What’s stopping your success?

Feeling like you have to conform to be successful is as constraining as having an overbearing boss breathing down your neck at any given opportunity. Neither work.

My client – let’s call her Sally for confidentiality purposes – had both. She had a brilliant business idea but kept getting swayed by her competitors and she had an overbearing boss in her day job to boot. Sally came to me frustrated but eager to bring her ideas to life.

Because Sally felt so distracted by the opinions and actions of others, the first question I asked was;

How aligned do you feel with your core values?

I took Sally through her values, or shall we say, lack of connection to things she thought were her values, because they’d long ago shifted. And of course they have. They’ll fundamentally remain the same as it’s true to who we are, but they’ll shift in accordance to how our life progresses and our experiences. Ultimately our beliefs shape our experiences and our experiences confirm our beliefs so unravelling the values that are crucial to our life giving wellbeing can sometimes be tricky.

What Sally was experiencing was not what she wanted. Her limiting beliefs were holding her back, identified and reflected in her experiences (if you ever want to know what’s holding you back, look at your own pattern of experiences, the limiting belief will reveal itself). By establishing her values for this new phase of her life, it enabled her to start the process of connecting to what’s important to her and shifting her perspective away from what everyone else was doing, but working on her own stuff i.e. flaunting her individual stripes.

What does this look like in practice?

Understanding why you do what you do, what drives that behaviour and what you can do to shift your life in the direction that makes your heart sing, is like the holy grail of change work. Sally was drifting without really knowing it. She had a great business, as a fellow coach, she was passionate about coaching startups, but needed some guidance herself (which is the coaches way by the way when it comes to our own stuff!) So although her business plans were solid, she found herself lost in the scroll of the millions of coaches out there competing for the seemingly same thing.

Sally’s USP was herself, just as it is for everyone single one of us. Leaning into that is so difficult when you’re first going it alone, or doing something new for the first time but it’s the secret sauce to success:

1. Align yourself with your values
2. Bring your own unique story to life
3. Stick to your plan

A consequence of aligning with her values and tracking her experiences to see what patterns were revealing themselves, was a deeper insight into why she does what she does and what beliefs are the driving force behind them. It can sometimes feel like you’ve got to go a couple of steps back to take a giant leap forward, and that’s exactly what happened. And that’s why sticking to the plan is arguably the most important step to this formula, because you’ll want to pivot and change and ditch it altogether. And that’s okay. It’s the part of change work that trips up everyone. The questions is, are you willing to go through the pain barrier? As whats’ on the other side of that discomfort is a new world waiting to be lived.

Sally and I worked together for three months and metaphorically threw out all the junk, had a good declutter, cleaned up, redecorated and created a plan that was for life, not just for the next ‘thing’. She realigned with her values, she dug deep and found the story within her, the emotions that had been buried and the talent that was literally everywhere and she adapted it to her business.

There’s no longer an overbearing boss breathing down her neck because she took the leap of faith and quit her day job and with her life plan firmly in her hands and her heart, her values rock solid and her USP standing strong, she started to work with the kind of clients that felt like her dream ticket. She still is.