This means making the decision that you are the CEO of your business and acting and showing up from that place. It’s knowing that your business starts and ends with you and you are responsible for your success. You are committing to being all-in and you won’t stop until you’ve made your dreams a reality, even if it makes you wildly uncomfortable.
A CEO mindset is about cultivating massive self-belief. I deeply believe that a business has its own energy and if we don’t make the conscious decision to support the energy of our business with our personal drive and intention, our business can’t flourish.
So how can you set your CEO mindset, and in turn, set yourself up for success?
Here are the four essential steps to set your CEO mindset:
Create separation between yourself and your business
This is all about removing any feelings of oneness between yourself and your business. Your feelings, emotions and desires should not be put in the driving seat of your business. If they are, you aren’t always going to be making the best decision for your business. For example, you might want to take a nap and read a book, but your business might really need you to write a sales email and call a potential client. If we lead with the question of “What does my business need today?” we’re far more likely to make the best decisions.
Here’s another good example. If you’re launching a new program, you might feel vulnerable. You might feel self-conscious going live every day to promote the program. If you look at it through a personal lens, it’s easy to self-sabotage and pick apart everything you produce. If you put your CEO hat on instead, you’ll see that it’s necessary to put yourself out there if you want to be successful. There are so many things no one wants to do but challenging yourself, and doing the scary and hard things, is the only way to grow your business.
Remove failure from your vocabulary
You are going to make mistakes in your business, but you can’t allow yourself to see those mistakes as failures. You might be getting a lot of “no’s” and at times, it might feel like you are not cut out to be a CEO. Banish that thought. That possibility doesn’t exist in your CEO mindset. You will have human thoughts and feelings, but they should never dictate how you run your business.
Every “no” is one step closer to a “yes.” On a good day, conversion rates are 2-3%, so statistically, you need to put yourself out there enough to get those “yes” answers. Your CEO mindset has already decided that success is inevitable and everything along the way is part of your journey.
Transition from reactive to proactive
It’s never a good idea to make decisions on the fly. By switching to a proactive approach, you create a strategy that you can stick to and that steers you over and over again, no matter what may come at you. That commitment to your strategy is what will inevitably lead to your success.
Your strategy should be something that you’re constantly building upon. My advice would be to not “burn your container”. What do I mean by that? If you decide that things aren’t working for you, it can be really easy to want to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. But this is such a waste of your time! Really, you just need to pivot and you’ll be back on track reaching your ideal client. Burning the container is self-sabotage and can set you back if you allow it to.
Treat every exchange as a service opportunity. When you are in CEO mindset, you’re always thinking about how you can best be of service. What are the most powerful ways that I can show up? As a CEO, you need to lean into how you can sell to your ideal clients and how you can have these soulful conversations and share your products and services over and over again.
Tips for implementing a CEO mindset
Here’s an exercise to help you further develop your CEO mindset. Start with just 2-3 tiny mind shifts you’d like to make. Take personal responsibility for what you need to do better. Recognize where self-sabotage is keeping you small and lean into those opportunities. Ask yourself, “If I was brave, what would I do differently in my business?” The answers will send you, the CEO, where you need to be, to drive your business forward.
Ellie Swift is a marketing and mindset coach based in Western Australia. With a strong corporate marketing background, she created the Swift Marketing Method, and now runs over a half-million-dollar business. Her courses have helped high-performing female entrepreneurs build abundant and sustainable online businesses. She currently hosts the “Shine Online with Ellie Swift” podcast. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
Read more about a CEO making history: Whitney Wolfe Herd from Bumble.
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