Written by: Mark Newey, 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.
As business owners, our company’s biggest asset is ourselves. We know all about our products, our customers, our production processes and our industries, but we know very little about ourselves. We all know that people buy people and the more authentic you are, the more natural charisma you have, and the more likely people are to buy from you.
We didn’t study self-development at school, let alone mental wellness and emotional intelligence. Those of us who have already done self-development work, have done it purely with the objective of bettering ourselves. What we haven’t done, is dig deep to find out who we are and build a rock-solid sense of identity.
This grounded sense of self is the single most important platform for living a fulfilled life and building a dynamic, thriving business which genuinely ignites our passion and makes an impact on the world we live in. The Solution is Radical Self Discovery.
Radical Self Discovery: A Definition
Radical Self-Discovery produces an identity shift onto a different level of consciousness, which is based on deep-level self-awareness and self-esteem, humility, a desire to make an impact and vulnerability-based charisma. This different level of consciousness is not a seemingly untouchable and distant spiritual destination but is there waiting for us all the time; we simply need to be ready for it.
We are born as a pure spirit, like a blank tablet and whilst genetics are responsible for about 30% of our future personality make-up, it is our upbringing, our experiences and our relationships that build the majority of the identity of who we become. In other words, we have to have experiences and relationships before we can know who we are.
In many ways it is the sledgehammers that knock us to the floor that we learn most from; the ability to get back up when we get knocked down and to take the positive learning with us is really what allows us to grow. We also learn from the successes of course, but the learning isn’t as deep.
But modern society places a massive “spanner in the works” from a very early age in terms of allowing us to know who our true self is. We are brought up to worry about what people think about us. This results in us wearing a mask and a suit of armour and putting up a hologram of what we want people to see in us. It quickly becomes impossible to know who we are and to reach that next level of consciousness.
Radical Self-Discovery removes all of the layers that we’ve built up over the years to “keep ourselves safe”, virtually all of which run unconsciously in the background. This allows us to be vulnerable and to be authentic: no pretence, no ego. Being vulnerable is counterintuitively the most charismatic asset we can have; charismatic people are simply themselves: no B.S.
Radical Self-Discovery removes the mask, propels us into a completely authentic identity shift and onto a different plane of consciousness transforming our ability to make an impact.
Step 1: Practical Brain Science 101
Only 9% of our mind is conscious; therefore 91% of how we create our reality on a moment-by-moment basis is unconscious and we know nothing about our Unconscious. Understanding the filtering process our mind goes through every second, tells us a huge amount about how we think and why and how we experience stress and burnout. And it’s not rocket science!
Step 2: Stop Stress
Now that you have the bigger picture of how your mind works, it’s time to explore stress in more detail: what it is, what function it serves, how it works and how to stop it, so that you can regain a clear head and the energy to really fire up your business and the people it serves.
Step 3: Emotional Intelligence 101
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, and those of the people around you. People with a high degree of emotional intelligence know what they’re feeling, what their emotions mean, and how these emotions can affect other people.
For leaders, having emotional intelligence is essential for success. After all, who is more likely to succeed – a leader who shouts at his team when he’s under stress, or a leader who stays in control, and calmly assesses the situation?
Step 4: Find Your Purpose and your Passion
As business owners our business is our reason to get out of bed every morning: it’s our passion. But very few of us have actually articulated what the purpose embedded within our business actually is. It’s written in our personal values and in our emotional D.N.A.
But articulating it, not only helps us to constantly connect with it and motivate ourselves, it also allows other key stakeholders (staff, customers) to buy into it too. There’s a Chinese proverb that says: “If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.”
Step 5: Identity: Be You
Discovering who we are and being utterly comfortable with being that person, transforms our world…literally! Being authentic allows us to drop the mask that we all wear, worrying about what people think about us. This saves us a huge amount of mental energy, helps us to look forwards with positivity, improves our relationships and clarifies our thinking.
Step 6: Self-Empowerment and Energy
The revelation of a deep sense of self is extremely empowering: it unlocks your energy at a different level. No more doubting and double-checking: just the courage to find your own path and steer your business forward with certainty and excitement.
Step 7: Charisma and Success
The words used to describe successful entrepreneurs are charismatic, driven, purposeful and dynamic; they have the confidence and clarity to make good decisions and take action fast. This can only be learned and reproduced reliably through genuinely deep-level self-awareness.
Here are links to two more articles on stress and mental health in Brainz:
If you would like a no-obligation virtual 30-minute coffee break chat to explore further how Radical Self-Discovery can genuinely transform your life and your business, please don’t hesitate to contact me from my website. You can also follow me on LinkedIn.
Mark Newey, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Mark Newey is a Protagonist and Disruptor, empowering small business owners to totally transform their company's biggest asset: themselves. Running a business is stressful, especially in today's environment: if we are stressed, our cognitive capacity drops by 40%, which means we are operating at 60% efficiency. Mark has distilled 22 years of experience from his own breakdown and working with 3000 clients (of whom 1200 were small business owners) into a foolproof system: The 7 Steps to Radical Self-Discovery. Only 10% of companies thrive and grow coming out of a crisis. The difference between the 10% and the 90%? The mindset of the entrepreneur.
