Defining Your Business Mindset
What established attitudes or beliefs do you hold about your business?
I want to take you back to March 2020, two weeks before the pandemic lockdowns began. I was heading “back” to work after taking 16 weeks of maternity leave with my son, which really meant that I’d hired a nanny to watch him for a few days per week while I worked from our basement office. I’d just launched The Writers’ Co-op with Wudan Yan, and I needed to ramp my freelance business back up to make sure I could pay our family’s bills throughout the spring.
Then the pandemic hit, our nanny was unable to start and I found myself with only edges of time – naps, evenings, weekends – to restart my work. I’d also had a traumatic pregnancy and birth, and my mental health had suffered. I struggled through about six months of this work set-up, wondering how I’d survive with my business intact because like it or not, running a small business means watching your personal and professional lives bleed together. Publicly, I was thriving. But privately, I was completely adrift. Before having my son, I felt a sense of purpose when I filed impressive journalism stories or booked $12,000 revenue months in my freelance writing business. But now, I was filled with existential angst. What was the point? Why was I working myself to the bone?
Looking back, I can tell you that I was facing a misalignment of my values during the spring of 2020. My beliefs about who I was as a person in the world – a worker, a mother, a partner, a friend, a writer – had been interrupted by a shift into motherhood and pandemic isolation. In retrospect, my confusion makes sense, and I know it was shared by so many other people. But that didn’t make it any easier to navigate when I was in the midst of it.
This newsletter, Mindset Mastery, is born out of what I’ve learned during the two years following this crisis; it’s based on the idea that your mindset determines your personal satisfaction and business successes. “Mindset” is defined as an established set of beliefs or attitudes that we hold to be true. For most of us, our mindsets are made up of beliefs from childhood, our past jobs, our families, culture, our fears and our identities. So often, we’re walking around with a bucketload of beliefs that we didn’t even choose for ourselves, and those beliefs may not serve us as we try to change our lives for the better.
After over a decade spent in journalism (mostly writing about psychology, health, parenting and purchasing), four years of running my own small business, and several years spent coaching other entrepreneurs, I’ve learned that the ways we run our businesses are directly tied to our mindsets. People often come to my coaching practice because they want to make more money, find new clients, refine their services, create better marketing strategies, pivot, level up, or learn about how to navigate journalism’s tricky ins and outs. And they walk away having learned about those things, sure. But more than that, I’ve realized that we must address a person’s mindset if we’re going to make progress with any of those other issues because if we don’t, we’re ignoring the root cause of the symptom, and the changes won’t stick.
Take Linda’s story, for example. Linda (name changed) came to my coaching practice because she wanted to make a lot more money this year. To which I said: Hell yes! But we needed to do more than just audit her clients, create a budget and figure out her hourly rates; we also needed to dig into her money story. As it turned out, her parents had gone through a tricky financial time when she was in middle school, and she’d watched her family go from thriving to barely able to pay the bills after her father’s consulting practice slowed to a standstill.
Linda was laser-focused on making sure this didn’t happen to her, but it meant that she was terrified to rock the boat with her clients. She hadn’t asked for a raise in years and didn’t feel ready to ditch the clients who weren’t paying her well, which was required if she wanted to make more money overall. Linda and I needed to work on her money mindset: Her beliefs about how precarious finances can be, the security money represented for her, and the fear she swallowed back each time she looked at her financial spreadsheet. If we could help her buy into a more abundant, less fear-based financial belief system, she’d be able to make the changes needed to up her earnings.
The good news is that your mindset is changeable; I can guarantee this from first-hand experience in my own life, and from my experience working with clients like Linda. For example, in March 2020, I was primarily writing product reviews and medium-length journalism feature stories. I worked about 30 hours per week and made six figures. I felt trapped in my business. But as I write this, in March 2022, everything is different. I’m running a thriving business that still includes writing work (which I take when it’s paid well, interesting or impactful); but much of my effort now is focused on teaching and coaching through both my business and The Writers’ Co-op. Over the past two years, I’ve worked close to 15 hours each week and still maintained about $8,000/ month in income, which allows me to support my family and spend a lot of time with my now-toddler son.
What changed during those two years to allow me to adjust my services, make more money while working less, and stay flexible? My mindset. I became aware of the ways in which my previous mindset was holding me back, and took measures to change my beliefs and take responsibility for the outcomes. Primarily, I realized that my values had changed; I’d been so focused on the classic definition of “success” when I started my business that I hadn’t actually thought much about what I really wanted, and what might feel fulfilling. When I was faced with much less time to work and a global pandemic to boot, I had to make hard decisions about which clients to work with. I had to get proactive. I had to put myself at the cause of my life, rather than the effect, and the results rose to meet me.
In this newsletter, my goal is to help us all get from here to there in our businesses. I’ll break down one mindset concept each month, with stories and examples from my life and the lives’ of my (anonymized) clients and colleagues. All Substack subscribers will receive the written portion of this newsletter for free.
$5/ month subscribers will also get the added bonus of access to accompanying journaling exercises, worksheets and prompts built to help you explore the concepts in the newsletter. (This month, for example, paid subscribers will receive a set of journaling prompts to help you identify your current business mindset compared to your ideal business mindset; to build from here to there, we need to know where we’re starting and where we want to go.) If you want to implement changes right away, this paid add-on will be the key. Think of it as me coaching you from afar for a very reduced price! By becoming a paid subscriber, you’ll also be supporting me in taking the time to research, write and edit these newsletters each month.
Over the next few months, Mindset Mastery will focus on money stories – ie., how our upbringing can deeply influence our financial strategies, which impacts how much we charge our clients and the ways we do (or do not) stand up for ourselves financially. I’ll also dig into concepts like the inner critic (I like to call it the gremlin) that holds us back from the things we really want; what it looks like to trust your intuition (and what research tells us about using intuition to make decisions); how to build a business and life that’s aligned with your values; and so much more. If you’re running a small business and you identify as a perfectionist, an imposter, a procrastinator, “bad with money,” an over-worker or a people pleaser — don’t we all, if we’re being honest? — this newsletter was built for you.
Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear from you!
-Jenni