Why improve self-esteem for business success?

The entrepreneurial journey is a complicated one, but it always kicks off with a boost of positive energy and excitement. For business-minded adventurers, the vision of having their very own business can be downright magical. And, if you’re anything like me, it is.

There are millions of people out there right now daydreaming about becoming their own bosses. They’re eager to call the shots, make the big decisions, and live in the glory of entrepreneurial freedom. And some of them are even taking the leap and going for it.

Ignorance is bliss… at least for a little while. 

For some of us, the entrepreneur within will not be ignored. She’s a persistent person and will poke and prod until she has your attention. Before you know it, you’re up in the middle of the night googling “How to start an online business?”. All the while she’s in the background lighting your fire and chanting, “Do it! Do it! Do it!”

This is the first step toward business success, but it’s only the beginning. The hard part’s just ahead.

In this post, I’m going to share why it’s often difficult for entrepreneurs to improve self-esteem for business success. You’re also going to learn how to develop it to have the confidence and do what it takes to succeed. Read on!

Overcoming the Twisted Digital Lens

The reality is that the road to entrepreneurship is paved with plenty of struggles, challenges and boatloads of mistakes. The impact of the stress and anxiety of running your own business is well-documented. Experts agree that owning a business is no easy feat, but you wouldn’t know it by the looks of your Instagram feed.

Social media glamorizes being an entrepreneur with post after post, story after story, reel after reel. Each instance amplifies a toxic environment of comparison and competition that no one can outrun. We see perfectly curated images of others’ aspirational lives along with their Gold Rush-Esque results that tell our highly suggestible minds, “this is how it should be.”

The almighty algorithm prioritizes the success highlights of one-percenters which are then celebrated with overwhelming amounts of likes, comments, and shares. Conversely, knowledgeable and talented entrepreneurs often feel like they’re fighting a losing battle to secure their corner of the internet. Post after post, story after story, reel after reel, depletes them and gives them a sense that something is wrong and that, perhaps, it’s all their fault.

BREAKING THROUGH SELF-WORTH UPPER LIMITS

Each of us has a setting inside our nervous system that creates a threshold for how much love, success, satisfaction, and joy we allow into our life. For most of us, that threshold gets programmed in early childhood according to whatever the norms were within the family unit and immediate environment.

Once programmed, this threshold creates your comfort zone— the level at which you’re comfortable enjoying, receiving, and doing whatever is before you. Your comfort zone is the programming that creates the norms for your life experience, including your upper and lower limits. The upper and lower limits include how you “do” relationships, goals, money, personal achievement, and anything else that shapes your world.

The comfort zone and how it impacts improving self-esteem for business success

Your comfort zone is about one thing and one thing only: what’s familiar. It’s not necessarily about what’s good for you; it’s simply a set of neural efficiencies. Our brains know their way around our comfort zones.  And doing something new or different would require new learning and a big energy output, which, for most, is neither easy nor comfortable. Hence, the pull to stay within that threshold in what you know instead of going after what you want.

The problem is that this threshold affects how you perceive and value yourself. As such, it has a direct impact on your self-worth, self-esteem, and self-confidence, all of which are necessary to live a happy and healthy life. Those upper limits can also prevent you from believing in yourself and doing the important things you’re capable of, like having a successful business.

Moreover, when you’re caught up in the upper limits of your threshold, you cannot fully know the power of your mind or your ability to use your focus to create what you want and succeed. That’s the reason to tap into your personal power and use it to move past it and break through.

But how exactly do you improve your self-worth?

Everyone has a worthiness threshold, and actively improving your self-worth raises your worthiness threshold. As you do, the upper limits in your comfort zone reach new heights allowing you to create greater success. 

In a nutshell, the evolution of your self-worth leads to the evolution of your success.

High self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-value are crucial to success. This is true for anyone and especially useful for entrepreneurs as they focus on building their businesses.

The critical component for improving your self-worth is a consistent focus on personal development. This is about believing you can become the person you want to be with the qualities you want to have. And that belief can only happen when you lead your life’s journey.

The result is breaking through self-imposed limitations and remembering how much you can achieve and how worthy you truly are.

5 Ways to Improve Self-Esteem for Business Success

1. Put Your Success into Perspective

It’s important to remember that meteoric success is rare and not necessarily beneficial. As cliche as it sounds, growing a successful business is like growing a garden. You gotta prepare the soil before you can plant the seeds. Then, you must water and nurture the seeds, not knowing if they’ll break through the soil. After that, you have to nurture, nurture, and nurture until one day you have fruit.

None of this happens overnight. All of it takes time. And while you couldn’t see it, the seeds you planted were hard at work doing their job, soaking up the goodness, and doing their best to actualize their highest potential. Ultimately, their efforts are for your benefit.

Treat your business like a living, breathing being born to support in actualizing your highest potential.

2. Adopt a Growth Mindset

A growth mindset reframes lack of knowledge or understanding and mistakes or “failure” as temporary setbacks and opportunities for growth and learning. It immediately alleviates the pressure of perfectionism and comparison by making your growth an individual journey. A growth mindset is about learning how to learn and improve for improvement’s sake. The purpose behind a growth mindset is to create lifelong success by perceiving momentary setbacks as temporary.

3. Believe in Yourself

There’s no way around it: being an entrepreneur is tough. Big business breakthroughs are often preceded by big business letdowns. The key is to keep going, make adjustments, and track results. This is easier said than done.

Sometimes things get so hard that you just want to throw in the towel and get a job (the horror).

That’s why when it comes to starting and running a business, believing in yourself will be your biggest ally. Despite enormous challenges, believing in yourself will help you keep going until you have the breakthroughs leading to your success.

It’s the willingness to get up again and again that turns dreams into reality, also again and again. So, go ahead and rip the mic away from your inner critic and use it instead to remind yourself of every win, every bit of progress, and everything you can appreciate.

The bottom line is that if you want your ideal clients to believe in your business, you have to believe in yourself. Believing in yourself will also motivate you to continue to take action to further improve your self-esteem for business success.

4. Value Yourself

To value yourself means you recognize you’re inherently worthy and are willing to invest your time, energy, and attention to take care of yourself. When self-value is present, there’s a natural inclination to prioritize your needs and desires and to respect others’ needs and desires. Valuing yourself strengthens your belief in yourself and plays an essential role in how you treat yourself and others every single day.

Self-value is having an inner knowing that you are worthy of happiness, love, respect, success, and all good things. It means believing you’re capable and acknowledging and appreciating your strengths, skills, and abilities.

Valuing yourself makes it easier to take action towards achieving your goals and makes success a natural part of your life.

5. Practice Self-Compassion

Dr. Kristen Neff defines self-compassion as an emotionally positive self-attitude that can shield us from the disempowering effects of self-judgment, isolation, and rumination (such as depression). The research indicates that individuals who practice self-compassion tend to be happier, healthier, and more satisfied and motivated. Self-compassionate people also have more fulfilling relationships. and experience less anxiety and depression.

Practicing self-compassion involves treating yourself with kindness, respect, and care in the same way you would treat a good friend who needs your support. It’s about acknowledging mistakes without beating yourself up so you can cope with them in resourceful ways.

Self-compassion normalizes learning and, in doing so, supports the development of a growth mindset. Research after research shows that self-compassion increases motivation and leads to goal achievement by cultivating authenticity and self-efficacy while minimizing negative thoughts and self-doubts.

Practicing self-compassion means remembering to be kind to yourself during difficult moments. It means allowing yourself to learn from your mistakes without always having to atone for them. Self-compassion is about doing your best and knowing that when you know better, you’ll do better.

The progress is in the process.

There you have it! Now you know how to improve self-esteem for business success. It’s important to remember that improving your self-worth and developing self-esteem is an analog process. The process isn’t black or white. It’s about consistently moving forward.  And it’s the accumulation of growth and learning that, over time, leads to desired results, success, and fulfillment you want.