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What if I told you that the difference between business owners who create BIG impact and those who struggle to get traction, comes down to the specific language they use? Both in communicating with others, but more importantly, the words they use with THEMSELVES– out loud and IN their head.
And if I could teach you EXACTLY what to say to change your outcomes, would you be open to getting a smidge uncomfortable?
Buckle up. Today’s episode will FIRE you up, as I walk you through how to shift from the employee mindset, into the role of a digital CEO with your WORDS (because your current vocabulary might be the very thing keeping you stuck).
Episode Highlights & Key Takeaways:
- How we only see the tip of the iceberg ie. the surface-level things in business and not the messy middle (and why should we start thinking in a different way)
- Valuable insights that transformed the way that I operate in life and business (and hope it does the same for you too!)
- Leading by influence (how to make an impact not only on stage but also in our lives and businesses)
- How the questions we ask are powerful ( plus what are the type of questions / statements that you need to be aware of and catch yourself when you’re doing this)
- The shift that you can make to start stepping into a more powerful role
Episode Show Notes:
You only see the surface when window shopping other brands.
When we’re building our business, we look up to people that are doing the things that we want to do and oftentimes we only see the surface-level things. We only see the end goal and not what it takes to get to that success.
We see how they talk about their programs, not their frustration because it’s not working out like they want. We see how they show up on social media, not the amount of time they’re hustling. We see their pretty pictures and branding, not the backend of their business and their team.
We only see all these things externally which are just on the surface but there is so much that happens below the surface that nobody can see.
If you want to build the business that you dream about and create the impact that you want to make, you have to get clear on how you show up, not just on stage.
Yes, those things matter because people buy from those who show up confidently. But you also have to figure out how you can operate, not just from a what to do perspective, but how you operate in your mind. Remember that in order to change your external reality and the results that you’re getting in your life and in your business, something has to change on the inside.
Leading by Influence
If you want to be the voice of your business, if you want people to not only listen to you but to believe in what you say, follow your advice and create transformation in their lives — it requires leadership.
But what I find so often, especially with online entrepreneurs, is they typically picture a leader in their mind as an executive or a director or a CEO in a big company that has teams of people behind them.
They don’t see themselves as a leader because they don’t have teams. They are individuals that maybe have a few contractors that work for them.
The thing is leadership is influence.
I learned that from John Maxwell years ago when I hired him to speak at one of our conferences. He was the one that really taught me that leadership is about influence. It doesn’t matter if you have team members or employees that are technically required to follow you.
What you want to do is be able to show up in a way where people naturally are drawn to follow you because they believe in your ideas and the picture that you’re creating. They believe in the power of possibility and they believe that you have their best interest at heart.
And I know you want to make an impact, and that impact requires you to have influence. It requires you to get people to think about things from a new perspective, to follow your line of thinking, and see how it can work for them. That is true leadership.
The Questions We Ask are Powerful
If you’re constantly seeking tangible, practical strategy, figuring out the best way to structure your program, or thinking which platform you should put your website, wanting to know what you should do next in your business –just pause for a hot minute then ask yourself, how’s that working for you?
If you’ve been asking these kinds of questions, I don’t want you to feel bad for doing this.
These questions are necessary. But if you’re spending your time and energy looking externally for the right way to do something or the best way or the most efficient way to do something, we’re putting our time and energy into those tactics and tools and not in the real transformation of our people.
So what we’re doing is creating busy work that is preventing us from doing the real work. I don’t want you to feel bad about it, instead acknowledge where you are right now and do something about it.
Asking Better Questions
“The quality of our life is determined by the quality of questions that we ask.“
The more I think about it, the more truth I find in that statement. That’s why I’ll share with you the type of questions and statements that you need to be conscious of and catch yourself when you’re doing this so you can reorient your thinking from the poor question / low-quality thinking mentality into more of a leadership mentality.
- Closed Questions
These are called yes or no questions where the answer to the question is a very black and white yes or no.
If you’re asking yourself these closed questions and they have a negative bias towards them, you need to be very, very cautious of this because our brains have the tendency to go to the negative thinking that can pull us down. We’ll find ourselves not operating as a leader and we are draining our own creative vision and our own capacity to hold space for people to want to believe and follow us, so I want you to catch it when you’re doing it.
- Statements that get you stuck
Many people reference these as limiting beliefs. If you find yourself making statements in your business around, “this won’t work for me because…”, “I’m not good enough”, “I can’t control the algorithm”, and making excuses for things, what happens is you start believing them to be true and now become part of what forms your reality.
So I want you to think about what kinds of statements you are speaking to yourself and what kind of questions are you asking yourself in your head and how is that impacting your external reality.
Because when we’re spending our time focusing on these statements or we’re continuing on a loop with these closed questions that aren’t serving us, it does not create the capacity for us to think like the leader we need to be to create a new reality and a new business. We will just stay in the cycle of where we’re at in our business and won’t get anything different.
The shift that you can make to start stepping into a more powerful role
Curiosity. This has become the most powerful thing for me in building my career.
The more curious we can be as leaders, the more successful and the more influence we’ll find.
What I mean by being curious is not going out there and just consuming knowledge for the sake of doing so. It’s being curious to find out new things to inform what we do or say next.
I want you to think about curiosity in conversations and in your own mind. This is what starts flipping the switch between those negative statements that we make, those closed-ended questions that throw us down a loop, keep us stuck, keep us frozen, keep us freaking out.
We fix it by becoming curious with higher-quality questions. We ask exploratory questions. These are open-ended questions. And that’s the key – open-ended exploratory questions.
Start by exploring your line of thinking and direct your mind in a different way, away from the period statements. Move on now and explore. You need to get comfortable trying stuff out to see what works.
Here are some better questions that we could ask ourselves:
- What can I let go of?
- What am I doing right now that is not contributing to an outcome?
Just get present and get curious because when it comes to creating success in your business, it’s just taking the next action, learning from it, and then getting yourself back up and acting again and again.
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