3 mindset shifts to help take your business to the next-level

In this post, you will learn the TOP 3 mindset shifts that will help you take your business to the NEXT LEVEL.

Being in business for yourself is no walk in the park. I absolutely love being a full-time entrepreneuress. That being said it takes a lot of stamina, drive and a commitment to pushing through the icky stuff to make it work. 

The adventure and journey I’ve experienced over the past 15 years of building a brand and business online has been the most incredible test of endurance & courage. I’ve done a lot of things right…like starting a blog, pushing out content consistently, being relentless in my pursuit of learning and growing. I recently read the book, The 10x Rule by Grant Cardone and it completely gave me a new boost in terms of how I approach my business.

Here is the thing about being on the beautiful adventure of being in business for yourself… you will experience an incredible amount of personal growth. Why? Because we are our own biggest roadblock and as Joyce Meyer likes to say,  it’s the battlefield of the mind! Our minds are neurologically wired to protect us from danger and any time we attempt to go big or step outside of our comfort zone, our mind likes to pop in and remind us that the world is a big, bad and scary place. This is why so many people give up, quit or succumb to the pressures of presumed failure.

As we expand with new ideas, push to new heights or try to grow to that next income level, we find our minds filling up with chatter, doing all it can to talk us out of our next big move. Because our ego & subconscious mind like to keep us small and safe, it’s difficult determine whether the mental chatter is our intuition trying to protect us or our limited thinking mind. 

Knowing this, I sit here again ready to take my business to the next-level. I’ve been building my personal brand for over 15 years online and I am evolving in a new direction and wanting to really grow. I’ve also expanded my brand into a jewelry business that I am extremely passionate about and I want to really take to a whole new level. You can read more about that here. I am right in the middle of a big push for myself. So, I’m going to share with you what I have learned during this growth process so you can possibly apply my learning as you prepare for your own growth and business expansion. 

3 mindset shifts you MUST make for business growth

1. Competition is the greatest mirror to your potential. 

It’s like one second you’re feeling so excited about your business and what you’re up to and the next, you scroll on Instagram and see your competitor who is absolutely crushing it and makes it look so easy. You immediately feel gut punched and you can’t even remember why you started in the first place. Feeling defeated is a real thing. 

The truth : the universe purposefully places your competition to serve as an aid to support you in creating your vision. Anyone who you see out there, who has something that you want is simply a mirror of your potential! If she can do it, be it, have it....then that simply means it’s absolutely possible for you too. 

With this information, you MUST begin sending out well wishes, good energy and encouraging words to any and all of your competitors. Anytime you judge someone or something that you yourself actually want, you are resisting it. You are only judging yourself. So, instead of seeing your competitors as the enemy, see them as your ally. They are only showing you what is possible and that it is SAFE to continue forward with your dream.

When you internally make this shift, your internal frequency and energy is raised and you get yourself more in alignment with success. You also must remind yourself there is room for you and more at the table.

I recently struggled with this. Having a podcast to help support was business was a move that I felt really good about. But I wasn’t feeling super great about it because I haven’t reached millions of downloads like many of my competitors have. Plus, I felt super intimidated with so many people out there in my chosen industry. It caused me to lose interest in my podcast and not give it too much attention. However, I was reminded by a principle in the 10x rule book, you must remember that there is NO other YOU. You are the you-est there can be and there is room for more of YOU in your chosen industry. Do not ever let a fear of too many competitors hold you back.

So, I decided to put more back into my podcast. Regardless of what my competition was doing or not doing. You have to give anything and everything you do all of the energy that only YOU have. Your only true competition is the former versions of yourself.

2. Business is actually meant to be easy. 

When you are doing what you are passionate about and in love with, it’s easy to do it. It doesn’t feel like work because it is aligned with your soul. When you are doing something you aren’t meant to be doing, it feels hard, like awful labor, you easily get distracted, burnt out or over it. I remember when I started to offer social media consults to various interior design companies. I was sought out by several companies to help them with their branding and social media presence because of what I was able to create for myself. I was paid big money to do this, too. While I felt these things came natural to me, it was work that I dreaded. It gave me headaches. I had to take breaks often. While I was good at it, it wasn’t in alignment for me and my overall career vision.

Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean that is work you are meant to do in this world. You are meant to do the things that create magic in you at the soul level. Even now, as I write this blog post, I feel expressive, passionate, excited to share these things with you in this way. I love it. I’m sitting here with my love and our baby by my side as I passionately write this post while we are all watching a movie on a Sunday because I love it so much. It feels easy. And this blog post is an effort to move my business forward.

When you are doing your soul work in the world it will feel fantastic. When you’re able to express yourself, share what you’re passionate about...you’re building your personal brand and building your business.

If it feels hard to you to come up with content, create services for your business, make messages for your products...you may need to be rethinking your relationship with what you are doing. Is this really the business I am meant to be in?

You’re meant to have a thriving business if that is what your heart wants. You’re meant to make a lot of money with that business if that feels right to you. You’re meant to enjoy the work you do in the world.

The truth: You may need to do some work on your core beliefs about business that are subconsciously programmed within you.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself…journal on these and see what comes up for you:

• Do I believe I am worthy of/meant for/deserve to be successful?

• Would my being successful disrupt my relationship with someone else?

• Do I feel safe to have success in business and also feel loved at the same time?

• Am I hiding behind perfectionism?

I like to use affirmations for success in my journal to help with my self belief and self worth.

3. Your self-worth is your greatest secret weapon. 

Hear me out on this one. I can tell you from many years of being in business for myself, your ability to believe in yourself affects everything in your business.

FIRST. It affects your pricing. Getting to pricing things right is a struggle for everyone! I find most women are actually under charging for their worth. 

Let’s take a look at why...you’re scared that no one will want to pay higher prices. You’re currently attracting the type of client who asks for discounts or wants to get your best deal. You could also be experiencing what many call “imposter syndrome”, where you feel like a fraud. These mindsets are NOT an energetic match for alignment in your business. They are probably exactly what is blocking you from getting to your next income level.

So, what can you do to unblock yourself? What action can you take today? RAISE YOUR PRICES!

I recently have done an overhaul on my prices in my business. I dropped the prices in my digital products because I believe the work I have created is truly transformational and I decided that I wanted to serve MORE people in this way. Which meant I wanted to reach all price points. However, at the same time, I significantly raised the prices of my personal one-on-one services, valuing my time more.

What surprised me the most was that my customers were very willing to pay the higher price point for my private time and my sessions have been booking up with the type of clients that I adore!!!! When you value your time, the right people will pay it. You will naturally weed out your ‘not in alignment’ with you clients and call in the ones who value, support and appreciate you. And you will be an example for them and for what they deserve and how valuable they are!

At the same time my digital products have also had a massive uptick in sales which has also been a huge benefit that is encouraging in business.

SECOND. Your self worth will reflect in your marketing and your branding.

Most people are out there trying to be the next big success, while using other people’s messaging and marketing tactics. However, when you know yourself, when you are clear on what makes you, you …you’ll have a MAGNETIC personal brand and attract a massive audience.

You’ll be unafraid to share more of who you are, your interests, your authentic personality and really become a powerful brand. Just think about how many personal brands you are attracted to. Who do you love following and why? Probably because they have a killer personal brand.

If this resonates with you, you may want to download my FREE e-book that I wrote on personal branding, The Passionista Playbook : A step-by-step guide to creating, building and growing a show stopping personal brand. For the last 10+ years I have been cultivating a personal brand and I’ve learned so much from the best in the industry.

I hope this post was helpful for you. If you have anything you would like to add, comment below, I would love to hear your experiences.

Love, Ashlina

p.s. you may also want to read this post, What 2020 taught me about business.

How to build an abundance mindset & amplify your success

For a very long time I lived with a “lack” mentality. And so for a very long time I struggled with feeling comfortable with success. Once I finally learned that true abundance is built within and when you do the inner work to build abundance, you will naturally see success become a joyful way of life.

Let me explain a little further.

So, I used to live from the perspective of “lack”. This was modeled to me by everyone around me for most of my life. Broke family members would speak horribly about rich family members. Negative things were always said about the people who were really just “owning it”. I can remember once when I was young, I had worked hard and saved a lot of money for myself. When my friends and family found out, they would say “oh are you going to be selfish and just use that for you? or are you going to be a good person and spend it something for all of us"?”. “don’t be selfish” was a constant phrase I was told.

So naturally, I adopted that way of thinking throughout my life. I would feel awful spending money on nice things for myself because it felt “selfish”. I would get triggered by other women being really successful because I thought that meant somehow they were being selfish or greedy. I had a really skewed way of looking at things.

To be fully honest, I had ZERO IDEA that this was my subconscious programming. It wasn’t until I started doing inner work on myself, my soul and my mindset that I learned my real blocks to the abundance and success that I was craving.

HOW I LEARNED THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING DEEPER

They say that starting a business is the best personal development seminar on the planet and in my case it was certainly true.

I have to say, for me business and success always came relatively easy. I started a babysitters club in junior high and was always booked. I made and sold lemonade on my street and always sold out. Ever since I was little, I was one of those that always instinctively knew how to monetize things.

So, in my 30’s as a busy + thriving interior designer & blogger in New York City, success honestly seemed pretty easy. I always had the drive and ambition that others seemed to lack.

However, I was working myself to death. I got completely burnt out and everything in me just knew my life was meant for more than 24 hour non-stop chasing after the money + business.

For a while, I searched outside of myself for the answers.

Maybe I needed to move? Surround myself with a different culture of people.

Maybe I needed to change careers? Perhaps do something more meaningful like yoga teaching.

Maybe I needed to find a rich husband? So I can just relax and enjoy my life.

It’s funny how the universe works because it was at that very time in my life, when a book fell into my lap and from that moment on I was never the same. Spirit Junkie by Gabrielle Bernstein.

HOW SPIRIT CHANGED EVERYTHING FOR ME

My girlfriend invited me to go see a lecture with her and told me all about this girl named Gabby. She handed me her book, Spirit Junkie. I read that book from cover to cover in what felt like less than 24 hours. I had ALWAYS known that I had a deep spiritual connection with God, the Universe, myself. But this book explained it in such a way that I finally felt like I was seen, I felt understood. I was totally a spirit junkie.

In all my years of working so hard and living for the grind, I had finally been reminded of what was there all along. A connection to my spirit, my soul. I had been going to church and keeping up with prayer and bible studying. But this took my spiritual practice to another level, it opened me up to so much more. I was so much more into reconnecting with the deeper soul inside of me that felt more drawn to meditation, crystal shops and hot yoga as a form of daily spiritual connection. Not just going to church on Sundays.

This shift in my life enabled me to really LOVE MY LIFE in a new way. My focused shifted from “making money” to “finding bliss”. Instead of working harder on my business, I worked harder on myself and my own internal happiness. And it was from that place, where things really began to thrive for me. Without much effort at all.

I learned that working on myself, my mindset, my inner alignment needed to become priority over working hard at getting new clients, marketing or sales techniques. And that completely changed the game for myself and the work I was doing.

>>> I began making more monthly income than I was previously able to do with less amount of work.

>>> I was enjoying the work that I was doing because I had integrated spiritual practices into what I was doing

>>> Instead of feeling like work was something I needed to do to make money, I made money from loving what I was doing.

Through all the inner work I was doing on myself, I learned about mindset and how subconscious programming affects your ability to really create the life you want. One of the first things I learned was shifting my mindset from “lack” to “abundance”.

HOW TO BUILD AN ABUNDANCE MINDSET:

1. RECONNECT WITH YOUR SELF AT THE SOUL LEVEL

One of the first things you need to do when looking to shift your mindset is to slow down and take the time to become an observer of your current thoughts and programming. Have you ever asked yourself what you really think about money? Success? What you are worthy of having?

Most people are too busy to even take the time out to get to know themselves in a deeper way so they go through life blindly, struggling to get what they want, feeling out of control, in competition with everyone else, looking for happiness outside of themselves.

When you begin to reprogram your mind at the soul level, you free yourself from an old, outdated paradigm and shift into attracting abundance in all aspects of your life. If this resonates with you, I invite you to come join me for a 21 day workshop that will completely shift you into abundance through self love, soul care and spiritual growth and evolution. Join my Soul Aligned Course here. You will get a short video + homework assignment every morning for 21 days, so you can easily begin implementing this work into your busy life.

One of my favorite Universal laws of the universe is the Law of Compensation. It states that you will be paid in direct proportion to the need for what you do, your ability to do it, and the inability to replace you.

So what that means is that the more YOU, you become and share that in the work that you do…the more valuable you get to be. In other words, when you get to know yourself at the SOUL level, and you begin putting that out there in the world, the universe sees that as you being of higher value! And knowing that, you just become more magnetic to money and abundance.

2. YOU MUST CUT TIES WITH YOUR PAST

When you do work like this, inner alignment work, you will begin to uncover you abundance blocks, like I had to in my story above. You MUST take the time with yourself to work on the things that may be subconsciously in your way. At the soul level. You can’t just begin thinking thoughts and using the law of attraction without first going into your soul and doing some deep digging up of old roots and ties to things from the past.

One of the things that blocks most people from living from an abundance mindset is that they believe everything needs to be harder than it actually needs to be. When you are so conditioned to believe that you have to work really hard for money and success, the option for it to be easy is simply unavailable for you to see.

So let me tell you what happened for me:

I started earning more not because I was working harder, but because I improved my abundance mindset and my story of how hard things needed to be. Making more money has very little to do with how hard you work, and actually has so much more to do with your energy and the value you bring to others.

“The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is.”

– Jim Carrey

3. FORM A GRATITUDE PRACTICE

If you practice feeling grateful for the things you already have, you are tuning into the energy and frequency of abundance. When you are grateful for small things, you become a magnet for more of the things that keep you feeling that way. It’s another law of the universe. You can begin by simply saying “thank you” silently to the universe for all the things you encounter throughout your day.

When you wake up “thank you for another day”

When you brush your teeth “thank you for this delicious toothpaste”

When you sip your coffee “thank you Lord for creating this magic juice”

When you get into your clothes “thank you for the ability to wear what I love”

Making this into a habit, gets you into the energy of feeling abundant and from that place more abundance will always come your way.

HOT TIP: I often use “gratitude” as a form of manifestation. I journal out the things I want to create in my life in the from of being “thankful for it already happening”. So, I would write “thank you for the 10K I made in business this month. You get the idea.

4. INVEST IN YOURSELF MORE

The first time I went to buy myself something really nice, that was not practical I unlocked a new paradigm of what I was available for. I bought myself a Louis Vuitton planner. At the moment that I bought it for myself, I became a person who spent a lot of money on something that wasn’t a necessity or a need. I instantly throttled myself into become a person in alignment with a nice, beautiful desk agenda. I elevated my worthiness from someone who bargain shops for a planner to someone who invests in quality things for herself. It was a way for me to tap into the version of me that did that.

That was one of the quickest shifts I had ever experienced because shortly after that I manifested a pair of designer shoes I was wanting. The second you invest in yourself in a new way, you instantly put yourself into an elevated vibration.

These are just a few of the ways I got started in my mission to build an abundance mindset. I hope this blog post was helpful for you. Leave me a comment below if you like posts like this and I will do more.

P.S. Our minds are programmed to keep us safe but our souls are expansive. Tap into your soul, tap into your personal expansion! Invest in yourself, invest in your soul……..