Mastering your mindset is key to identifying your ‘why’ and address any limiting beliefs that might be holding you back from taking action on your dreams. By starting with the right mindset from the beginning, you will set yourself up for success and rise to the challenges that you may inevitably face in your business.
The clearer and more purposeful you are, the easier it is to focus your time, energy, and resources in the right direction so you can be even more intentional and strategic in your business.
While having clarity is important, it’s also a moving target. Your vision and purpose might evolve over time as your brand evolves – and that’s totally okay! The most important thing is to get started.
The one thing I don’t want to hear from my dietitians is to hear they are “struggling” “exhausted” “burnt out” or all three of those things. I want you to build the foundations now in the right way so that you can build faster, gain traction quicker and become more profitable in the long term.
So here’s my first big question for you: Do you know how closely your self worth is linked to your ability to charge what you’re worth and market yourself as your businesses brand? What I am saying here is that the way you view yourself will impact on your ability to ultimately build a profitable business that affords you the lifestyle you want. Ultimately, you need to value your own worth within your space as a dietitian and believe with all your might that you are working in your zone of genius and that allows you to help other people. When working in your zone of genius, you are doing the thing that comes naturally to you because of your life experience, your work experience or your personal qualities or all of those things combined and you are actually really good what you do. You can get clients the results they need to make their lives better. You though, you are the one that has to believe you can in order to build a business around it. And if you don’t, well……….
What’s the alternative?
You have no awareness of how stuck people are without you. You are not aware that right now they have two choices- to continue on with their problem, the pain it causes them, more frustrations they have and keeping them stuck where they are or b) moving them towards the transformation they are after. So if you aren’t aware of their pain points, you can’t give them the transformation so you don’t charge enough, and because you don’t charge enough you aren’t taken seriously. YOU don’t take yourself seriously, so why should anyone else? Now is your time to shine.
So how can we fix this?
Know your why.
Having a higher purpose is more successful than traditional goal setting alone. Understanding your ‘why’ has the power to keep you steady through roadblocks and challenges in business. This is your opportunity to reflect on the reasons why you are passionate about being a private practice dietitian.
Let’s start with the big picture – because if you don’t know where you’re headed, you’ll never arrive! Grab a pen (or keyboard) to jot down your answers to the following questions. Before you start writing, close your eyes and visualise the outcome or feeling that you’re describing.
- You’re living your dream life in 5 years’ time. What does this look like for you? For some people, this means jet-setting across the world and working from their laptop. For others, it’s settling down in a small country town with a rustic home and surrounded by family.
- How would living this life make you feel? Describe the emotions this brings up for you.
- What things could you do in your life or business (that you can’t do now) if you had a thriving private practice? Try to go another layer deeper – for example, if you want to quit your day job, why is this important to you? Is it because you want more freedom? Is this freedom to spend time with your children, family or partner? And why is that important to you?
- What does running a successful private practice mean for the impact you can have on others? When you think to the end of your career, what type of legacy does this leave behind?
Now that you have explored your higher purpose behind running a successful private practice, it’s time to select one major WHY. Find a way to make this why present on a daily basis – add it to sticky notes, your whiteboard, your vision board and/or your journal. This will allow you to keep tapping into your why on a daily basis and keep it at the forefront of your mind.
Why we avoid and distract ourselves
Do you find yourself regularly procrastinating, distracting yourself or avoiding work that moves you closer to achieving your big goals?
Sometimes we blame it on overwhelm, not knowing what to do, being too busy, too tired, never having enough time or other aspects of ‘life getting in the way’.
While these are all valid reasons to step back and re-assess whether your goals are realistic, it’s important to recognise that sometimes doing the thing we want to do is scary and confronting. We might be avoiding the discomfort that comes with trying new things or even deep-rooted beliefs that we won’t be successful.
As you move through this workbook, notice your distraction and avoidance patterns. Are there particular activities that you regularly do to procrastinate working on tasks that move you forward in your business? Some examples could be calling a friend, going for a walk, going to the fridge, doing housework, watching Netflix or going shopping.
Tip: make sure you specifically block time out in your schedule to work on tasks that directly contribute towards achieving your business goals. Treat it like you are making an appointment with yourself!
Recognise what is holding you back
Our pre-existing thoughts and belief patterns have an incredible impact on our actions and the results in our life. The aim of this section is to help you work through some of the thoughts and belief pattens that you might currently have about being successful in private practice.
- What current thoughts do you have about being successful in private practice? How do these thoughts relate to what you have or haven’t accomplished yet?
- Where do you think these thoughts come from? What is your earliest memory of having these thoughts?
- What kinds of feelings or emotions does this bring up for you when you think about it?
- What kinds of actions (or lack thereof) and results has this caused in your life or business?
Much of the time, these thoughts didn’t even originate with us. Sometimes they can be passed down through generations, like a gift that was handed to us that we never really asked for, yet we hold on to. I want you to visualise releasing these thoughts from you, as if you have written them on a white board and are erasing them.
- Now that you have explored and released these thoughts, what is a new empowering thought that would serve you in accomplishing your goal? How can you keep this thought ‘top of mind’ as you make your way through this blog?
Perfectionism
If I had a dollar for every dietitian who told me that “dietitians are typically known for being perfectionists”, I wouldn’t ever have to work again. I’m not sure it’s entirely true though. What that statement is meaning, I think from my point of view is, the process of over thinking everything you do and trying to get it all just right before you actually tell anyone about it and that mindset that gets you bogged down in the details that really don’t matter as much as the emphasis you are placing on it. I want to tell you, you don’t need to understand absolutely everything to start taking action. Your ducks don’t need to be aligned before you take a step forward. I want you to take imperfect action so that you can learn and refine along the way.
If you are sitting back perfecting things, you aren’t making money and your competition is getting ahead of you. Money and success love speed so if you are an entrepreneur, you need to keep up with the race and put yourself out there making things happen, even if it’s only 50-75% perfect. As an entrepreneur, the only time you get paid is when you take action- perfect or imperfect. Having an idea doesn’t pay you, taking action does. You need to execute and sell your idea.
The Power of Focus
You all know and I will be the first to admit it, that I have too much on my plate so learn from my mistakes. I’m a mum of 4 young kids, I work PT as a senior dietitian in bariatrics, I have my own private practice and I am the CEO of The Ambitious Dietitian. Dare I say I need to sleep and have a social life and try to incorporate movement into my life too?
So imagine this…. You are in the valley and you need to put a bridge in to get to the other side. So you build 10 bridges all crossing at different points but you only have so many resources, and confidence and time and money to put into all those bridges. So these bridges take you 10 times as long to build because you are building so many. As a dietitian, are you trying to do 4-5 different social media platforms, plus email marketing, plus blogging, plus see patients, plus run an online course plus, plus, plus…..You get where I am going with this? When you are doing too many different things as once, and trying to perfect them all, you will run out of steam. Overwhelm creeps in, you get paralysed and burnt out.
- What should we be doing instead? The easiest way to maintain a strong power of focus is to sit down and reflect on how many bridges you are currently building. List all the bridges you have on the go right now.
Now you have done that, can you rank them in order of priority so we can work out what you are going to focus on in a systematic way? Once you’ve built one, you can then build another and so on. We aint building them all here right now. I’m saying this so you can get to the other side quicker and so much cheaper and with so much more confidence and strength. Then when you get there, you can gather all of your resources and learnings and extra confidence and start building the next bridge.
Resilience
Starting and growing a successful business is not easy and it’s not something you can do overnight. It takes work- hard work, dedication, blood, sweat and tears. Having excuses, complaining, deflecting or blaming others won’t get you moving forward. You are the one that needs to stand up and take full responsibility, face resistance and setbacks and learn to be resilient throughout all the challenges. Don’t be the person that poisons your own self with past beliefs, negative attitudes and a give up mentality. Be the person that encourages, recognises the hard work, and does the work and shows up.
So in summary, if you don’t get your head sorted, if you don’t start thinking like a entrepreneur, everything else you learn will lose it’s power. Unknowingly and unwillingly, you will limit the impact of everything you do.
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