When I spend time in the mastermind alliance with my Entrepreneurial Elite Inner Circle, my vision is expanded and enriched, I’ve got ideas in abundance and I’ve got that deep sense of fulfillment at not having just fed my own mind and soul, but knowing I’ve contributed the same to others in the group.
In one particular session, the following words left the lips of a very successful business owner who’s built a thriving £5 million pound business employing 30 people;
“I’ve realised if there’s one thing I’m not very good at, it’s asking for help”.
At that moment, I observed the heads of his five colleagues around the table nod in resonance. An unconscious communication. Clearly the challenge was well known in the room.
Now consider this; if a successful entrepreneur who’s a passionate advocator of, long term participant and investor in an entrepreneurial mastermind – with a close, supportive group of successful business owners around him, as well as unprecedented access to one the most sought-after professional coaches in the world – speaks of how difficult it is to ask for help and his colleagues around him unanimously concur they face the same challenge, that challenge can only be magnified for the masses whose lives lack this level of support.
Owning and running a business is a lonely profession. A business owner can be surrounded by a plethora of staff and a loving, supportive family…and be utterly isolated. The staff mean well but they don’t understand you. They’re not entrepreneurially minded – that’s why they’re employees. Your family love you but they don’t think like you do either. Truth be told, they think you’re rather strange. And obsessive. They’ve never built and ran a business in their lives either.
Ironic, is it not, that the job description for this choice of career demands self-sufficiency. What makes a business owner a business owner is the guts, brawn, courage and willingness to go it alone – that quest for freedom, the promise of being liberated from living someone else’s agenda, the right to shape life on your own terms.
The “independent gene” serves us well….until it doesn’t anymore. And that point in time comes a damn sight faster than most business owners realise. If the business is to grow beyond infancy, it happens early on. And if Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner fail to “clock” where the “independent gene” serves them and where it doesn’t, that business owner is no longer a profitable asset to the business….they’re a limiting liability.
The loneliness of running a business is, to a certain degree, just the way it is – an occupational hazard if you will. That said, it can be mitigated to a large degree – if you’re smart enough to put yourself in supportive communities with people of your ilk – people who have faced the same unique challenges only the entrepreneurial path can bring.
That’s why the smarter thinkers in my world are part of my Entrepreneurial Mastery and Entrepreneurial Elite Inner Circles, or members of an Entrepreneurial Elite Mastermind Group – where they get to interact every day with fellow growth-orientated business owners who “get it” and stretch, challenge and support them in their growth objectives to extraordinary success.
You can’t receive what you won’t ask for. To be too “proud” or too “shy” or too “self-conscious” to ask the all-important questions that bring you the all-important answers is some of the most crippling and most dangerous psychological limitations you can have. At best it’ll severely stunt the growth of your business. At worst it’ll kill it. If you can’t get yourself out of the way to first think into the questions you need answers to and then to ask them, trust me, you’re in big trouble.
Thinking into the question and asking it, is only two-thirds of what needs to be done. You then need to be smart enough to evaluate the calibre of person you’re asking the question to. It’s no good asking the self-employed printer turning over £40,000 a year a question to help you turn over a million. He’s not generating £40,000 a year because he wants to, he’s doing it because he’s not aware of how to generate it a month, week, day, hour or minute.
Whatever you’ve read, seen or heard about what brings greater success to your life, let me assure you – this is the most important of all; it’s an irrefutable truth of life most people live in complete oblivion to:
The quality of your life proceeds out of the quality of question you are willing to ask yourself, be asked by another, or to ask of another.
What makes questions the “holy grail” of success? They elevate quality of thinking. And quality of thinking determines quality of result. Your business and the quality of your life, can never outgrow the quality of the thinking you bring to them. That’s why “The 4 Pillars of Mastery” videos come with a “Success Implementation Guide”, packed to the hilt with powerful, searching, coaching questions to raise your consciousness and take your thinking to a whole new level.
Why do you think I went to all that trouble in creating the guide? Don’t you think I could have just left it at the videos? The videos alone would be enough to blow most people away – especially as these incredibly valuable resources are offered for free. The questions in the “Success Implementation Guide” are where the gold lies. They’re the most essential resource of all and yet, in the greatest of ironies, most people get all juiced up about the content in the videos and put little, if any precedence on the questions.
BIG mistake.
And an understandable one. We’re programmed into watching TV and taking in information. We’re not programmed to ask ourselves intelligent, powerful, searching questions. And that’s why so few of us think – because that kind of question can’t help but cause thinking and most people avoid thinking like the plague – and their results prove it.
The quality of question you ask determines the quality of answer you get.
Christian Simpson is the UK’s leading coach and mentor to business owners and entrepreneurs. For COMPLIMENTARY ACCESS to tried, tested and proven entrepreneurial success strategies, click here
