If you want to heal your once-vibrant, entrepreneurial mindset and have more energy, ideas, and focus, turn your attention inward, not outward.
Comparison to others can lead you to doubt yourself, your path, and your abilities. The only way to find your way back when you’re stuck in a comparison cycle is to stop, turn inward, and connect with your divine intuition and most authentic self. This openness to and focus on yourself will fix your fractured mindset and get you back on the path to creating with confidence.
As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.
Rumi
The Toxic Effects of Comparison on an Entrepreneurial Mindset
I presented to several groups of entrepreneurs this week, and one young man who was exhausted and overwhelmed asked me how he could begin to find his way back to feeling like himself. He was caught in the undertow of “compare and despair”—spending hours online obsessing over what everyone else was doing and feeling miserable— a habit that is toxic to cultivating a healthy, effective entrepreneurial mindset.
He had lost belief in himself, his abilities, his talent. His energy was a fraction of what it once was, and his sales had dropped significantly. I could hear the panic welling up in his chest as he spoke of having lost touch with his ability to think clearly.
Like so many others, he needed to fix his mindset, but he needed help figuring out where to start.
I assured him that there was a simple and surprising solution. One that I discovered years ago and wrote about in my book, Buoyant. I read the following excerpt to him, and it provided him immediate, powerful relief.
If you are in a similar season and need to reclaim your entrepreneurial mindset and get your creativity flowing, I hope this will serve you as well:
“There’s a gravel road in Clear Creek, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Highlands, North Carolina, that winds for miles through US Forest Service land. I’ve walked that road in every season, every sort of weather, for more than thirty years. I have thought through and made thousands of decisions and choices while tromping along the towering pines and deciduous trees, cycling through buds, lush foliage, brilliant colors, and naked branches.
I chose to leave the world of nonprofit leadership and become a real estate broker on that road. I have read aloud, with the trees as my audience, speeches for a graduation, an academic banquet, company retreats, and judges deciding custody of my stepchildren. While walking that road, I decided to get married, and then divorced.
I took my newborn son in a front-facing pouch, and later in a backpack while he played with my hair, for long, chatty walks. I mourned the loss of my father, doubled over in sobs, hands on knees. I have watched Sophie become joy incarnate, splashing in swimming holes or running like the wind.
I began birthing this book, stopping to scribble notes, line by line, mile by mile, on that road.
Each walk begins with my reciting gratitude out loud. The poplars, oaks, and maples stand like kind and wise ancestors, bending toward me to listen closely. I celebrate with them, and they nod their tops in rustling breezes. I meditate with eyes and heart wide open, step by step. Turn by turn.
I play games of manifesting to see if I can bring to my attention something surprising. Unexpected. A signal from the Universe that I am in partnership with all of creation and can dissolve into an energy that resonates with another unseen world, and call something forward into three-dimensional matter. I’ve done it dozens of times. Orange butterfly. Heart-shaped stone. A deer. A wild pink lady’s slipper. An owl. A ruby red garnet the size of a pea. I always know when I’m “there”—in that blissful, buoyant state of receivership. Open. When I’m not bullshitting myself. When I’ve put down the petty concerns of daily life. When I’m 100 percent connected to the divine within me and all around me.
Some days, I slide into that delicious state without effort. That’s when I’m like a woman in a white surveillance van, parked just down the street, wearing headphones and listening intently to pick up any signals or syllables.
What comes through in those times are Class 5 idea rapids. Kayaking on the whitecaps, paddling like crazy, I’m carried around rocks and overhanging branches. Ducking. Twisting. Forward. A small journal, tucked into a leather cover, a pencil, and I are engaged in a flurry of getting it all down.
The open focus of a creator. This state is, without a doubt, one of our most precious commodities for loving life in consonant vibration with every living thing, most notably ourselves. From this ledge, we have a twenty-twenty grasp of our point of view.
For entrepreneurs and creators, our point of view is the mirepoix base of our secret sauce. The vision, voice, perspective, and unique genius that make us who we are. Like no one else. This is what calls our audience, our clients, our community, right to us. Our sexy siren song that we play simply by living in accord with our true selves. This is the ethereal realm of the deepest connection we can experience. It is the origin of creative worlds powered by our unique fingerprints.
It is an inside-out job. And we cannot get there if we are spending too much time looking at what everyone else is doing and saying, obsessed with the notion that everyone except us has it all figured out. Wielding a stick to measure our progress and worth and convince ourselves how far short we fall.
Here, we are trapped in the hideous pursuit of compare and despair that is the kill switch on our sense of self and our ability to connect with our intuition. Here, we are stopped from receiving juicy intel and insights that can only be born within the stock of our cauldron.
Remember: when we are disconnected from ourselves, our efforts to connect with the market falter, sputter, and drop.
How might you open the aperture of who you are? Where do you need to turn your attention away from others so that you can see what only you can see? What can we fashion from the images that appear only to us? And why should we bother?
When we have the open focus of a creator, we are more optimistic, which ushers in our ability to see more possibilities, creativity’s raw material and driving force. We muster up courage to make bold moves in our work and lives. We refuse to stall out and stay stuck. We discern and decide, letting our choices power our creativity with a confidence born from focusing on what we love. We more easily find meaning and enjoy feelings of fulfillment, a greater engagement with the world, and access to success.
The ability to hear ourselves think is a sacred and rare superpower. When we get out of the clamor, we can come to know what is and is not us. When we turn away from the din on our screens, we can feel and tap into the verdant void of silence and stillness. The quiet and calm are unnerving at first, but if we recognize we are merely reacting to old habits of distraction, we can settle into this new state.
Open focus provides us with an expansive state of being that bends time and coaxes us across the threshold from clinging control to empowered self-trust. Once through this portal, we inhabit a world of momentum, working with a tempo kept by the drumbeat of us. Energized and expectant of serendipity, we seek and find what our minds believe to be true and create what only we can create.”
Stop Comparing to Start Creating
When we stop playing the comparison game and surrender openly to the divine within ourselves, our creativity and intuition return, rushing in to fix our entrepreneurial mindset. Tune in to your most authentic self; the energy, focus, and ability to generate new and exciting ideas that are essential to an entrepreneur will come back to you.