Daily Mindset Practice for Business Success | Create a Mindset Routine17 min read
If you’ve ever thought mindset work was ridiculous, or if you’re struggling with managing your mindset consistently, this article will help you understand what you’re missing and how you can go about actually mastering the mindset you need to succeed in business, so that you can finally create the mind blowing results you’ve been working toward. From how to start a mindset practice, to how to successfully maintain a consistent mindset routine over time, you’ll be ready to set yourself up for success every day. This mindset routine is exactly what allowed me to blow my business up – from making 5 figures a year to making 5 figures a month.
Why is a daily mindset practice routine important?
The biggest difference between a successful entrepreneur and a struggling entrepreneur is by far their mindset.
In working with business owners at all stages (from just launching a new business with zero entrepreneurship experience, to managing multi-million dollar businesses), what I see to be true time and time again is that business owners with success-oriented mindsets go further every time.
Related post: The ONE Thing That Will Grow Your Business 30x
It doesn’t take much Googling to realize that so many iconic entrepreneur success stories came about after immense failures
- Arianna Huffington got rejected by 36 publishers (current net worth $100 million)
- Bill Gates watched his first company crumble (current net worth $133 billion)
- Walt Disney was fired due to lack of creativity (net worth at time of death – $1 billion)
Had Arianna Huffington succumbed to self doubt, fear of failure, or disbelief in the viability of her dream… her 2nd or 3rd rejection would have stopped her career in her tracks.
Had Bill Gates stopped believing that Microsoft could be a success, he wouldn’t be where he is today.
Had Walt Disney taken his employer’s ‘feedback’ at face value, he wouldn’t have built an empire.
I could go on and on, but if you only remember one thing from this article, let it be this:
Failure is inevitable at some point in any business journey. The thing that will allow you to come out on top of your setbacks, is a rock solid success mindset.
What if I’m struggling with my mindset?
If you’re reading this article, thinking ‘shoot, I’m always doubting myself and worrying about what will happen if I fail’, take a deep breath.
Your mindset is not fixed – you get to create your own mindset by establishing a consistent daily mindset practice.
In her famous research, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck proves humans have the ability to change our beliefs, and the simplest shift can have a profound impact on our lives (source).
Related post: The Power OF Positive Speaking
So before we dig into HOW to cultivate a success mindset, let’s circle back to why it’s critical that you do so.
How does mindset determine success?
Here’s exactly why your mindset will determine your success (or lack thereof)
- The results you want in business (or in life) will come from the action you take.
- The action you take is correlated with how you feel.
- How you feel is directly affected by what you’re thinking.
Your thoughts create your feelings, which create your actions, which determine your results.
The root cause of success, or failure, begins in your head.
ANA MCRAE
When you’ve mastered your mindset, you are a living, breathing, manifestation of confidence, excitement, determination, and hope. You take the kind of action you need to take to generate the results you desire because you believe that what you’re doing is working… and so you continue doing it (which is what creates results!)
Related post: How To Boost Your Confidence
When you’re struggling with your mindset, you feel doubt, indecisiveness, fear, or even hopelessness. You fail to take the actions that will get you the results, and you don’t hit your goals in business (or in life).
Success in life is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics
Tony Robbins (source)
Spend too much time and energy in the wrong inner state of mind, and it will affect your external reality.
Proactively and intentionally cultivating a mindset for success will quantum leap your business further than any ‘secret strategy’ ever could.
Are you taking the time to cultivate a success mindset for your business, or are you leaving how you feel up to chance?
How to establish an effective daily mindset practice
One thing you need to know about mindset work is that it’s not a one-and-done situation.
You’ve spent a lifetime developing the beliefs and thinking patterns you currently possess.
It would be unrealistic to assume you could change them in one sitting.
The reason it’s called a mindset practice it’s because it never really ends (if we’re being truthful here).
At every new level in your life, with every personal or business growth opportunity, you may come up against deeply ingrained limiting beliefs that will hinder your potential for success if left unexamined.
So don’t read this article and think that if you do this today, you’ll be set for life.
In an age of instant gratification, we’re forgetting that some things take time — this is definitely one of those things.
Deep mindset work: a step by step process for working through your limiting beliefs
There are two different kinds of mindset work that you will play with in your practice: deep mindset work and maintenance mindset work.
Deep mindset work is appropriate when you’ve identified a belief that isn’t serving you in pursuit of your goals.
For example, you’ve just signed your first client in your business, and you notice your brain is throwing all kinds of crazy thoughts at you like “you’re not going to be able to help her, you don’t know what you’re doing, you better get 5 more degrees before you work with her or else your entire business will fail.”
Related post: How To Start Your Business When You’re Scared
Step one: identify your mental block / limiting belief
First, you need to understand what’s driving the thoughts or behaviors that are holding you back.
In the example above, a very deep rooted belief of ‘I’m not good enough or I’ll never be good enough’ is driving the thoughts and feelings of inadequacy and ultimate doom.
Related post: How To Overcome Self Doubt
Other common limiting beliefs I help my clients work through include:
- The belief that achieving your business goals has to be HARD in order for you to deserve the financial abundance on the other end
- The belief that you must be the absolute best at what you do or else there is no point in trying
- The belief that money does not come easily
Do you find yourself thinking any of these? If so, it’s time to do some mindset work.
Step two: create awareness of your limiting beliefs
Just being able to state your belief out loud, or write it down, immediately starts to dissolve its power.
By acknowledging it (instead of trying to bury it) you’re able to see it for what it is – simply a thought that you are choosing to believe.
It’s also helpful to realize how NORMAL it is to have these thoughts when you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone.
Often, we falsely assume we are the ONLY ones who think like this, and so there must be something very wrong with us.
In having worked with dozens of entrepreneurs, let me tell you, what goes on inside our brains is all very similar – regardless of what level of success we are at.
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It’s our ability to work through our limiting beliefs that determines the results we can create for ourselves – not the fact that we have them.
Once you’ve become aware of your mental block, take some time to get curious about where it’s coming from.
Write down all of the evidence you’ve acquired over your lifetime that ‘supports’ this limiting belief.
For example, if you’re struggling with believing you’re not good enough as you are, consider if maybe having parents that praised you on your accomplishments caused you to develop a lifelong need to hustle for your self worth. Or maybe there was a specific incident you can recall when people you trusted betrayed you and made you feel unworthy. (This stuff can literally hide in your middle school history and affect you to this day, if you don’t take the time to work through it – so don’t be surprised if your limiting belief stems from something seemingly silly).
Step 3: find new evidence that supports an alternate belief
Our brains focus on what we’re looking for. This means if you believe you are not worthy of success, your brain will naturally find reasons to support that belief.
Luckily, it can just as easily find evidence to support alternate beliefs (that actually serve you in pursuit of your goals) if you begin looking for it.
If your limiting belief is “I could never do that, it’s too hard”, ask yourself some good questions
- Is that true? Is that absolutely true? “Well I couldn’t prove it in the court of law, so maybe not but it sure feels like it’s true.”
- Have you ever done something hard in the past? “I mean, there was that one time that I didn’t think I’d be able to pass my biology course, and then I studied hard and got a 65%.”
- Ok, so you have done hard things in the past? “Yeah…I guess so…”
- So do you think you might be able to do hard things again? “Maybe…”
- So is it true that you could never do ‘that’ because it’s too hard? “No… it’s not.”
One small piece of evidence against your limiting belief is all you need to create enough cognitive dissonance that starts to shift your thinking… but feel free to list all of the reasons your limiting belief is untrue.
Then, you’ll be able to let go of that belief in favor of one that actually serves you.
Step 4: rewrite your limiting beliefs into empowering beliefs
After you’ve created some cognitive dissonance (shown your brain that its previous thoughts aren’t the only ones that could be true) ask yourself
- What is the opposite of this belief?
- What would someone who has already achieved what I want believe about this?
Instead of believing you are not worthy of success, you might choose to believe that
- I deserve everything the Universe has to offer
- The more I have, the more good I can do in the world
- I am worthy just because I am
Whatever sounds believable (but a little bit stretchy) to you, write it down.
Caveat: sometimes the opposite belief will be too much of a stretch for your brain to buy into. You want to avoid your brain thinking “this is a load of crap.” You need it to be believable enough.
So if you’re struggling with loving your body, and “I have an amazing body” feels too ridiculous, then try “I have a body” on instead.
Related post: How To Be Happier With Mindfulness
Sometimes you have to adopt the neutral belief first, before you can move into a positive belief – especially if your original limiting belief was extremely negative (like my body is hideous and no one will ever love me).
Step 5: ingrain your new, empowering beliefs
The step that ties all of the above work together is actually ingraining these new beliefs into your brain so that they become your new autopilot.
As I mentioned above, this takes time (and a lot of repetition).
Ways to ingrain empowering beliefs
- Write your new beliefs down on paper every day.
- Read your beliefs back to yourself.
- Stick them up on post-it notes around your house.
- Record yourself saying them in the ThinkUp app, and play the recordings back to yourself over and over again.
You must remember that you are not your thoughts. You are the one choosing to think your thoughts. So you get to decide what thoughts to believe.
Over time, you will notice your brain stops going to the limiting belief as often, and starts throwing your new, empowering belief at you when you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone.
You’ll see this working, and you’ll see how it’s changing the way that you feel, and act, and the results you create in your life and business.
But your work doesn’t end here. After coming so far, it’s important to establish a consistent daily mindset practice, that maintains your empowering beliefs and prevents you from slipping back into self-sabotage.
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How to establish a successful daily mindset practice routine
My favorite way to start the day is with a mindset practice that elevates me into a state of peak performance.
I’ve learned (and re-learned over and over again) that spending 30-60 minutes in the morning doing mindset work sets me up for a productive day that feels fantastic and generates amazing results because my headspace is in the right place.
My daily mindset practice routine looks like this
- 4:50 – 5:00am – Listen to affirmations in ThinkUp app (while I roll out of bed, go to the bathroom, and get settled on the couch with a glass of water)
- 5:00 – 5:15am – Journal (5 things I am grateful for, 1 thing to look forward to today, and the one task I want to accomplish today)
- 5:15 – 5:30am – Meditate on my affirmations
- 5:30 – 6:20am – Exercise, shower, get ready for the day
- 6:20 – 6:30am – Read a chapter of a personal development book
- 6:30 – 8:30am – Get the kids up & out the door
- 8:30 – 8:45am – Visualize my goals all coming true (while I drink my coffee)
You might look at this and think “there’s no way I have time to do all that, so I might as well not try.”
Remember that I gradually built up this daily mindset practice routine after noticing how much better I felt when I started my day taking this time for myself.
Initially, my mindset routine looked nothing like this, and involved only gratitude journaling or reading. Over time, I’ve played with different routines and landed on one that is most effective for me to get into the right headspace and crush the day.
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Your mindset routine might look very different from mine, and that’s okay.
If you have less than 10 minutes, that’s just as good! Spend just 1 minute doing each of the following and you’ll already start to notice an improvement in your productivity & mood throughout the day
The 6 elements of a successful mindset practice
- Journaling
- Meditating
- Visualizing
- Listening to affirmations
- Exercising
- Reading
This is the essence of a daily mindset practice routine that will change your life. I’ve experienced this myself over the years of my personal and business growth journey, I’ve seen it change my clients’ lives as they begin mastering their own mindsets, and it’s been documented in several personal growth and business books by well-established authors (Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning outlines a 6 minute mindset practice that will set your day up for success)
Related post: How To Start A Gratitude Journal
Mastering your mindset is like developing a muscle over time.
This is why you can’t just journal on your limiting beliefs once, and then expect them never to affect you again.
A daily mindset routine allows you to maintain a success mindset, and that consistency makes it easier for you to work through any future mental blocks that come up when you’re stretching and growing.
Whether you spend 6 minutes or 2 hours on your mindset work each day, ingrain it into your everyday life if you want to achieve your wildest goals with ease.
Summary: how to establish a successful daily mindset practice routine
Your success in your business and your life comes down to what you choose to believe about your ability to achieve your wildest goals.
If, intellectually, you know it’s “possible”, but deep down you think “it’s also hard, not possible for ME, and is going to make everyone hate me”, you’re not likely to get very far in your business or personal growth.
Tuning in to what your brain is thinking allows you to work through any limiting beliefs that are sabotaging your success, and to practice empowering thoughts that create the feelings and actions that will get you the results you want.
Incorporating journaling, mediation, affirmation, visualization, exercise, and reading into every day will, over time, shift your thinking in miraculous ways.
From there, you’ll finally be able to step into your full potential, achieve your wildest personal and business goals, and live the life you used to only dream of.
Related post: The Ultimate Guide to Setting Goals and Achieving Personal Growth
If you crave a fulfilling life but you find yourself stuck (either in a career that drains you, or a business that has plateaued), as a life & business strategist I am here to support you in starting or growing a purpose driven business and living a fulfilling life.
I’d love to support you in getting clear on your goals and your strategy for achieving them, becoming confident in your ability to make it happen, and taking consistent action that will get you the results you crave. Through strategy, mindset, and accountability, we can achieve your wildest goals faster than you thought was possible.
Book a discovery call today to see whether we’d be a good fit.
I’d love to know, so comment below, what do your mornings currently look like? What small change do you want to make to set yourself up for success the rest of the day?
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