How you think is how you feel: An entrepreneur’s journey

One of the greatest things I have done in the last few years is become part of the Entrepreneurs Organisation (EO). You can watch me share my thoughts on EO when asked about it on Sky Business last Friday.

EO is a global community of entrepreneurs with its main focus on learning and growth through peer-to-peer learning, once in a lifetime experiences and connections to experts. We have an internal goal at WE LOVE NUMBERS of helping to get as many entrepreneurs from our community into EO as we know it is only going to accelerate their success even more.

One of the major components of EO is something called forum, which is a member-led confidential peer-sharing program. Each month I meet with nine other amazing entrepreneurs and we share the parts of our life that no one else knows and we then share experiences and lessons learnt that we think could help a person in a particular situation right now. A big part of forum is to give presentations on something that is very important in your life right now.

I recently gave a presentation titled: How do you stop feeling like a failure and being dissatisfied in business? It was a very confronting topic for me as I have done a lot of self-development and I have got in control of most parts of my life but this was still causing me problems.

What did I learn from the experience?

Journey

The most valuable part of the presentation was actually the journey of creating the presentation not presenting it. It forced me to really do a lot of soul searching, think about what could be potentially causing the problem and what future options I have.

I started speaking to people about the topic to get little insights which could help with my thought process. When you are an entrepreneur, life is very hectic; you think you are the boss but really the vision is the boss, and it is a very demanding boss! You are also getting pulled in multiple directions trying to juggle between, team members, customers, suppliers and shareholders. If you don’t make time to get inside your own head and focus on the bigger picture, months, years can go by and you may one day realise that you are not sure why you are doing what you are doing now.

Coach

Having a coach is very powerful. In EO when you are creating a presentation you also get assigned a coach who is there to help uncover the real problem and to formulate your thoughts. You often think you know something until someone starts asking you questions from an objective point of view.

I am not alone

Everyone could relate to my problem, which in a way saddened me. I was in a room full of some of the most amazing, intellectual, driven and successful people I know and they had all shared similar feelings at different points of their lives. Where we are lucky is that we are in an environment where we are encouraged to share our feelings but unfortunately most people don’t have this opportunity. I encourage you to all be vulnerable and share your feelings with people as you will be very surprised to find out that you are not alone.

How you think is how you feel  

One of my forum buddies, who I greatly respect as he is the Zen master, said he likes to say this statement to himself regularly: How you think is how you feel. These seven simple words put together in a sentence really summed my problem and solution at the same time. The problem was that I was thinking the wrong things. I have shared with you the power of starting your day with positive thinking in my previous SmartCompany article. 

I was reminded by this statement that I can control every situation and the solution to my problem was to just think differently. I can choose exactly how I feel in every situation that arises throughout my day and unfortunately I had been focusing on the wrong things in business. I was constantly focusing on what we had not achieved rather than what we had achieved. This doesn’t mean I am going to cease with my high expectations and constant pursuit of my vision but rather I am going to be more balanced in the way I view things.

Finn Kelly is the CEO and co-founder of award-winning Gen Y financial advisory firm,Wealth Enhancers, along with the parent company, premier private wealth management firm WE Private.