Build a Growth Mindset That Helps You Win More Clients and Grow Faster

We are live. Welcome to episode 114 of Black Belt Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. What's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Last week, I covered one of the most important ideas every entrepreneur should should understand, a growth mindset. We discussed why 2 founders, they can experience the exact same setback but walk away with completely different futures. One sees rejection as proof that they aren't good enough and the other sees rejection as information. And that conversation about growth mindset and the discussion we had generated a lot of questions. And the biggest one was, okay, I understand the idea. I understand what the growth mindset is and also the 6 traps I covered last week. But how do I actually build a growth mindset? That is what, that is what today's workshop is about. See, there are plenty of people who agree with the concept, but much fewer intentionally practice it. And that is the difference. A growth mindset isn't something that you decide to have on Monday morning. It is something that you build, just like learning sales, just like learning leadership, just like learning to negotiate, just like building a business. So today I'm going to share 6 practical steps that I've seen work in my own entrepreneurial journey, in my coaching of founders, and also in Dr. Carol Dweck's research. She's the author of the book Mindset: The Psychology of Success. So these 6 practical steps, which I want you to Whenever you need, pause the video, especially if you're not watching live, pause the video and make notes. And I'll make a worksheet available for you so that you don't have to take a lot of notes if you're driving or if you're listening in while you're doing other things. That's great. But by the end of today's workshop, I want you to walk away with a practical plan that you can begin applying this week. Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome. My name is Feras. That's what I do. I help entrepreneurs start, build, and scale businesses, and I focus on consulting businesses. So if you are an HR professional, IT professional, a process automation professional, someone who wants to get into AI and, and offer consulting to businesses to adopt AI intelligently, if you want to start a business with this technical expertise that you have, I have a lot of resources for you. You can check my YouTube channel at Startup with Feras, and Feras is spelled like my first name, F-E-R-A-S, and you have playlists on how to start, how to learn, how to vet your ideas, how to learn how to do marketing, sales, how to hire properly, deliver a service, All of that is available for you at the channel. And for those of you again who are new and haven't met me before, I've built— I was laid off in 2003. I was a VP at a tech startup here in Silicon Valley. I got laid off. I couldn't get a job. It was a really, really tough, dry market. So I ended up with a co-founder starting a business, a consulting company to help people get on the internet, build websites for them. And we struggled a lot for first year and a half, 2 years, exhausted our savings, worked really hard. But then we started to see the light. We got from zero revenue with zero background in sales and marketing. We got to 6 figures later after a couple years to 7 figures. And then later we grew that business to 8 figures that I later sold global media giant Dentsu. And along the way, we've built a few other businesses. So everything I've learned over the last 20-plus years is here for you. So I want to help you overcome the challenges that you are facing today, whether it's in deciding when and how to take the leap, in learning how to properly validate an idea that you have, or if you've already started but you're not getting any traction Do leave me a comment. Let me know what the struggle is, and I'll be more than happy to answer and address and give you some recommendations. At least give you some general direction on how to get to your destination, to financial independence, to having your own amazing team, your own amazing culture, leaving a legacy, whatever the goal is that you have. I'm here to help you get there faster. It won't be easy. It will— I will help you make it a little bit easier, but entrepreneurship not for the faint of heart, but it is very rewarding. And I, I, I really recommend that you invest a little bit of time learning about entrepreneurship if you're just still undecided, and then put a plan together and start making progress toward achieving that goal. And again, the resources I have on the channel are there for you to help you on your journey. So that is about That was the introduction. Let's get into the strategies, how to build a growth mindset. And I do want to remind you of those 6 traps. So today we're talking about 6 strategies. Last week I talked about 6 traps that people fall into. And I have one slide that I want to share with you. Give me just one sec right here with those 6 traps. And the reason I'm mentioning this is I speak with 2 to 3 founders every week. On the average. And I hear this all the time. Highly qualified experts. They have 5 years of experience, 10 years of experience, 20+ years of experience, and they're sick and tired of corporate, or maybe they were laid off like I was, or they just want to do something different. They want to pivot and do something completely different. And I hear these mindset traps all the time. I hear, I'm not ready. I'm just not good at sales, or I failed, or I need the perfect idea, or I've already tried that, or it's just, I'm not cut for this thing called entrepreneurship. I'm not cut out for that. These successful founders are different. So for those of you who are listening, I have those 6 founder mindset traps on the screen. But again, if you want to get a copy of this slide deck, let me know. Just leave me a comment. On the channel, again, @StartupWithFeras, and I'll be more than happy to send you a link to these slides. So that's what I covered last week. Spent about an hour and a half talking about these traps and how to get out of those traps. So today though, I want to talk about the strategy, how to acquire, how to make this growth mindset a thing that is part of your Part of your way of thinking, way of behaving, how you take practical steps to achieve that growth mindset. And it's difficult. And I read, I mentioned this last week, I'll mention it today again. Way back then when the book Mindset came out and it was popularized, I read it. And in the last couple of weeks, I listened to the audio version, the latest. And there are some really great tips on not just on business, growth mindset in business, but also on parenting also. And, there are a lot of examples from sports and from business and also from relationships. So, great book by Professor Carol Dweck. And, what I'm doing here, I'm not just summarizing what she said. I'm looking at it from my own experience, from the fixed mindset I had when I was laid off and how I how gradually I shifted that mindset and I learned specific habits that helped me get to 7 figures, get the business 7 figures, and also to 8 figures. So let's go through these strategies one, one, one at a time, one step at a time. So the first step to achieve a growth mindset is to identify your triggers. See, we're all different. Some of us get into this fixed mindset based on specific situations. So for one person, it's losing a proposal. You worked hard to meet someone. You went to a lot of events or you did maybe some cold outreach, or maybe you want and reach out to your previous colleagues, ex-colleagues, your suppliers, your vendors, people, maybe your family, your friends, and you got a lead. You worked really hard to to nurture this lead and convince them that they really need your service. And they said, send me a proposal. And you did send them a proposal. And then after some follow-ups, 2, 3 weeks later, they said, nope, we're not interested. Or we went with somewhere else or someone else. So for one person, losing a proposal could trigger this fixed mindset. Okay. And then remember from last week, for those of you who did not watch last week's session, the growth mindset is about believing that you can evolve your abilities, that you can try different strategies, and that you can— you're there to listen to feedback from others. So it's not about just a growth mindset. It's about positivity. And about working harder. Working hard is important. That's my motto in life: work hard, play hard, and give back. That's that's not the issue here. But just working harder without trying different strategies and without listening to the signals you're getting from from those around you—that's just not not going to help you get into this growth mindset. So so a fixed mindset is I I failed. My abilities, I have these limiting beliefs. I have this negative self-talk and that it is what it is. I can't do anything about it. So, back to our example, when someone loses a proposal, they get into this fixed mindset. I'm a failure. I don't know how to do sales. This thing is not cut out for me. For someone else, It could be asking for referrals. You've had a client, your first client, your second client. They're amazingly happy with you. You solved a problem for them. They paid you and they thanked you and the project is now done. Now you want to ask them to refer you to a friend of theirs and you're hesitating. Your fear of rejection or I don't want to annoy this person, you don't ask for referrals. So you get into this Fixed mindset of not doing something about that situation. For someone else, it could be posting on social media, on LinkedIn or whatever, whichever flavor of social media you like. You said, if I put a post out there on LinkedIn, my colleagues will laugh at me. Who's this guy or who's this gal talking about this stuff? They don't know what they're talking about. So you're afraid of being judged. Judged. So, again, there are different scenarios depending on the areas that you don't have a lot of experience in. You don't have a lot of confidence in doing certain things, certain aspects of the business. Those situations will trigger this fixed mindset. So, the first step here to tackle this fixed mindset is awareness. So, ask yourself, What situations make me defensive? What situations make me procrastinate? A lot of us, things we don't like, things we don't like to do, we just procrastinate. I'll follow up with the lead tomorrow. I had this serious issue. Remember, I learned sales from the ground up. I was in corporate before I was laid off and I was more on the professional services type of things where I was in charge of delivering the solution that our company produced to clients. So I was aware of general sales and marketing just like anyone else, but I never asked people for money for something that I offer. And I went from working the company, the startup that I was part of, we were selling infrastructure technology to the telecom, the biggest names in telecom, to AT&T, Comcast, Cox at the time. All these companies were trying to upgrade their infrastructure. And that's what the tech startup that I was part of produced. And these sales cycles take months and it's a different level of sales and business development. So I was a little bit exposed. I was exposed to that a little bit, but For me to walk into a small restaurant and ask the business owner, hey, I build websites, I can help put your, your business online. Remember, this was 2003, so that was— websites were, were, were a novelty at the time. For me to walk into, knock on the door of a business owner, or pick up the phone and call someone and tell them that, that was, that was horrifying. So I, I feel you. For those of you who are Maybe you were just laid off or they're thinking of starting a business and you have this fear of talking to people about business and you're not sure how to sell and you keep procrastinating. I hear you, my friend. I really— I went through all of that. And then my business founder, my co-founder and I, we decided we got to do something about it. I had a young family at that time and I was the sole the breadwinner. So, we had, you know, I had an okay severance package, but that amount was shrinking, that the money in the bank account, the amount in the bank account was shrinking day after day. And, we had to do something about it. So, we mustered all the courage that we had and we started to go out and ask people and ask our friends to refer us to others. It was very difficult. So, I want you— for some of us, for some of you, This might be okay. You're an extrovert and you're comfortable talking to others. Maybe that's your case. So maybe when it comes to deliver a project, you pause and you get into this fixed mindset. Maybe when it is time to hire people, you keep delaying that and then you're swamped in work and you can't grow. So I want you to be aware and identify when you find yourself getting into this fixed mindset. So this, again, this is step number 1 is identifying your triggers. So ask yourself these questions. When do I stop asking questions because I don't want to look inexperienced? What business activity consistently drains my confidence? So those are the things that you want to ask yourself. And those triggers, When you find yourself getting into this fixed mindset, that's not the problem. That's just the way you're reacting to situations, to scenarios. The problem is that if you don't recognize it. So I want you to take that step. Step number 1, identify those triggers that get you into this fixed mindset, and then you're not taking taking actions. I'll give you one last example before we go to the second step. And the example is from someone I had connected with recently and they had sent a proposal and they met with the business owner. They met with a couple of the directors and they did, I think, like 1 or 2 follow-ups over email and that was it. And then They reached out to me, this person, and said, yeah, I'm— I tried really hard. I met the business owner. I thought they were going to buy and they didn't. And now they stopped— this consultant stopped following up with the business owner. And I just brought a simple statistic that it takes multiple touch points, multiple follow-ups For a deal to move forward, depending on the size of the business, depending on the size of the contract, depending on the complexity of what you're delivering, it could go anywhere from— especially if you're pitching to the enterprise, it could go anywhere from 3 months to 9 months to even longer. I used to sell to the government. We were one of the top analytics agencies for the US government at the time. We had a lot of the government agencies as clients. Sometimes it took over a year to close those deals. Obviously, if you're working with small businesses, the cycle could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 8 weeks. If you're in maybe the business-to-consumer, the cycle could be shorter. But the point here is that you can't just send a proposal, have a follow-up email, and then just call it quits. No, there is a process to follow up and there is something that you can do about the situation where you feel that you're annoying, annoying the client. You feel that you're a burden on the client. You feel that you'll get a rejection. So you keep procrastinating or you just quit on following up. So that won't help you grow the business. And that leads me to the second step in achieving this growth mindset. And that is once you know the triggers, I want you to recognize those triggers and label them. Give them those fixed mindset triggers. Give them a persona. Give them a name. And this is what actually Professor Dweck talked about in her book. She suggested to give your inner voice a personality and give it a name. And my wife and I, and we've been married for a long time, and Amazing journey has been, and hopefully will continue. So, so she she yeah if I bring examples from from home I get in trouble so I have to be careful. But my wife and I have names for our respective personas, and we joke about it now again. If you're recently engaged or married or in a relationship, you have to be careful things you know you can do other when as as as your relationship. Grows and as the bond and the love, as they grow, you can do things you shouldn't and can't do early on. So now in a loving way, in a funny loving way, we remind each other of our faults or our fixed mindset or persona that is triggered by a specific situation. So personal stuff aside, I love this idea. And in business, Once you recognize this trigger and you give it a name, you know, then this is just— it's not you. It's this other persona in a way. So, if you're thinking that and this inner voice is saying, don't do this and drop X, don't do this, whatever that is, sending a proposal, following on proposal, posting on the internet, calling, cold calling, emailing, texting. If you're getting this inner voice, And you're hearing, you'll embarrass yourself. People, you're not that technical expert that you think you are. Someone else already does this better than you. People will think you're an imposter. So if you are starting to hear these voices or a version of these voices, note that These are, these are not facts. They are perceptions or predictions. And if you give them a label, give it a funny name, I don't know, you know, if you're the perfectionist type and you keep delaying launching your website or updating your LinkedIn profile or sending that proposal because you want to make sure it's 100% perfect, Maybe you name your persona perfectionist Peter or something, just called Peter. And every time you get these triggers and every time you hear these voices, say, okay, this is not me. This is Peter. All right. And we have a Peter in the audience. Love you, Peter. Not picking on you, but that's how you deal with it. Then it's just not the failure or the lack of responses from the client or whatever that inner, that negative inner voice is, give it a label and then deal with it, which again, we'll talk about how to deal with it in the next few steps. So if you're hearing this website that I've been working on for the 10th iteration and I haven't launched yet, if you keep hearing it's not good enough, Call it Perfectionist Peter or whatever, and then launch that website. The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, he said, and he's talking about products, but that's applicable to consulting and to this example. He says, if the first version, the first iteration of the product that you release, if it's something that you're not ashamed of, Then you've launched too late. Again, you don't want to put something— you don't want to put something out that is sloppy, that's not professional, but it does not have to be perfect. You can tweak, you can refine as you go. So again, in this example of delaying launching a website, the real issue isn't the website. It's the fear of being judged or this perfectionist mindset that's limiting you from taking action and moving forward. And again, for those of you who are joining us live or listening in live, if you have any question, you have any comments about the mindset, about the things that are limiting you from taking action and establishing your business and growing the business, leave me a comment or give me a specific example and I'll be more than happy to address it before the end of this session. Also, if you've had some wins, you've overcome a specific mindset scenario or a specific challenge in business, I'd love to hear from you as well because I also, I love for our community to see how our aspiring entrepreneurs are dealing with challenges and overcoming these challenges. All right, so step number 1 was to identify the triggers. What is it that triggers you to get into this fixed mindset. The second step was on recognizing the persona and give it a name. Okay? And then the third step is replacing judgment with curiosity. And this might be the single biggest shift in mindset. So instead of asking, am I good enough? Ask, What can I learn? Instead of, why does this always happen to me? Ask, what is it that I'm doing that's leading this to happen to me? Or what variable can I change next time? So, curiosity removes emotion from the problem. It turns the disappointment, the failure, the challenge you're facing into research. Let me dig into it and see What is it that I can do the next time around? And Jim Collins in his book Good to Great, a great book from classic way back then when I was going to do my master's, read it at the time, maybe a little bit after. And he says, he says, for a leader, for a CEO of companies who are the great companies, the thriving companies, that the leader needs to behave in a certain way. If something great happens, he said, looks out, look out the window, meaning attribute that success to others, include others in that success. It wasn't just me, I'm the genius CEO who led this turnaround and of this company and we achieved these amazing results. Now, include others. No one does anything on their own. Okay? Some of us work harder than others, but look out the window when success happens. And then when there are issues and challenges, look at the mirror, meaning look at your own behavior, your own actions, and what is it that you did not do that led to this issue. So, take ownership of issues. And that is, I think, that's the right mindset. That's the right mindset. You don't want to obviously live in the past and you don't want to get into this self-flagellation scenario, but it's okay to reflect on what happened. It's important actually. It's almost required. And for entrepreneurs, I say, have a weekly session, even if you're a solo entrepreneur, Either Sunday night, Monday morning, Friday afternoon, take half an hour to review what happened this week. Here's what I planned on doing. Here's what I ended up doing. I meant to have 20 conversations, sales conversations. I only had 5. What happened? Okay. Sometimes it's out of your control. Sometimes you got busy with delivering services. So, but, and then have a monthly review, a bit more extended, and then have a quarterly review. And, if you start to have team members or maybe even contractors, meet with them and review performance, review what can be improved, review what opportunities are in front of you. So, this curiosity and replacing judgment and self-blame and I'm a failure and it always happens to me, replacing all of that With curiosity will help you turn all that negative self-talk into signals, into something that is actionable. So, give you the last scenario before we go to step number 4. And we look at a typical marketing activity that some— a consultant might do. So, let's say you are a workflow automation Specialist, and obviously with AI and new tech adoption, you can go into a lot of companies, small, mid-sized, large companies, and offer your expertise to help them adopt the technology and AI in, within, across, across all their departments. And this is something that you've been, you've had maybe a couple of case studies. You've done this for a previous, for an employer. And you have your own templates and you have your own workflow and framework and all that good stuff. So now you start to speak about this on social media and you decided to do a webinar and invite people and share with them some of the best practices, which is a great way to establish thought leadership. You're talking about relevant problems in today's economy, in today's market, and then you're also offering your perspective on things. So great idea. You set up a webinar, you announce it on LinkedIn, you send emails about it, tell your friends, and only 4 people showed up. So you spent 10, 15 hours, maybe if this was your first webinar, you spent a lot of time preparing for this webinar and only 4 or 5 people showed up. So a fixed mindset will say, Nobody wants my content. A growth mindset would say, okay, 4 or 5 people, good. That's 4 to 5 potential leads because you've captured their email. So that's not bad. Even if you only got 2 people, and I remember this happening to me, I'll tell you what happened later, but start asking, maybe the topic was too broad or maybe it was too narrow. Maybe if I specify a specific— maybe if I specify a vertical, the same topic about automation and technology adoption for healthcare. Maybe I would attract more qualified leads or maybe I didn't announce it enough. I just gave it 2-day notice. Maybe I should have done 2 announcements, 1 week prior, 2 weeks prior, 1 week prior, the day of. Maybe I didn't send it to my email list and I do have an email list. Maybe I did it 9:00 PM Pacific and oops, I forgot that Eastern, it's midnight Eastern. So maybe Maybe the title wasn't catchy enough. So that is the process. This is when I say replace judgment with curiosity. This is the step we're in now. It is analyzing what happened and then making the changes based on your own observations. And obviously you can check with search on Google, check with GPT or Claude and get a thorough assessment of what happened and then develop an improvement plan so that And next time around, you turn this— I don't want to say failure, maybe the moderate success into a huge success by taking corrective action. So that curiosity in martial arts, we talk about this concept of shoshin, this beginner's mind, and that's really important. Even once you're established and you know a lot about things, You still can learn. So imagine when you're also starting as a new consultant, there's a lot of things you don't know about. So having that, that curiosity, that sense of curiosity and that open-mindedness is really important. So that was the third step. Again, first step is identify your triggers. Second step was to give your persona, recognize the fixed mindset persona and give it a label. And then the third step was But replacing judgment with curiosity. Now, the 4th step, and we have 6 in total, is about focusing on effective learning. See, when people hear about growth mindset, from my experience and speaking with other founders, many people, a lot of people misunderstand this concept of growth mindset. They think it's about trying harder and trying harder forever. I'm again a big believer of working harder, trying harder. That's just the nature of what— that's what it takes to build a business. That's what it takes to do anything worthwhile in life. You have to just work hard. There's no escape. There's no escape except on, of course, on LinkedIn. Sorry. Well, LinkedIn a little bit. YouTube a lot, social media a lot, where you can, you can get to $100,000 a month in revenue quickly, right away, following my 15-minute advice. So real life doesn't work that way. A lot of people, I think they do a disservice to a lot of the entrepreneurs by, by oversimplifying— not oversimplifying, by making it sound like it's just so easy to do. Yes, if you use a framework, a system, including mine, You on our blackbeltstartup.com website, yes, you avoid a lot of the mistakes that I made and you have a system for you instead of just chaos and not knowing what to do. But even with that, even with the best framework, I believe ours is near the top there. You know, we've built several consulting businesses to 7 figures and one to 8 figures. So, so this comes from experience. This comes from all, all the— research I've done, all the books I've read, all the hundreds of founders that I connect with. So, even with that, there's still a lot of work involved. But trying and working harder isn't— growth mindset isn't just about that. The other aspect of the growth mindset in addition to effort is that— You have to look at other approaches. So, so in some cases, yes, you got to try harder. That could be one part of achieving growth mindset. Sometimes it's a different strategy. You know, definition of insanity: you keep doing the same thing and you expect different results. So sometimes the solution is trying a different strategy. Sometimes it's asking for help, getting feedback, getting input from others. Sometimes it's hiring someone who's already solved the problem, right? So, so I don't want, uh, I don't want to just say the growth mindset is about working harder. Efforts is part of it, part of the equation, but I want you to look for ways to identify— I want to look for new ways, other ways, other approaches, strategies to deal with a specific situation. So remember, we identified the triggers, we called that persona, the fixed mindset persona. And then we talked about the mindset of curiosity and digging and researching and understanding what led to a specific event. And failure is not us. We, you know, the project failed. I didn't fail. I learned from that. Yes, it's a failure. It's hard. It's sad. It sucks. I get that. But then what did I learn from it so I can improve the next time around? But now in this step number 4, it is about effective learning and then trying something different, doing something different the next time around. So you might— I'll give you a scenario. You might be thinking of reaching out to your warm network, your people that you've worked with, ex-colleagues, ex-suppliers, vendors, customers and speaking with them, but you're not getting any replies, you're not getting appointments. So maybe, maybe you send out 20 messages. So that's, that's one scenario. Or if you're doing any sort of cold, cold email, cold calling, and you send 100 of those, but you're not getting any appointments, you're not getting any replies. So if you're sending, you know, let's say the cold email example, I mean, based on the statistics, don't expect to get 20 replies from sending 100 emails to people that you haven't connected with. The response rate, there are a lot of variables including the subject line and other things, but it could be 2%. You might get 2, 3 replies out of 100 emails that you send. So that is just one piece of information. Maybe again, you're new to cold calling and you're not sure. So now you learn, you can research, you can find good channels, um, on, on, on, read a book on, on cold calling. So you follow all the best practices, but if you're not getting appointments or if worse, if you're not getting replies, maybe I should try something different. Do A/B testing on the subject line. That there's a concept of A/B testing when you send out emails, especially when you're doing a lot of you know emailing, right? So maybe it is the offer that I have. Maybe I'm going after. I come from a corporate background, and I'm used to working with these Fortune One Thousand as as as an employee. And now you you know you're used to a certain. Way to speak and a certain way to speak to decision makers, directors, and senior directors and VPs. And now as a small business owner, as a founder, you're selling, let's say, to small businesses. So in your email, it could be full of jargon. It could be speaking to sort of like a VP at a at a Fortune 1000, and that language is not going to resonate with someone who is a small business owner. They need something maybe, you know, they could be technical, but still the language is different. The sales cycle is different. What's important to the small business owner is different than what's important to a VP or a director at the enterprise. You know, as a friend of mine— Who? Ron used to say, I learned a lot from him way back then. He used to say, when you sell to corporate, the big companies, when you sell to small businesses and you're asking them for money, you're asking for money out of their pocket, out of their potentially their son or daughter's education fund. But when you go and sell to the enterprise, you're asking money out of a budget. And that's a huge psychological difference. He was He was enticing me on pursuing bigger businesses. At the time, we were very focused on small businesses. That was an amazing piece of advice from Ron. So I haven't connected with him in a long time. Should send him a thank you note after all these years. So that is what I want you to think about when you're dealing with a situation that did not lead to the outcome that you're expecting. So focus on effective learning and trying different strategies. So before we go to step number five, we have some comments. So let me check those out. Okay, we have Rupa Mandas 742. Hi, sir. Hi. Thank you for being here. If you have any question about mindset about turning these difficult situations into business, feel free to reach out. But thank you for joining. I appreciate it. Good. All right, step number 5, build systems that make growth automatic. So this is about, of course, um, as a solo business owner, everything is in your head and you know how to do, you know how to react to certain situations. It's just you, you, you by yourself, whether it's marketing or sales or, or Delivering a service, you know you you know what to do because just you don't have things written down. You don't have things processes and systems yet. So so and you have you have the amazing you know a very sincere intention that you want to do things for the business, you know for your family. You want you want to grow. You want to you want to reach financial independence. So, so these intentions, these good intentions rarely survive busy weeks. But if you have specific plans and specific processes and systems, they'll help you survive and actually thrive in busy weeks. So instead of saying, I'm going to network more, or I'm going to send more cold emails, or I'm going to reach out to my my friends or dropping, you know, whatever activity that you are— that, that you know it needs to be done and you're not doing. So instead of saying, I'm, I'm going to do more of that, at your end of week review session, say, this coming Tuesday at 8:30 AM, my friend Jeff invited me to a networking event in the local chamber or at a BNI, or there's an industry conference, or maybe there's an online meetup, whatever the case might be. Instead of saying, I'll do more of it, on your calendar say, every Tuesday, 8:30 AM, I will be attending this event. And that's very specific. And then before the end of day Monday, I will send 5 LinkedIn messages. I'll recommend— I want to catch up with X number of friends who are in my network. I can easily message them on LinkedIn and just bring them up to speed on what I'm doing today and then also catch up with them on what is it that they're doing and see if I can be of help to them and they can maybe be of help to me. So now, put a process, a simple process, a Google— you don't need anything fancy, a Google Sheet will do. Potentially you can use Asana or any other, or Notion, or any of these tools, and you can have these processes that you follow every time you're about to do something. And you can break down these tasks that are hard for you to do into subtasks. So I will research the event that I'm planning on attending. So I get to know who typically attends these events. Let's say it's a local meetup on a specific topic. Let's say you're an HR consultant and there's some new employee regulations. There are some new regulations in your state or in your area, and you really haven't been caught up on those. Or you have, you have caught up on those and, and you're a subject matter, matter on the subject. So you want to find an environment where you can go and share what you learn and, and let people know that you can be of help. So instead of saying, yeah, yeah, I will write a blog post on this, I'll do a webinar on this next week or the week after, start breaking this down. Okay, I'll go, I will go to a local event or, or I will join a live, a virtual meetup, and I will research as much as I can to learn as much as I can about this event. Who typically attends, the titles of people who attend. I can look at previous events if there are recordings, and then you start knowing more about the topic and about the attendees and what their typical pain points are. And then you can prepare, say, okay, this person is a director of HR. They're very busy. They don't know about everyday's regulations. Um, I can, I can, I can, I can provide maybe some executive-level insights that I can share in my newsletter, or I can send it to them in a follow-up email. So you equip yourself well ahead of this event, so you build your confidence. Now it's not just, I'm attending, I'm attending an event and oh my God, I don't know what to do. You break down the things that, uh, that will help you in this, in, in this pre-event preparedness stage, right? So, so whether you're going to— if you're going to give a, a 5-minute talk about a specific topic and maybe you're very nervous about public speaking, and that's a common issue, uh, common, common challenge is I think the first fear after death that we have. So here, so, so I can develop my outline. I can research the topic. I have 5, 10, 20 years of experience in this field. So I know this stuff cold. How do I make this presentation easily understood by the audience depending if you're speaking with technical people is one level of details. If you're speaking with executives, you need different approach. So you research, you know the material. Now you research how to package it, how to tell a story. You develop an outline or a full script of your talk. You practice it a few times. And then as you're doing these activities, all of these are warmups before you go on stage, before you go into, before you step on the mat, that will help you execute much more effectively when it's time to deliver. So whether it's practicing a sales pitch, preparing for an important sales call with a big lead, Maybe it's content creation, prospecting. Maybe it's the weekly review that you keep delaying having a weekly review because you don't want to be honest with yourself that, hey, I messed up this week and I didn't do any sales calls. Whatever the case might be, it's easier. Growth and a growth mindset becomes easier when your calendar does a lot of the thinking for you, when you have systems and processes that you follow. And again, you, if you're using a Google Sheet, just, just before any of these activities that I mentioned, the examples I mentioned, and you can apply, you can fill in the example that works for you. You can have a list of things, break down this scary big task into something manageable, and then that will help you take smaller steps which will lead to this big big leap that you're about to take. So that was step number 5, how you build systems and processes that will make growth automatic. You know, on the dot, if I'm going to an event on Tuesday at 8:30 AM, then on Monday I'm doing these 5 things. So it just becomes part of your day and your workflow. The 6th and final step is To build an environment that pulls you forward. Pulls you forward. All right. So, you know, they say entrepreneurship, it's lonely at the top. If you're a CEO, if you're an entrepreneur by yourself, whether actually even if you're now beyond a solo entrepreneur, if you're beyond solo entrepreneurship and you've established a business and you have team members, you might have some direct reports, but it's lonely at the top. So you want to surround yourself and be in an environment that helps you shape this mindset that I'm describing, this growth mindset. Because if you're by yourself and you're not open to getting feedback, and if you're not engaging with others, on things that you need to be engaged with as a CEO, as a leader, as a founder, then there's more room for this negative self-talk. But if you start to surround yourself with people who will provide you feedback, with people who have a growth mindset, not those who always complain, then you'll behave— that will help you build that behavior. Because if you surround yourself with people who always complain, you'll complain. If people around you always complain about sales and leads are not getting back to us, and I hired this lead generation company and they gave me crappy leads, and that's— you start echoing that. So, so it's really important to be in an environment where people are doing the things that you want to do. If everyone is experimenting, you'll experiment. If someone, if everyone is challenging yourself and saying, I had this lead generation partner who was sending me horrible leads and then I had a conversation with them and together we identified our target audience and the people that we want to reach out to, their performance improved. And then I was getting qualified leads. So now you heard something from someone who's actually done something positive about fixing the issue with lead generation from the partner that they hired. So as you surround yourself with people who are doing the things that you're hesitating hesitating of doing, you'll start get tips and ideas from them, and you'll start modeling that same behavior. So look for the people around you and see who is challenging my thinking, who gives honest feedback, who celebrates learning instead of perfection. I just heard. I forgot where I watched it. I think it was on the Don Martell channel. I forgot. But it says if if if if you ask ignorant people, they'll tell you they know everything. Yeah, I know it. I've done it. I've tried it. There's nothing else to do. If you ask successful people, they they don't just they don't just have this mind of. Yeah, I know it. I know what to do. I've built. I'm successful. No, they're curious. They're very curious to know about new things, about how people solve problems, about other perspectives. So look in your environment, personal, professional environment, and see who's out there doing the difficult things that you want to do, but maybe you're hesitating or you're procrastinating. And then understand who helps me become a better entrepreneur. And it's different for different people. For me, I read or I listen to a lot of books or audiobooks. I follow, I have mentors. I don't think they know that I'm being mentored by them, but people who have done things that I want to achieve, people who have been to where I want to go, these are the best people to take advice from, whether it's people I know. And I go and meet with them quarterly or annually or take them out to dinner or lunch and have a conversation. And I share experiences, they share their experiences, or just people, strangers, but they've done real things. They don't just fake it and say, yeah, we've done it. And there's no— they can't substantiate what they've done. But you can do this with established business people. You can, in my case, again, That's one category. Other people who are in the same phase, in the same stage of where I am in building and growing businesses, you can see their perspective on things. In the last, I think, 2, 3 months, I've read 5 books on entrepreneurship and it's very interesting. You find, you learn. I know a good chunk of the content of every book, But you always learn new things, how other people think about business, about starting a business, the challenges that founders have. Things maybe were in the back of my mind but were not very well articulated. And now after hearing that from several sources, it solidified one thing that I wasn't very sure about. So again, find ways for you to become a better entrepreneur, to someone, people who celebrate learning, those who celebrate getting feedback, those who get back up on their feet after losing a proposal or losing a deal or losing a customer. Those are the people that you want to surround yourself with. They will play a very important role in help you establishing that growth mindset. Growth mindset. It is on you to do all these other steps. So notice this is step number 6, the last step in the process. You still have to recognize the triggers. You still have to label the persona, that fixed mindset persona. All of that, all the steps I mentioned are still required. Replacing judgment with curiosity, focus on how to— on effective learning. And the last step was on On building a process, a system, so your calendar is working for you. All of those are important and in a way prerequisite to this step of also putting yourself in an environment that will help you grow. So those were the 5 steps on establishing a growth mindset. So I'd love to hear from you. If you, for those of you who are watching or listening live, Let me know if leave a comment if you have a specific question on on dealing with a mindset challenge or or not knowing how to how to move from procrastination procrastination procrastinating or moving from this this this phase of I'm not seeing any traction and and this entrepreneurship is not cut out for me. If if you are having any of these challenges, let me know. Leave me a comment, and if it's something. A bit private, you haven't announced to the world that you are starting a business and you don't want to put a comment out publicly on YouTube or on LinkedIn, send me an email. Send me an email at info@startupwithferas.com. Again, Feras spelled like my first name, F-E-R-A-S, and I'll be more than happy to answer these questions, but any of your questions. But I want you to to finish these 2 sentences as you're going through this, as you're reflecting. You know, if you're listening to this live stream on, on while you're driving, um, and once you're done, once you get home, hit the like button and share and, and subscribe. But I want you to, once you're done listening, answer these, finish this sentence: the biggest thing that I'm avoiding in my business right now is Fill in the blank, or the story I keep telling myself is fill in the blank. So whenever possible, identify this self-talk, this fixed mindset belief. Identify these hidden assumptions, and then what experiment you want to run, you should run next. Okay. So again. A mindset, a growth mindset isn't something that you declare. It is something that you practice. So every client conversation, every rejection, every setback, every experiment, these are the moments. Those moments don't tell you who you are. They tell you what happened and then where to grow. All right. So that's it for today. I will share One, just a couple things here before we wrap it up. If you look here, let me share my screen quickly. If you go to @StartupWithFeras on YouTube, let me go right there. Yeah, here you go. And there are a couple of livestreams. So this is, if you are watching, you can see it now. If you're listening, there's this livestream from last week, How Entrepreneurs Build A Growth Mindset for Success. So in that one, I spoke about the 6 traps, um, and it was a workshop with questions and scenarios. So check it out. But also in them, this is in the live section of the channel. In the video section of the channel, the video section of the channel, there are actually a few recent videos. One on, on, um, on sales, 50 calls I audited and the 4 common killer mistakes. So check out this video. And then if you are about to start a business and you're not sure how, I have the ultimate guide to starting a consulting business. This has been extremely well received by the community, a lot of great feedback. So go ahead and check that out and check out the different playlists on sales, on marketing, on delivery, on mindset, on planning, on hiring attorneys, on hiring accountants. A lot of content to help you start stronger and get closer to achieving your dreams of having your own business, being your own boss, reaching financial independence. Not not this journey is not easy, but hopefully I'm hoping with my content, with the framework, with my experience and the support, I will make that journey easier for you. Have a good one, and we'll see you next time.