The 5 Things That May Be Sabotaging Your Business Success

The 5 Things That May Be Sabotaging Your Business Success (Even If You re Taking All the Right Actions) Sue Rasmussen Business Performance Coach Certified EFT & Matrix Reimprinting

Small business owners have access to all kinds of trainings, workshops, books, and experts that promise to help them build their business, get more clients, make more money, and be more successful. But there is something missing. Almost no one is saying to these business owners, I can help you eliminate or significantly reduce your anxiety about marketing, fear of public speaking, or your writer s block. I can clear out all of those business mistakes you ve made in the past. I can reduce or eliminate procrastination, overwhelm, and self-sabotage. And that s where most people get stuck. Many small business owners are frustrated to find themselves avoiding or resisting the very activities that would make the biggest difference to their bottom line, like marketing, public speaking, or writing. Or they are taking lots of action but something still feels off they feel uncomfortable, inauthentic, or overwhelmed with their marketing or business activities. More than lack of information, training, or skills, the following five things may be sabotaging your business success without you realizing it (even if you re doing everything right): 1. underestimating the power of your comfort zone 2. believing more information will improve your results 3. relying on willpower to move you forward 4. focusing on the positive without addressing the negative 5. believing you can out-think performance issues Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 2 of 12

#1 - Underestimating the Power of Your Comfort Zone Your comfort zone is that familiar level you keep returning to, the place you subconsciously believe you belong and it includes everything from your income level, your performance in writing and speaking, the kinds of clients you attract, and your success in all areas of your business. Your comfort zone is what keeps your performance at its current level, and it is so powerful that without properly addressing it, any improvements you might make are not likely to be lasting. In other words, improving a specific aspect of your business is not likely to bring about an overall improved business result because other parts of your business will downshift in order to maintain the comfort zone. Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure. Gay Hendricks The Big Leap In addition, your comfort zone is regulated by the subconscious, which means that it is not under your conscious control. It is an automatic process that happens beneath your awareness. You can t simply decide to change your comfort zone with your rational mind. So if your subconscious automatically keeps bringing you back to your comfort zone, what can you do to improve your results? Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 3 of 12

Solution: Traditional methods for removing inner obstacles for success often take months or years of hard work and persistence (if they even work at all). And here s why. When you experience any kind of emotional upset, whether it s anxiety, anger, fear, or overwhelm, your body goes into fight, flight, or freeze mode. Your adrenaline starts pumping, you start sweating, your muscles prepare to act quickly, your heart rate changes you are gearing up for action. In the modern world, most of the dangers you experience are not due to an external threat of being literally chased by a tiger. Instead, most of your current emotional upsets are caused by a combination of memories or thoughts from your past and the hundreds of day-to-day stresses you experience (the overwhelm of your overflowing inbox, the anxiety over the presentation you need to give, the fear of picking up the phone to follow up with a prospective client). Each one of these triggers also generates the same fight, flight, or freeze response in the body that an actual threat to your physical safety would generate. And over time, these stress responses in the body add up. Not only do they add up, but each time a similar stress occurs, the neural pathways in the brain are getting stronger and stronger, which supports the re-triggering of that negative emotion. The result? The negative emotions and limiting beliefs actually get worse over time. And that s why just talking about the fears and limiting beliefs isn t enough. We need to use techniques that can interrupt that loop that will interrupt the stress response in the body and reprogram the brain to act with calm, rather than stress. Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 4 of 12

Emotional Freedom Techniques (also known as EFT or tapping) is one of the most powerful, yet simple, self-help techniques designed to interrupt the body s stress response quickly and effectively. EFT is a combination of focusing on a specific issue while using your fingers to tap on specific meridian points on your body. According to EFT developer and Stanford engineer Gary Craig, "EFT is often called emotional acupuncture because it combines gentle tapping on key acupuncture points while focusing your thoughts on pain, unhappy memories, uncomfortable emotions" as well as on business concerns, stresses, and limiting mindsets. #2 - Believing More Information Will Improve Your Results The way to achieve business success is a combination of: 1. Knowing what to do (strategies, techniques, and how-to s) 2. Removing the fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs that are in the way 3. Taking action on what you know Most experts will tell you that all it takes to succeed in business is knowing what to do and then doing it. And don t get me wrong; you DO need good, practical, effective ways of building and marketing your business. But that leaves out step number 2 and that s where most people get stuck. Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 5 of 12

Just knowing what to do is NOT enough. Many selfemployed professionals have shiny object syndrome believing that the next book, the next training, and the next tip or technique or workshop will be the key to finally unlocking the door to ease and success. But good information can only go so far (in fact, only 2-5% of your business success comes from knowhow even the best know-how in the world). When you are stuck by inner fears, doubts, or limiting mindsets, it s really tough to take action. Everything feels hard. Even when you do take action, you don t see the results you were hoping for....while many people believe the difficult obstacles come from external factors they don t know how to market, they don t know how to choose a niche, they don t know how to build a Web site the truth is that most things that prevent it from being easy are inside us. That s right. That s the secret: The biggest obstacles to building a Million Dollar Practice come from within. External factors are merely details, and they are relatively easy to resolve....it s the internal obstacles fear of failure, fear of success, and other issues that get in the way of your goals. David Steele The Million Dollar Private Practice Solution: When you use EFT to tap on the fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs that have been getting in your way, both your conscious and subconscious can work together and change can be easy (almost effortless, in fact). #3 - Relying on Willpower to Move You Forward Relying on willpower, discipline, or determination might work in the short term, but they are not very effective over time (not to mention that they require an enormous amount of energy). Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 6 of 12

Your conscious mind -- the adult you who thinks you are making all the decisions -- controls less than 5% of your actions. The other 95% of all the decisions and actions you take throughout the day are controlled by your subconscious. So just how does your subconscious decide what to do? Your subconscious bases your current actions by reviewing often-outdated beliefs, fears, habits, and memories that go back decades, often to childhood. In other words, the way you act now may be based on something that happened way back in kindergarten that you have completely forgotten. "...our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Rider's control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose." Chip Heath & Dan Heath Switch Would you let a 6-year-old run your business, handle your marketing, write your newsletters, and give your presentations? No matter how great your motivation, plan, support, accountability, and step-by-step how-to s, if your subconscious mind doesn t think it s a good idea that you do something, it will sabotage every effort you make. So you might make short-term progress, and then find yourself quickly right back to where you were before you started. Solution: Because your subconscious bases your current actions by reviewing past experiences, any lingering negative emotional responses from the past will be brought into the present experience. Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 7 of 12

Using EFT on the stress responses related to memories and events from the past will not only neutralize the upset you feel at the memory, but also eliminate what has been triggering you in similar situations in the present. #4 - Focusing on the Positive Without Addressing the Negative Many people who follow the Law of Attraction, positive thinking, or other teachings are often concerned that if they focus on the negative, it will bring more of what they don t want into their life. They re afraid they might be reinforcing the problem, making the issue permanent, or making things worse by putting attention on the negative aspects of an issue. However, ignoring something doesn t make it go away. When your conscious mind thinks you want something but your subconscious thinks you don t deserve it (or any other limiting belief), you will fail at getting what you want. Joe Vitale The Key The negative is there for a good reason (even if you don t know what it is), and pretending it isn t there actually gives it even more power. If you have a sliver in your finger, positive thinking and affirmations aren t going to work nearly as well as simply removing the sliver. Solution: Even the best marketing strategy, business plan, or performance goal can be limited by mental and emotional blocks to success. Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 8 of 12

Any and all of these are tappable inner obstacles: fear of marketing, concerns about selling, fear of failure, beliefs about scarcity, public speaking anxiety, writer s block, performance fears, beliefs that people won t pay your fees the list of inner blocks can feel endless. Rest assured, each one is resolvable! The solution is to focus on the negative (or the charged reaction) long enough to resolve it with EFT and then when the issue has been released, it s simply gone and there is no longer a need to try to pretend it s not there. _ #5 - Believing You Can Out-Think Performance Issues _ Many common suggestions to help people remove their blocks to success, while wellintentioned, are simply not that effective or permanent for most people. Affirmations, focusing on the positive, changing your mental game, and visualizing are all good techniques, but they do not remove the fears, limiting beliefs, or doubts at the cellular level. They simply try to write over them in the conscious part of the brain. But when you find yourself in a stressful situation, all of those fears, limiting beliefs, and doubts get triggered without you even realizing it, and your subconscious takes over again. If it were simply a matter of thinking yourself out of the problem, you would have already done it. The inner blocks did NOT start at the mental level they started at the physiological and cellular levels. Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 9 of 12

Past mistakes, fears, failures, or perceptions are held in every cell membrane of your body. Just like having a recorder running in the background (even though you are often unaware of it), these memories from the past are directly affecting all of your current actions, behaviors, and choices. Solution: Simply understanding your doubts, fears, and limiting beliefs is usually not enough to overcome them. You can talk about your fear of failure until you re blue in the face, dissecting it from every angle, talking to coaches and counselors about it and so forth, but unless you bring in a tool that clears that fear, the way tapping does, you re not going to get anywhere. Nick Ortner Foreword, Tapping Into Ultimate Success Unlike traditional talk methods of resolving inner blocks, you need to release what s stuck at the cellular or physiological level of your body, not just what s going on in your mind. Every business owner has past events, failures, and experiences that still bring up negative emotions, regrets, or upsets. You can use EFT to systematically identify and release these emotions, as well as the limiting beliefs that may have developed at the time of the event. And the best part? Unlike other techniques, you can remain completely skeptical and still get great results, because EFT speaks directly to your body, bypassing your conscious mind. So you don t even need to believe that it will work for it to work. So, where do you go from here? In this report, you ve discovered the five most common ways that small business owners sabotage their own success without realizing it, even if they are taking all the right actions. There may be other roadblocks that can get in the way of success, but by Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 10 of 12

avoiding these five factors you will be able to measurably improve your business results, often easily and quickly. A good place to start is to simply visit my website, read some of my articles and resources, get my newsletter, and decide for yourself if you d like to learn more. And if you are ready to experience better results in your business and you re curious to see if what I do might be able to help you resolve the challenges you re experiencing, why don t we have a conversation? The way I have found that works best is for us to schedule a complimentary Business Breakthrough Session. During this session we will: create a clear vision for your ultimate business success analyze where your business is now and where you want it to be uncover hidden challenges and blind spots that may be unconsciously sabotaging you from producing much better results in your business (better performance, more opportunities, more money) identify at least one step you need to take to remove the obstacles that have been keeping you from moving your business forward leave this session renewed, inspired, and re-energized about your business I ll also answer any questions you have about my services and we ll see if it s the right next step for you or not. This is a no-obligation, no hassles way to find out more about the services I offer and whether they re right for you. Of course, if you feel this approach is not for you, you won t get any pressure to move forward. Whatever the outcome, you will leave the conversation clear about the issues you re facing and excited about what s possible for your business. Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 11 of 12

The conversation will take between 30-60 minutes and is done by telephone or Skype. Use this link to apply for your Business Breakthrough Session: http://suerasmussen.com/business-breakthrough-session Hi, I m Sue Rasmussen. I m a Business Performance Coach and a certified EFT and Matrix Reimprinting Practitioner. I help entrepreneurs release their inner blocks (the negative self-talk, limiting beliefs, self-sabotage, fears, and doubts) so they can measurably improve their business results. You are welcome to pass this report on to your colleagues and friends, or better yet, direct them to my website: www.suerasmussen.com. Why EFT? You might be asking, why is EFT the only tool I use and recommend? Aren't there other ways to help people get unstuck? Over the 15 years that I've been coaching, I tried many tools with my clients on the inner blocks, and they either didn't seem to work very well or my clients simply didn't use them. If they were stuck, they just stayed stuck. I was very skeptical about EFT when I first learned about it; it seemed weird and I didn t think it worked. Then EFT came into my life a second time. I learned to use it in a different way that really worked, and for me, EFT has become the technique that blows every other tool I've ever used out of the water. Even better, I've seen changes in my clients and what they can accomplish that have exceeded their every expectation. Please note: EFT is not designed to replace any of the great things you are already doing to support your business success. Tapping is in addition to working with your business coach, marketing and business development training, reading business books, and any other resources that support you. Sue Rasmussen www.suerasmussen.com Page 12 of 12