Written by: Edmund Ellison, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We all want to succeed in business. I remember speaking to a coaching client recently who said that she was struggling with imposter syndrome, procrastination, and a lack of action on her goals.
She wanted to launch an offer and had been lowering her price, making tweaks, and generally procrastinating. It felt like a conflict of interests; here, she was passionate and wanted to empower her own clients to overcome mindset blocks, and yet she was experiencing the same thing that she was qualified to help others with.
The one thing that was really bothering her was that she couldn’t figure out why. When I worked with her, I explained that we all enter habits and patterns because our minds like to automate. We’re not always aware of these, and when we probed deeper into the problem through our strategy session, she realized that her procrastination was an indirect symptom of imposter syndrome.
What’s your pattern?
She would go to work on an offer, then find that she’d overthink, overanalyze, and start doubting everything leading to stress, overwhelm, and anxiety. Questions she mentioned during our session included:
Will people buy this?
Am I good enough to teach this?
Is it worth this price?
She’d then find that she would start working on her website or going on Facebook to look for leads and start liking posts and engaging.
There was a pattern to her behavior; she just hadn’t noticed it until I pointed it out.
Change your thinking, change your habits, change your results.
Research by Duke University found that 40% of our actions are based on habits, so when I explained this to her, she started to recognize she was stuck on autopilot doing things that were not serving her or her clients.
Sheeran (2002), in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, found that “intentions explain only 28% of the variance in behavior.”
This appears to suggest that just because we intend to do something doesn’t translate into that future action being completed.
For my client, the breakthrough was realizing that her fear of failure and being criticized was causing her to put things off because she didn’t believe she was good enough.
So given that figure of 28%, it’s important to be consistent with what we can control and develop habits that drive the right behaviors.
If you’re feeling stuck, here are 5 critical steps that you should take to achieve your goals:
Set an intention – research by Cornell University found that when we take ownership of something, we’re less likely to give up.
Face your fear – if you’ve been putting off a goal, consider that your habits have been normalized around it. By investing in mindset support such as hypnosis, you can change your thinking quickly, leading to a change in behavior and better results.
Get clear on the result – by visualizing the end goal in your mind and writing down the goal as a clear, tangible, measurable result with a timeframe, it makes it real.
Add it to your calendar – if it’s not in the diary, it doesn’t get done
Accountability – According to a study by the ATSD, your chances of successfully achieving a goal increase to 95% when you have an accountability coach or partner to work with you and hold you to your actions.
To increase your chances of achieving your goals, you first need to consider what’s influencing your decision-making. When you change your thinking, you’ll change your behavior and then your results.
Edmund Ellison, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Edmund is the Founder and Chief Impact Officer of Impactful Today. He has 15 years of experience in global learning, performance, talent, and people development.
He is an award-winning high-performance mindset coach and executive contributor for Brainz Magazine who empowers business owners & leaders to remove mindset blocks using his CLEAR Impact model and methodology, so they can increase confidence, visibility, and profits.
