Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Attitude

You can receive mentorship from the top finance gurus in the world and fine tune your small business so it runs like a well-oiled machine, but if you are not mentally prepared to receive wealth, your company will flop. Your attitude needs to be cultivated to reap the benefits of a successful business, so if you are working hard and not getting the return on your investment, be willing learn from the “gray dogs” that have made it happen already.

In his book, Failing Forward, John Maxwell makes it clear that obstacles and challenges are a normal part of the road to success. What separates the wheat from the chaff, or those with and without wealth is the determination to reevaluate and pick it back up when something had failed badly. You must be on some type mentorship program with a successful entrepreneur if your objective is to reach levels of accomplishment beyond where you’ve already been.

There is a science to changing our attitudes. From the moment we are born, and according to Dr. Bruce Lipton while we are developing on the womb, we are continuously bombarded with the opinions and beliefs of others. As we grow from infants to children the neural pathways in our brains become “hard wired” with the data we are collecting from the world around us. We learn to think like the most influential people in our young lives, adopting their beliefs and making them our own as we become adults. Successful entrepreneurs consistently report their efforts to overcome the challenges associated with the beliefs imposed on them by others.

Yet, there is a special feature entrepreneurs possess that people satisfied to work for others until retirement don’t have. It is the profound desire to break the bonds of the “9 to 5” mentality, and strike out into unknown territory. It takes courage to shake loose the ties we have to the status quo and blaze new trails when we have been taught from infancy to play it safe and choose security over adventure.

Cultivating a entrepreneurial attitude means tearing apart the established neural pathways in the brain that dictate our behaviors, responses, attitudes and world paradigm, then to literally reconstruct the neural connections in the brain. This happens by attending classes or conferences led by successful entrepreneurs or undertaking a book study program to learn new ways of thinking. If you think like an employee, you will always be one. If you learn to think like a millionaire, all your behaviors and activities guarantee you will be one. We are what we think.

You have to start by taking a personal inventory of your beliefs, and identifying the ones that do not support your business objectives. For example, if you were taught by your parents that you have to work hard for money, it will only come to you when you have a sense of working hard. Entrepreneurs such as Robert Kiyosaki teach us that we can make our money work hard for us by adopting an investor mindset. When we change our attitude about money and small business, success happens.

More from this contributor:
How I Funded My Small Marketing Business
Things a Small Business Can Do to Avoid Overspending
Steps to Getting a Small Business Loan in a Down Economy

Reference:

• johnmaxwellonleadership.com/