Following your dreams and starting your own business from scratch is not for the faint of heart. It’s tough to deal with the unpredictable income, the potential judgment from friends and family, and the constant hustle that is so often required during the first few years in the game. That’s why the following mental habits can help you stay on track to meet your ambitious goals and thrive as an entrepreneur.
1. Focus on your systems. Forget the rest
As a freelancer, you probably get to set your own schedule and choose your clients.
For example, if you’re a writer, you can pitch to magazines whenever you want to. That’s incredible. But there’s also an enormous downside to this path: Unpredictable income.
If you’re in this boat, one of the best mental habits to cultivate is to simply focus on your goals:
How many pitches do you want to send each week?
What courses would you like to complete in a year?
How many words per day do you need to write to finish your book?
Meeting these goals will likely give you a great sense of satisfaction, even if the results aren’t exactly what you were hoping for. It’s best to measure your success by what you’ve accomplished instead of how much money comes in on a weekly basis. After all, plenty of entrepreneurs earn $3,000 one month and $10,000 the next!
If you prioritize meeting your goals over keeping a watchful eye on the results, magical things can happen.
2. Concentrate on fostering inner peace rather than external validation
It can be so easy to feel down when you don’t make any sales in a week. All too often, that’s when the wheels of negative dialogue start spinning, but you don’t have to do that to yourself.
It might be helpful to adopt daily mental habits of journaling, meditating, or writing down everything you’re grateful for before you even turn on your computer. Why? Because if you’re creating and hustling, there might be haters trying to bring you down or all kinds of other negativity attempting to make its way into your world.
Don’t let all that toxic noise get to you. Haters hate themselves, not you, and the ebbs and flows of business are predictably unpredictable.
Truthfully, change is the only constant for entrepreneurs, as we all know, which makes mastering your internal world and fostering a sense of inner peace all the more important.
3. Remember your mission
There are going to be tough days — everyone has them.
Maybe you didn’t get the funding you were counting on for your startup or a client pulled out at the last minute.
Maybe you’ve experienced a $0 month.
Whatever the case may be, it’s extremely important to have a mental habit that makes you refocus and remember why you started this journey in the first place. The bigger the impact you want to make, the bigger your “why” needs to be to counterbalance the hard days.
Were you hoping to help people find meaning in their work?
Eat healthier? Laugh more?
Did you want to help cure a disease?
If you’re short on money, lacking motivation, and struggling not to give up, remembering your core mission can make a world of difference. We all need to learn how to get up when we fall in order to rise to the top!
