We named our program for female business leaders in Papua New Guinea “Guria” because it means “earthquake” or “shake-up”.
A shake-up tests the foundations, exposes what’s weak, and let us rebuild something stronger in its place.
To take our businesses to the next level, we need to change what’s comfortable today.

For our third block, Anna and I brought in Kate Nethercott Wilson, an incredible facilitator, therapist and coach, who dove into the emotional and mindset barriers that hold us back.
e.g. If you think that you’re not deserving of success or wealth, all of the “best practice” business tools won’t help you.
Kate spoke a lot about the “Mindset Gap” – if we want to reach a new level of success in our business, we’ll need a new set of beliefs and mindsets.
Or as they say, “what got you here won’t get you there”.

This week revealed a lot of deep-rooted identity issues, brought buried anxieties into the light where they could be addressed, and seemed to be a source of great healing.
Lots of tears, lots of breakthroughs.
For obvious reasons, I won’t be using names, images or identifying stories in this post.
Here are the lessons from the week that stuck with me:

Entrepreneurship is more than starting a business
To be an entrepreneur is not the same as being a business owner or manager.
There’s an added dimension – the decision to choose yourself, the decision to be vulnerable and try something that might not work (it’s statistically likely to fail).
You attach your identity to the business, tying your name to its name, your reputation to its reputation.
This is incredibly confronting, and causes us to fall into defensive patterns to limit the risk.
e.g. not advertising yourself, not charging market rates, being slow to hire people, giving more and more so that we feel like we have value.
We don’t want to put ideas or promises out into the world, because we fear rejection.
Specifically, we fear the feeling of rejection, the feeling of ridicule, the feeling of being measured and coming up short.
The mindset of an employee is completely different to the mindset of an entrepreneur, so we’re in need of a mindset shift.

Tasks that drain your energy are unlikely to be games you can win
Just because something is “industry standard” doesn’t mean it’s the right way for you to work.
If you really hate a particular process in your business, you’re unlikely to want to do it in the future.
This leads to delays, shortcuts, apologies and avoidance.
e.g. if you hate how you feel when creating invoices, you’re unlikely to want to send invoices in the future.
Your mind will generate lots of “good” reasons and excuses for not doing that task in the future, such as offering discounts, not billing for your work, turning down opportunities altogether.
Instead what we need is a new mindset, a new set of stories and beliefs around things like invoicing that aren’t based in guilt and issues of self-worth.
All the invoicing software in the world won’t help, if you still feel uncomfortable stating your price and requesting payment for the work you’ve done.

Permission To Succeed
One of Kate’s big questions for our participants was
“Is it even ok for you to be successful?
Are you keeping yourself small because it’s more acceptable?”
What a huge question.
Once again, if the answer is “no”, all other strategizing becomes pointless.
You’re holding yourself back, perhaps for good reason.
Perhaps it’s not seen as acceptable for women to be more successful than men, or to put yourself in a position of influence.
Or perhaps it is ok for you to be successful, but you haven’t yet embraced it.
This question is a showstopper, because it identifies the barriers and self-sabotage that prevent us from growing.

Numbing Negativity
Our mind uses approximately 70% negative thoughts, which is believed to be a way of keeping us safe.
e.g. worrying about health, status, food security and tribal cohesion prevented us from an early death at pretty much every other time in history.
These problems are less urgent in 2020, but our thought patterns remain.
The temptation is to numb this negativity, and we have lots of “normal” ways of doing this that act as a crutch, such as drinking, drugs, social media and Netflix.
None of these address the underlying issues, they mask it and dull it for a short while.
Instead, we need strategies to help us sit with our feelings, and re-set the balance by adding in more positive thought patterns.

Feelings, rather than thoughts, are what’s stopping you
Thoughts are not what hold us back, it’s how the thought makes us feel.
We hate the physical tension and discomfort, and will go a great distance to avoid it in the future.
Fear of the feeling is what drives us, like the fear of feeling embarrassed, feeling inadequate, feeling isolated, feeling ridiculed, feeling like our efforts were all for nothing.
These feelings are awful, but that doesn’t mean we have to avoid them at all costs.
Perhaps instead we need to learn to hold these feelings and work through them, rather than creating fake stories.
Our minds are great at creating fake stories that follow the template of
“I can’t ______ now, otherwise ______”.
This is the excuse generator, which has to be switched off or ignored if we’re going to make genuine progress towards our goals.

Bringing your whole self to your business
One of the myths that entrepreneurs tell themselves is that only part of their personality is acceptable for public consumption.
We have to segment a small part of our character and make that our brand, hiding the rest of ourselves in shame.
The irony is, I bet your favourite people to follow are those who are honest about their whole selves – Celeste Barber springs to mind – and these are the people who end up having the most loyal fanbases (Celeste recently raised $52 million for the Australian bushfires).
Full authenticity, being yourself without holding back, might be what your business needs.
People can opt in or out of your brand without pride or shame, so no point taking their choices personally.
What it leaves you with is a tribe of fans/customers who appreciate all that you bring, who are inspired by your work and who will tell others about you.
You don’t have to be everyone’s cup of tea, so long as you’re some people’s favourite cup of tea, and that usually means having a strong flavour.

“I don’t know” is an elaborate strategy of the mind to keep you safe
Your mind rarely “doesn’t know” something, but rather it freezes out of fear.
This is when your head second-guesses your gut, overruling what you sense is right in an attempt to avoid a negative feeling (e.g. the feeling of embarrassment, the feeling of being called a liar, etc).
Again this isn’t a bad thing, it’s just designed for situations more serious than running a business, and so it’s overkill for most of our daily lives.
When you hear yourself saying that you don’t know what to do, check if this is the genuine absence of options/information, or your mind pumping the brakes to avoid change.

You can’t be selective when tuning out feelings
Kate reinforced that how having feelings is normal, but this wasn’t necessarily demonstrated by our parents.
We need to learn to sit with our feelings, rather than “hustling” to avoid feeling things.
I’ve often seen this in people around me, who are running from one thing to the next, because the feeling of progress and busy-ness is more comfortable than feeling something uncomfortable inside.
We can’t be selective in which feelings we block out, it’s all or nothing.
By blocking out sadness we also block happiness, and miss out on having a genuine connection to ourselves and others.
It’s very difficult to have a sense of fulfilment if you’re going to block all your feelings out.

Fear wastes energy
Kate phrased it in a really powerful way to one participant:
“Imagine if you didn’t have to spend all of that energy, trying to make yourself good enough”.That hit me like a sledgehammer.
So many of us second-guess ourselves all day.
We second-guess our prices, our products, our credibility, our value propositions.
If you ask me, my mind will tell you it’s out of quality assurance and professionalism, but the truth in my gut is that it’s out of fear.
Fear of being exposed, of feeling vulnerable, of being gossiped about, of ridicule, of public failure.
All of these checks take so much time and consideration, and are in most cases defending against a fear of something that doesn’t really exist.

“There’s always something stopping me from going out and selling”
I really liked this insight from one entrepreneur, who named the behaviour pattern that’s holding back her growth.
This isn’t a planning issue or a calendar issue.
She’s named an internal force that’s causing her to drag her feet.
Once you name it, you can pinpoint it when it happens, and naming each moment takes away its power.
By addressing the underlying aversion to selling, we can remove the true obstacles to growth, and then bring in tools and techniques to boost sales.

The dangers of Yak Shaving
Seth Godin uses the term Yak Shaving to describe a series of side tasks that become more and more removed from your goal, all in the name of progressing your goal.
He uses this example:
Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do.
“I want to wax the car today.”
“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter.
I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”
“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”
“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”
“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”
“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”
And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
This yak shaving phenomenon tends to hit some people more than others, but what makes it particularly perverse is when groups of people get involved.
It’s bad enough when one person gets all up in arms yak shaving, but when you try to get a group of people together, you’re just as likely to end up giving the yak a manicure.
Which is why solo entrepreneurs and small organizations are so much more likely to get stuff done.
They have fewer yaks to shave.
So, what to do?
Don’t go to Home Depot for the hose.
The minute you start walking down a path toward a yak shaving party, it’s worth making a compromise.
Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.

When we get down to action planning at the end of a block, I hear a lot of “urgent tasks” that sound a lot like Yak Shaving.
Sometimes they stem from a scattered brain, but more often than not they sound like a mind that’s stalling, that’s looking for a reason to avoid the negative feeling.
A great question that helps get unstuck is “what can we do now that will make everything easier?”, otherwise known as the “monkey or podium” question.
In the above example, this is the decision to go to a different store to buy the hose, or taking your car to the car wash instead of doing it at home.
That simple decision might costs a little more today, but is certainly easier and cheaper than trying to sneak into the zoo to shave a yak.
The same goes for our action plans – the decision to sit with our unease, to take a risk that might not work, to potentially experience a negative feeling – these are much easier in the long run than the great lengths we go to avoid any chance of discomfort.

Facts vs Fake News
One exercise I found particularly useful was to draw two columns on a whiteboard, one with the heading “Facts” and the other “Fake News”.
You then take a problem that’s on your mind, and populate the two columns with what goes through your head.
I went first as an example, describing my thought process whenever I get new requests for freelance work.
The facts column is really compelling; all the actual evidence points to a great fit between me and the prospective client.
The fake news column looks ridiculous; all of the unfounded stories made up in my brain about inadequacy, fear of being exposed, fear of disappointing people that are worlds away from the evidence at hand.
This got a big laugh from the group – partly because my thought process is ridiculous, partly because everyone else’s is too.
A great exercise that you can do on your phone whenever you feel overwhelmed.

This week has been one of the best accelerator blocks I’ve ever participated in.
We’re really lucky to have earned the trust of such an incredible cohort, who were willing to be vulnerable, dig into their past and make some confronting decisions about how they want to re-shape their mindsets for the future.
I really appreciate seeing Kate work, expert facilitators are absolute gold in a program like ours, particularly when they bring unique strengths to the group.
If you feel like you want to talk to someone about your mindset and the internal forces that keep holding you back, I highly, highly recommend speaking with a professional.
I’m happy to be a listening ear, but I also acknowledge that someone with training can be even more helpful than me.

We’ll be back in Port Moresby soon for the final block of the program and our showcase…