech newbie.
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