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Being an entrepreneur can be rewarding, but sometimes the learning curve can be really frustrating, AND LONG!
When I ventured into starting my coaching business twenty years ago, I figured it couldn’t be that hard to pick up a few clients here and there. Little did I know that running my own business would mean I had to learn how to sell my programs, articulate my value, price my offerings, position my packages so that prospects really knew what I did, PLUS learn how to hire and manage contractors to help me get it all done.
Oh, and then there was that mindset issue I had to conquer.
I figured I’d hire a coach to help me shorten my path to success, which helped a lot. Without the insights of my early mentor, I may never have been able to see how important the next step was. But a mentor alone just wasn’t helping me speed up results.
That’s where my community changed everything.
More specifically, my inner circle of fired-up entrepreneurs who were slaying their goals and conquering the ever-changing landscape of online business success, better known as a mastermind.
My mastermind became a Rising Tide.
A rising tide is a concept that J.F. Kennedy presented in the 1960’s to bring attention to the premise that when something is good for the community, all in the community benefit.
When a tide is rising, all the boats rise too.
Now that concept may or may not hold true in the world at large, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, its undisputed that a rising tide not only shortens your own learning curve, but it creates a feeling of effortlessness.
A successful business owner can tap into a more effortless and automatic rise of success simply by surrounding themselves with people in momentum.
Here’s what I noticed happened by being in a powerful mastermind that became my rising tide:
The quality of my conversations leveled up.
Before I first joined my mastermind, the people I was around were all broke and had no idea how to fix that problem. They struggled to accomplish their goals and dreams. They had a business idea but no results
One day I heard Mark Victor Hansen share a version of a Jim Rohn quote that completely shifted my paradigm, “Your success is the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” In that moment I knew I needed to be around people who were succeeding!
It wasn’t that I didn’t love my friends. I didn’t stop spending time with them. But I changed who I had conversations about business, money and success with. When my first mastermind formed, we challenged each other to push past limits and conquer fears. We talked about what COULD work, instead of getting stuck in what didn’t work.
We were fired-up, and determined to rise above challenges to conquer our dreams.
And each and every one of us did.
I unleashed my own power.
Part of the Rising Tide Effect is that the people in your tide raise their game, and you raise yours by the sheer nature of that momentum. It doesn’t matter who rises first, but when everyone is rising, you make sure that the others rise too. Not only did I rise, but I really understood what my unique superpowers were and I leaned into them.
The tide is your environment…and the level to which the water rises in this tide is influenced by owning your own power. You can’t play small and safe when you align with a rising tide. You must be willing to participate in the momentum of success.
The key ingredient is allowing your mastermind (or inner circle) to see your true superpowers and harness them for the greater good of the group. The simple act of being invited to share my superpower on a teleconference (we didn’t even have webinars yet) and being put on stage in front of my ideal clients allowed me to exponentially increase my revenues.
It would have taken me five years to organize what I accessed in the span of a few months.
The Rising Tide Effect provided momentum I desperately needed (and found invaluable to tap into a more effortless approach to growth.)
No man (or woman) is left behind.
One of the simplest but most powerful elements of being in that mastermind was knowing that my “team” wasn’t going to leave me in the dust. When you speak your goals to your mastermind and mentor, you have instant accountability. Your group notices when you win, and they notice when you don’t follow through.
Accountability is a valuable part of the rising tide effect…because left to our own devices it’s easy to talk yourself out of a goal or make excuses for your lack of progress.
Which leads me to the mindset accountability – your mastermind recognizes when “stinking thinking” cycles kick in. My masterminds over the years were not afraid to call each other out on allowing fears to take over and run our decision making. At the same time, we also knew that we could create our own economy together. By sharing our collective audiences we would all prosper together because each of us solved a unique problem in a unique way.
What really moved the needle was the unwavering generosity of wisdom available. Between a mentor and a mastermind, having access to proven strategies gives you a sense of confidence and feeds the rising of the tide (because when one is succeeding, all have access to the strategies that work!)
As I look back over the years of successes (and the failures too) one thing is crystal clear – if you want outcomes to be different, you have to be willing to change the tide you are currently drifting in.
If the tide isn’t rising, or you aren’t one of the boats being lifted, pick a new tide to wade in.
Maybe its time you picked a mastermind. The Amplify Mastermind might just be the perfect one to become your Rising Tide. Or maybe you need a coach and mentor to believe in you so fiercely that you just can not fail. Let this be the year that you upgrade your tide and rise.