You can deny it all you want, but personal issues will start affecting your business and company, and vice versa. Often time, people think that they can separate work and personal life. This is not true. To run a successful company and be a growing entrepreneur, you’ve got to put in the time and effort to make yourself better.
Ray Higdon, a bestselling author, and social media expert discusses how you are your most important investment. At his lowest point, Ray was unmotivated and living on his friend’s couch. As he made his way back into the business world, he realized the importance of taking care of himself and how it can only benefit his business. Ray shares his experience of personal struggle, being an entrepreneur, and the importance of vulnerability.
Investing in Yourself
With Ray’s experience from being at the top of the corporate business world to sleeping on his friend’s couch, he learned many lessons about entrepreneurship. “A lesson that more entrepreneurs need to understand is to, as long as you’re an executor, as long as you implement, then you need to double down on investing in yourself. And that dictates the speed of your growth.”
When you want your business or idea to grow, you’ve got to put in the time and effort. This means educating yourself and continuing to learn and read. Growing a business means that you’ve got to constantly innovate, creating new ways and new processes of how to get things done. This also allows for more efficient ideas and ways of running a business in general.
Something else that Ray realized looking back is “your business issues are your issues 100%, and you can try to avoid that. You can try to shove it in a closet. You can try to say ‘no, I need a new strategy but it’s just not true.” Every person that Ray coached, has located a personal reason why their business isn’t better or more efficient or less frustrated.
Back when Ray was at his lowest personally, he was drinking heavily. He found himself in a mental state that didn’t allow him to move forward or grow. Ray felt sorry for himself. When you’re feeling that low, it’s hard to pull yourself up to do something great. It starts to affect other parts of your life, like your personal relationships, and that takes your motivation away from doing something else.
These personal experiences eventually allowed him to understand and help others. “I was being pulled to impact more people to get out of debt and all those different things. And so for me, it was a personal thing that altered my business mind.”
Learning Vulnerability and Transparency
As Ray developed his program to help coach business people, he realized the importance of sharing his story and his vulnerability because personal problems are inevitably going to be tied to business problems, and vice versa. This wasn’t always the easiest, especially because Ray felt like he always had to keep things in.
“I started being more vulnerable. I started not hiding my imperfections or trauma or abuse that I’ve been through. And that’s what changed my career.” Ray would be out there on the stage, scared to share his emotions and personal journey. Once he started opening up, it allowed other people to connect more personally with him.
It wasn’t as done as easily as Ray might it seem. He had to have the mindset to stop being afraid to share and be vulnerable. Breaking down every part of his life and looking at which parts of his life weren’t aligned with what he wanted to be, Ray reflected often on different aspects of himself. He didn’t like how anti-social he was, so he dove into the WHY he didn’t want to be around people. Through mindset and coaching, Ray managed to train himself to grow into more of the person that he wanted to be.
“It’s constantly not just settling that you have a personality trait that you don’t like that personality trait is based on something from your past and you can figure it out if you’re dedicated enough.” Ray recognizes that people sometimes have a hard time investing time and effort in themselves.
At first, when Ray invested in a coach for himself, people thought he was crazy. People believed that Ray wasn’t motivated enough, and that why he needed a coach. When really, he hired the coach because they had the expertise that he didn’t possess and what he wanted to acquire. It’s a resource to hire people and learn from them – it’s not just strategy, it’s learning about how they think. It’s learning from those people’s real-life lessons that made them think a certain way. Ray then tries to adopt those philosophies into his own life.
“And so for speed of growth, there’s just nothing like it because you can be in your little vacuum and be a very good producer and very smart. And you get one from someone who knows 10-times bigger business that skyrockets your growth…our speed of growth is due to coaches and mentors and learning from people who’ve been there, done that.” Learning from others is one of the best resources and tools available.
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