The Small Business Trifecta (Part 2): The Power of Belief

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 156. 

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a fulltime money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. This week on the podcast, I am sharing with you part two of what I started last week. If you had not yet listened to last week's episode, Episode 155, I started the first of a three-part series, which is called “Small Business Trifecta”.

There are three important steps, three key steps to building your business, and last week I shared step one. Today we're going to start with step two. You can approach these steps in either order, whether it's one or two. When we get to step three next week, that really does come after step one and two. 

Either way, whether you start with the ‘what, how, and who’, like we discussed last week, or you're going to go with belief and mindset, which is what we're going to talk about this week, either way, you need both of these.

If you think about the triangle, the belief work that we're going to talk about today and the ‘who, how, what’ that we spoke about last week, those are on your bottom of the triangle. Those are the most strong, grounded, fundamental components of what you have to offer. That's what's going to draw the clients into your business. 

And then selling is at the top, and you know how much I love to talk about selling. Next week we're going to talk once again about selling your offer. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. I want to let you know that the day this podcast is dropping is the day before Black Friday. I am having so much fun in my business creating Black Friday offers.

In fact, just a few days ago, I had one set of Black Friday offers and then, all of a sudden, I came up with something new. And that's a little teaser for you, that you get to run your business however you want and you get to make it fun. 

I mean, there are basic principles when you're running a business. I like to talk about your signature offer, having something big ticket that's going to be able to grow your business and get you to $100,000 really quickly. And if you're selling a bunch of $49 offers, it's going to take a lot, a lot, a lot of sales to get you there. 

But be that as it may, I want you to go to my website DebbieSassen.com/newsletter and get on the newsletter. Because if you're listening to this on the Wednesday, or even on Thursday, even on Friday, I have some really fun deals that I am sharing with you about money, money mindset, your money healing, and building a business. 

Some of it is going to actually mirror what we've been speaking about on the podcast the last few weeks. But I'm going to go into more detail in the business bundle. And there's even a course in there about investing your money and building wealth. So go for it. All right?

And now we're going to jump into this week's episode of the podcast. We are going to speak about small business trifecta and the power of belief. So let's even talk about what is that belief? You might've heard the expression that a belief is thinking a thought over and over and over again. 

We have 30,000 or 50,000 thoughts that zoom through our brains. They're like sentences in your mind every single day. A thought comes, a thought goes, but when you believe something in your core, you've thought this thought over and over and over again. “I'm beautiful. I'm successful. I'm happy.” 

Whatever it is that you're working on, once you know it in your core, it is an embodied experience. You feel it down to your tippy toes, to the top of your head and down to your tippy toes. Then it moves from being a thought to a belief. 

Belief is critical to building your business. You have to believe in the future. You have to believe in the possibility of something existing that has not existed before. And it doesn't matter if you are at the beginning of your business journey and you haven't even had your first sale yet. But some idea comes up in your mind. And every single idea that was created on the planet started with a thought that became a belief, “We can actually make this happen.”

Think about it. How is it even possible that you are listening on an electronic device to the words that I said into a microphone a few days ago or weeks ago or months ago, depending on when you're listening to this. That is a wild idea. But somehow, somewhere, scientists discovered sound waves. And then other scientists, technological experts, were able to figure out how to capture these sound waves and put them into some sort of device. 

You could put something into your ears, or maybe not into your ears, and you could listen later to the sound waves that I've created. I mean, that's mind blowing when you think about it.

But with the development of technology, we were able to get from people talking to saving talking. And then once upon a time, there were actually Sony Walkmans, if you remember those; where you had headphones. Big headphones are actually coming back into style. But we had cassettes and then we had CDs.

And eventually we have moved over to digital, where you don't even see where this equipment is. It's somewhere on a cloud. I don't know what kind of cloud it is, a cumulus cloud? It's all sort of vague, right? But we're listening to digital information that is stored somewhere. 

Somebody believed that they could actually create that. It came from an idea. Now, obviously the idea has developed and evolved over decades, but still it started with somebody believing that they could create it and it actually happened. And every year, the quality of these transmissions improves because somebody believes that they can perfect technology a little bit more and a little bit more. 

So that is a belief that we don't see the future yet, but we believe ahead of time that something can be created. That whatever is right now is going to be different in the future. And whatever you're building in your business, you have to believe ahead of time that you can actually create the thing that you say you want to create.

Because that thought is going to come through your head. It's going to come in and come out. And if you don't work on that thought until you get it deep into your core on a belief level, it's just going to flit away. In fact, the people who are the most successful in their businesses, they're not the people that spin over and over again, “Maybe yes, maybe no. I think I should do it. Maybe I should go do some research.”

I mean, research is good. You want to do a little bit of market research, but really, the people who are most successful in business, they have an idea, they lock into the idea, and they go for it. And that's especially true if you're in a service-based business where you have very little to lose. It's not like you're investing a lot of money in inventory if you're a coach, if you're a creative, if you're a healer. 

So many of my clients are service-based business owners. I do have a few product-based business owners. But you believe that what you're offering the world has a market. You go out there, you put up a sales page, you write a bunch of words on a page, or you even put something into an email with a PayPal link and you get something going.

And the way you actually develop belief is by doing the thing. It's actually about taking the next steps forward. So I want to tell you a story, and this happened to me … not in my business, in my personal life … almost seven years ago. You may know that six and a half years ago, I hiked Half Dome with my dad, who wanted to do it for his 80th birthday, bless him. Now he's 86 ½, and may he live and be well to 120. 

But he had hiked Half Dome when he was a Boy Scout, when he was like 15 or 16. And one of his items on his bucket list was to hike Half Dome again. Now he's definitely not in the same physical shape that he was. My dad has Parkinson's. He uses a cane sometimes to walk, so he could never do it now. But he really wanted to do it, and he did it. 

My stepmom was a little bit worried because my dad was at the beginning stages of Parkinson's. Then she said to me, “Do you think Jonathan,” my husband, “will go with daddy to hike?” And I was like, “Sure, he would love it.” My husband's a hiker. Just get him outside, any mountain, climb every mountain … he could have been in the Sound of Music … and he's there. 

So off they were going. They had to put in the dates that they want to go, and then there's some sort of way that they give people their allot dates and times. But before we did that, a seed had been planted in my mind. I was like, “Wait, my dad and my husband are going to hike Half Dome.” I did a little bit of research, and if you go online to look up Half Dome, you will see that on a scale of 1-10, Half Dome is considered an 11 in difficulty. 

Now, there's nothing that's going to get me charged up more than saying, “Hey, this is an extreme sport. It's a big challenge, and it's really hard. Count me in. I'm going to do it.” 

But here's the thing, I had to believe ahead of time that I could actually do it. It's a very long hike; you can do it in 10-11 hours. We went at my dad's pace so it took us much, much longer. All the way up and all the way down was about 14 hours. And my dad took a little bit longer. My husband, bless him, he just walked with my dad slowly down the hill. 

But once I believed ahead of time that I could do it, I could have the strength. I had the resilience. I had to go out and start putting my plan into place. I started working out like crazy to develop my strength. My lower body strength is pretty good. I was already spinning at the time. I was going 2-3 times a week, and so my legs were very, very strong. 

But my upper body strength is way less strong than my lower body. And the last, for me, 20-25 minutes… For my husband, I think it was like 30 seconds … you have to pull yourself up a 60⁰ incline on these cables, and you really have to pull hard. It was so challenging for me. I never did a pullup. It's really hard to do a pull-up. But I was doing push-ups and I was doing all sorts of weight training to strengthen my upper body so I could get myself up that hill, and I did. 

First, I had to believe ahead of time that it was possible. Then I had to get into action. And third, I made it come to life. So those are three stages, and we're going to talk about those three stages of belief right now. 

So you're going to have an idea. If you let it spin around in your mind for a very long time, you're going to eventually convince yourself, and it usually happens pretty quickly, that it's impossible, it can't happen. Or it can't happen for you. It will happen for other people, but it's not possible for you.

This is how so many people talk themselves out of bringing their amazing ideas to the market, selling their amazing ideas, because they're, “No, I don't think so. Nobody's going to buy.”

In fact, just today I was having a conversation with someone. I gave her an idea for her business … Because if you meet me sometime in person, I like to talk business and ideas … And she's like, “No, I don't know. Maybe it won't sell.” You have to believe ahead of time that the thing is going to sell, and you have to take action. 

But if you stay in the, ‘no, it's not going to sell,’ if you don't have any belief, you just think it's impossible, you're never going to take the steps and do the thing. So that's really pre-stage one. You're going to be in impossible. It's not possible. 

And then a lot of people just stop themselves. They miss out on so many opportunities. They miss out on so much money because they never get themselves over the hurdle of impossible to possible. 

Then you decide, “I'm going to go for it. It's possible,” but it still seems so far off. So from when I decided I was going to climb Half Dome to when we actually did it, it was four months. I was still looking online and checking. My sister also ended up doing it with us, and one of her friends. And my dad's cousin, who was 10 years younger than my dad at the time, 70, his cousin Steve.

We were looking at videos, my sister and I, on YouTube, of different people doing it, climbing Half Dome. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I don't really know if I can do this.” That doubt started to creep into my mind. You have to watch yourself because that fickle, sneaky, little doubt can really stop you. 

But because the family had already planned, we already had tickets, and we booked our airlines, there was no backing out of this. I mean, there would have been a lot of egg on my face. And even up ‘till the point where we were hiking it, I was telling my sister, “It's okay if I don't make it.”

My sister's like Spider-Man. She just zoomed up that last little bit of the mountain, she and my husband both. I was even trying to psych myself out of it a little bit. “If I don't make it all the way, I've done a really good job.” But you have to overcome those sneaky, doubtful thoughts with belief.

And when I got to the bottom of that dome, at the top, it’s one step after another step after another step. You have to take action every step of the way, even when you're exhausted. And let me tell you, my arms were so exhausted from getting myself up the mountain. And my legs, on the way down, they were very wobbly and rubbery from hiking up a lot, and you use a lot of quad strength on your way down a mountain. 

But you have to be able to overcome all of those doubtful feelings in your mind and stay in belief. You're going to wobble. You're going to wobble in and out of belief. And when you notice that you are falling out of belief, you've got to pick yourself back up and say, “No, I determine my reality. I create my future. I am going for it.” You have to get yourself back up into belief.

Because as I said, it's normal that you're going to fall out of belief. But if you stay out of belief for a long time … And that could be sometimes in a business. It could be an hour, it could be a day, it could be weeks, it could be months. 

There are people who start building their businesses, then they hit a roadblock or an obstacle and they get thrown off course for months and months at a time. You have to be able to pull yourself back even during the course of the day. 

Something's going to happen. Somebody's going to make a remark. Somebody's going to say something that destabilizes you. And your mind, this is where mindset comes in. 

Everybody talks about mindset. You using the power of your mind. You using the power of your thoughts to re-enter that stage of belief that it's possible. That is what is critical to building a business. 

So you're going to get from impossible, that's your pre-stage, to it's possible. Stage two is you're taking action toward your goal. And as you take action toward your goal, something that seems possible on 10% will now seem possible at a 20% level. You're going to keep moving forward. It's going to be 30%, 40%. 

And really use that metaphor of a mountain. Every single step that I was taking toward the top of Half Dome built my belief that I could do it. And then, sort of on the opposite side of the scale, every step that I took forward made me more exhausted. So I have to keep my mindset strong because my body is telling me, “You're exhausted. Slow down. Sit down. Stop here.”

My body didn’t want to go further. You have to think about this. I'd been hiking straight uphill with a backpack, with food, etc. on my back, water, lots of water. It was June. And I have to keep my mindset strong when my body's saying, “No, it's okay. You can sit down. You can relax.”

You’ve just got to keep going. And especially, the hardest part is always at the end. Whenever you're ready to give up, that's when you are so close to creating the reality. So even when you're 70% there, your belief is at 70% out of 100% that you can create the thing that you want to create. You've got to up your belief a notch so you can get to 80%, 90% and 100%.

And let me tell you, my friends, the view at the top, the view at the top of the mountain. And if you ever want to see it, I actually do have on my Facebook page … you probably have to search it … but I did a 360⁰ just turning around all over the top of the mountain. The view of Yosemite Valley was stunning, spectacular.

And that's the same thing in your business. When you put an offer out into the world, whether you're selling the first item in your business or the hundredth item, you raise your prices, you build a program, you create a new offer, stay in belief. The view at the top, when you actually sell the thing, when your belief has gone from possible to inevitable, it is the most divine feeling in the world. 

Because you created something new. You created something that did not exist before. You took what you thought of as an idea, it was swimming around your mind, and you brought it to reality. You actualized your dreams. You manifested something. And that is the power of staying in belief. 

So remember these three steps. There's the pre-stage one, where you're going to be completely, “It's impossible. It's never going to happen.” You're going to get over that hurdle and you're going to get to possible.

Once you believe it's possible, the next stage, step two, is actually taking action to meet your goal. That's creating your offer. Figuring out who you're selling it to. What your process is. That's the “how” that we talked about last week. And “what”. What are you delivering to your clients? What are the results that you're delivering to your clients? You take steps through your marketing and your selling to bring your dream into reality. 

And the last step is when possible becomes inevitable. You can actually taste it. It's so close, and then you get there. As I said, the view at the top is spectacular. And you are so much more powerful than you know. 

So take whatever idea it is that you have in your head, even if you have a business that exists right now and it's not going the way you want, or your business is doing bonkers, you're just going crazy, your business is doing well.

And there's another stage. Raise the ante, up the bar, do more. Because you can. Because the power of your mind is so strong and you really can create anything you want to. 

All right, my friends, thank you so much for tuning into today's podcast. I want to remind you that you want to be on my email list so that you're going to learn all about my Black Friday offers. They're coming soon, and they're so much fun and they're so high value. DebbieSassen.com /newsletter. I can't wait to see you on Black Friday.

Bye-bye, for now. 

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.