How To Be In Charge Of Your Life And Your Business

Quite clearly, the most successful entrepreneurs have good business ideas, but the over-riding key to success lies not in business acumen (although of course it's very useful), not in technical expertise (many entrepreneurs operate in markets in which they have no technical expertise at all) but in their mindset. It lies in what they believe and how they then operate in line with those beliefs.

We all have beliefs about ourselves, our business, our clients, our staff, for those of us who have staff. Some of these beliefs form the powerhouse of the business and some of them are limiting. So what are some of the beliefs that the most successful carry with them?

1 - You are where you are today because your thinking got you there

2 - You and only you are responsible for where you are and what happens to you; you are the cause of everything in your life

3 - Your potential is limited only by yourself

4 - Success requires a willingness to risk, experience failure and recover quickly, decisively and persistently

5 - Success only comes through action

So, by now you'll probably have cottoned on to the fact that the first secret of successful entrepreneurs is that they:

Take Responsibility For Everything That Happens In Their Life

You'll have heard some people bemoaning the state of the economy; you'll have heard others blaming their bad luck; you'll have heard sob stories.

How is this belief about responsibility useful and what effect does it have on our thinking? Well, for a kick off it puts us AT CAUSE in the CAUSE: EFFECT relationship and that's the very best place for us to be.

You know about cause and effect. You know that any stimulus provokes a response. The important thing is to recognize that your response to any stimulus is entirely what you decide it to be.

So a recession comes along; you have an idea that doesn't work; you spend hours trying to clinch a deal and it falls through. Now you decide how you intend to react, because in all these scenarios you have a choice. You have a choice as to how to respond to the stimulus.

Some while ago I was watching the second Harry Potter movie, 'The Chamber of Secrets' (entrepreneurial secret coming up) and towards the end, Harry, who has been through a hell of a time, is talking to Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts where Harry is at school. At one point Dumbledore turns to Harry and says, 'Harry, it is not our abilities that mark us out for who we truly are; it is the choices we make.'

The question is: what decision do you make? How do you CHOOSE to respond to the stimulus? Do you take the path of least resistance and decide to blame the economy/government; the people who didn't like your idea; the client who must clearly be an idiot not to see the benefits of your solution? Or do you take responsibility and decide to consider what you can do to overcome these obstacles and also to examine what part you may have had to play in the idea that didn't work and the deal that fell through?

Once you take this step you put yourself AT CAUSE and automatically bring positive power to your thinking because if you acknowledge that the solution lies with you then you are not dependent on anyone else at all. You have made the decision to become responsible for your own destiny.

From now on you have one responsibility above all, and that is to recognize that in every moment you have a choice as to how to react to whatever is thrown in your path.