Many people have heard me speak about how a business reflects the beliefs of its owner. For example, a person who is not charging enough in their business is liable to have some limiting beliefs about their personal worth – some sort of self esteem issue. The “not charging enough” behavior is just a symptom of an underlying set or cluster of beliefs that were probably formed in childhood.
However, sometimes self employed professionals fall into the trap of thinking that not only does their business reflect themselves it is them. And there is a crucial difference.
This is an easy trap to fall into, especially when doing market positioning work. In my marketing teleclass for self employed professionals, “Claim Your Niche”, and in the positioning work I have studied by other service marketing gurus, there is a lot of emphasis on determining what differentiates your brand or how to name your “unique selling proposition” (USP). In order to do that for a service practitioner – especially when the service is somehow personal, involving relationship, style, and a million other factors that vary between professionals in a similar field or target market – we need to look very closely at personality, strengths and weaknesses…in my classes I even go so far as to use NLP techniques to do things like internal searches to further elicit this information. So it is very easy when your business is this personal to think that your business not only reflects you, it is you.
Again, there is a crucial difference. Understanding this distinction consciously and having this difference wired in unconsciously is what often separates my most successful clients from those that are struggling. Understanding this difference and wiring this reframe into your other than conscious mind allows you to do things like not take rejection personally.
If you are in business not every potential client is going to be a match and probably some clients are going to complain. If you are running a belief cluster that says “I and my business are one” that feedback is going to hurt. A lot. It’s going to feel like a personal rejection and might stop you from moving forward. On the contrary if your business is merely a reflection of you it is easier to take that feedback and use it appropriately to notice if you are correctly positioned, if your systems are working, if there is an appropriate response or if you just say “OK” and move on.
Even people with loving backgrounds can have these kind of outdated issues and feelings; it seems to be normal and just a product of being human. What is important to know is that the patterning has a structure that can be redesigned to be more empowering to our adult selves – that’s what I do in my sessions as a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). You can make a shift and automate it so that you don’t have to remember to be different, you just are.
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