A Business Alignment Mindset is Crucial to Small Business Growth

How do you spend your time during your workday in your business? Do you spend it in worry that the business growth you want will never work out? Or focusing on what you don't have like not enough clients or not enough money? Or are you focused on serving your clients, but muttering under your breath that if only you had more time you’d get to other things you need to do to create growth?

Yes, there are many things we need to do in our business for it to succeed but honestly, it’s not as much as the typical media hype would lead us to believe. That’s why I’m on a mission to simplify what needs to be done in your marketing and day-to-day of your business so you can have the success you want…and have time for what’s important to you at home.

Here we are simplifying the mindset you need for small business growth. This falls squarely under one of my favorite business principle models called “business alignment” which is all about creating alignment between you and the outcomes you want. That makes sense, right?

But you’d be amazed at how often I see coaches, healers and purpose-driven entrepreneurs who lack this crucial alignment and are all over the place. So they never get to their desired outcomes or create the small business growth that they want. Instead, they go around in circles, feel exhausted and wonder if all of this is worth it. Let’s clean that up, shall we?

When it comes to mindset, there are ONLY two must-do’s to create a successful business. The first is picturing the outcomes that you want to have in crystal clear detail. The second is believing that these outcomes are possible for you. This one-two punch is what moves you from being on the sidelines watching others have success to bringing about the small business growth you are hoping for.

Of course, your actions will also have to align with the above outcomes to make it all happen in the real world but we’ll save that for another article. Here we’re going to just focus on the mental part of this equation. Because if you get this wrong, no amount of taking action is going to create the success you are looking for.

There are reasons this one-two mental approach works both from a law of attraction/manifesting and a Human Design perspective, but there’s also a scientific explanation. It’s in our biology and is literally how the brain and body were designed to move you successfully through life. Turns out that our brains are hardwired to bring to life that which we see around us. The body takes that input from the brain and tries it in real life, which gives the brain the feedback it needs to make slight course corrections until it’s happening.

This is how we learn to walk, eat and talk when we are small. It’s how we learn to play sports or do any physical activity. It’s how we learn to paint, sing, cook, craft, drive, meditate, do yoga or anything we do in the world. In other words, it’s a skill that you have and have been using since you were born.

If you can watch it being done, you can learn to do it. Of course, you have to be willing to completely suck at it at first. Think of any child you’ve seen learning to walk, talk or eat, and you totally get this. Jamming their spaghetti-filled fist into their eyeball as they tried to get it to their mouth is just how they roll.

Because they do it so cutely, we miss that what they are doing is making amazingly large, clumsy mistakes as they attempt to do what they are seeing…and that over time their mind is making adjustments based on the physical outcomes their body is creating until they get so refined that they are actually doing it.

Or if you’ve tried to do a new physical activity as an adult, this might make sense if you can remember how awkward and uncoordinated you seemed. But all of us did learn to walk, talk and eat because we stuck with it. It’s the same with anything you want to learn.

Now here’s a wild twist that many people miss. The brain cannot distinguish between what it sees and what it imagines it sees. See a large scary animal in the woods and your body will take over to get you out of there in a hurry: making all the adrenaline and other hormones it needs to do so. Imagine that there’s a large, scary animal in the woods and then hear some rustling and your body will react exactly the same as if it saw it. The same amount of adrenaline and other hormones will be secreted to get you out of there. Why? Because you “saw” it in your mind’s eye.

Accomplished sports athletes, successful executives and many experiments have proven this to work in real life for creating better performance and getting to desired outcomes. Those who practice in their minds for their big shot or their next negotiation get the same improvements as those who practice in physical life.

Turns out that if you can imagine it, you can bring it to be.

But here’s the catch. You have to see it happening in your mind in the way it will happen in life. This means that you need to understand it and have the correct information you need to fill in the details. Too often coaches and healers have vague ideas about “happily serving clients” and try to do this or that type of service, without an understanding of what the marketing and operations actually entail for the day-to-day running of that business.

For example, I often see coaches, healers and service-based small business owners trying to create a course for their business without understanding that a course-based business model means spending tons of time by yourself creating content and most of your work hours marketing it. It requires having decent marketing skills in copywriting and getting visible to thousands of people every week to get the dozens of sales that will make your living. It involves a lot of research, number crunching and content generation. That’s an amazing fit for some people…and a terrible fit for those who want to spend actual time with their clients or hate that level of visibility.

Or there’s a purpose-driven small business owner who wants to make $5-10k/month but is selling only single sessions to their clients. They are missing that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do enough marketing for that scenario to work. They would need about 150 people per month responding to (that means showing interest in and getting back to you, not just “liking” it!!) their marketing for that to work. That of course can be done but it’s a bit of advanced marketing and level of visibility that most beginners simply can’t yet pull off without exhausting themselves and giving up.

The answer? It’s crucial to get the right input on the business growth you are trying to create on exactly how to do it. You need to know what that will entail day-to-day and be sure that’s in alignment with how you want to spend your time. You need to work with mentors and coaches who have step-by-step proven pathways not just the ones that give you generic advice.

Then you need to fill your time with imagining doing those things and practicing those things in real life to bring them about.

This requires that you keep those pesky “what ifs” and other doubts out of the picture. Spend the day doubting your abilities, looking at what’s not working and worrying about what you are not doing, and you are not creating business alignment. Your small business growth—or lack thereof—will likely reflect this.

This leads us to part two of this equation and one that the coaches who tell you to put on your big girl panties and just do it often leave out. Your inner beliefs of what you can and can’t do must be addressed in this process. If deep down, you think money does awful things to people or that marketing is the same as bragging or that if you put yourself out there you’ll be too busy and won’t have work/life balance, then you won’t feel good about pursuing your small business growth plans. If you aren’t sure that you deserve to succeed, or that you won’t be able to get your clients results, then you’ll imagine how wrong things can go or how ineffective you’ll be.

Instead of imagining your success, you’ll spend your time thinking of what’s not working or what might not work. Or play out terrible scenarios in your mind about overworking and abandoning your kids. Or spend days distracting yourself with minor things that don’t actually move your business forward.

The truth is that we’ll always live up to our expectations of ourselves. We are always enacting our beliefs in our actions whether we are aware of it or not. You only have to look at your outcomes to see if you’ve done enough work to ferret out those pesky limiting beliefs. Getting the outcomes you want? You’ve done enough.

Not getting the outcomes you want? There are only two reasons for this: you’re holding yourself back because part of you doesn’t believe you can/deserve it OR you don’t have the input you need on HOW to do it…& have the limiting belief that no one can help you or that’s it’s too expensive or whatever excuse you have to not go get that input.

Both of these are 100% fixable but not with mantras or affirmations. You have to get underneath these beliefs and do the somatic or healing work needed to let them go for real. Then you have to develop the habit of “seeing” yourself as successful in the activities you need to do.

Bottom line? You have to mentally practice being a success at creating small business growth in order to do it. Do the “right” kind of practice and you’ll start to see the outcomes you want. Do the wrong kind of practice and you won’t. It’s all about what you let your mind spend time on.

That’s why success begets success or you see someone who’s starting to succeed suddenly explode their growth. Because once they’ve experienced how to create their growth, they start seeing themselves in their mind’s eye doing it again and again and in bigger ways.

If you’re ready to create your business alignment and the small business growth you hope for, consider working with someone who can get you there. You know the outcomes you’re having while going it alone. What if you could get real support and do it differently?