Who do you see when you emvision the future you?

A successful business owner, a passionate creative, a fulfilled professional, doing her life’s work joyfully and purposefully?

Working backwards, what would that look like now?

What actions would you need to start taking or changing?

I ask this because there is a vital connection between the way you see yourself now, and the way you aspire to be.

When I first started out in business and it came to tax filing time, I told myself that since I was making way more losses than income, I was probably not running a real business, therefore I was exempted from filing a tax return.

Part of me felt relieved – but a tiny part of me was disappointed with myself and saw myself as a failure. I wasn’t even successful enough to pay taxes!

It wasn’t until years of personal development later that I had a breakthrough, and I finally started to accept the truth of what the experts had been saying all along. That it is only when your inner person and your outer image are in harmony that you start to make and to see, progress.

As long as you think you are not good enough, or not worthy to succeed, or not business-minded enough, you will not think or act or make decisions like a successful business owner.

You can only thrive at the level of who you see yourself as.

If you see yourself as having a hobby rather than a business, you will not exert yourself to understand the numbers, much less learn bookkeeping and organize your paperwork to file a tax return. Why would you need to?

But when you start to see that you are creating this organization that has the potential to grow and produce good fruit and meet other people’s needs, thereby blessing them and you and yours, you begin to see that you have a responsibility and a challenge, and you will begin to think and act differently. You will even (finally!) see the good sense in understanding and mastering your numbers.

You begin to get curious.
You begin to study and do research to find answers.
You begin to reach out to those who are further along the path, and to seek their wisdom and help.
You admit how little you know, and how much more you need to grow and learn.

Most of all, you begin to feel excited again in a way you may not have felt while you were playing it safe and small.
Because NOW it makes sense, NOW it’s finally relevant and related to what you are trying to accomplish in the world.

If you have been stuck for a long time and are not achieving the level of success you desire in your work, perhaps it’s time replace the internal movie you’re watching, with a new one.

P.S. For this perspective I give full credit to Michael E. Gerber, who explained all this wonderfully in his excellent book, The E Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work And What To Do About It, a must-read for the aspiring business owner.