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“If you don’t change your belief, your life will be like this forever.
Is that good news?”
W. Somerset Maugham
“This isn’t going to work for me, I’m just not a numbers person”.
These were the words spoken by a smart entrepreneurial woman who was adamant that she couldn’t understand the financials of her business.
This was a problem because I’d been asked to help her turn the business around from a difficult financial situation. Yet the one area she didn’t want to talk about was the numbers!
As I discovered, her strength was in selling and also motivating staff, and this was the main reason the business had succeeded when times were good. But when the Great Recession hit, the hidden financial leaks started becoming more evident and serious.
She had been referred to me by a mutual colleague and after a little exploration it was clear that part of the problem was that she had no control or visibility over the company’s finances.
When I asked her why she thought she wasn’t a numbers person, she eventually told me that she had really struggled with maths in school and she had always just figured numbers weren’t her thing.
It was clear to me however that she was very smart and I didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t understand business financials. And as I told her, to save her business, she needed to work through the psychological pain barrier to understand them.
The real problem here was what was going on in the deeper part of her mind – her unconscious mind, the home of her beliefs.
Her belief around numbers as it turned out, had been created when she was in school. A maths teacher had said several times to her that she ‘clearly wasn’t a numbers person’ – and this thought had stuck.
So when it came to maths she believed the teacher and stopped putting in the effort to learn. Unfortunately, like most people, she didn’t leave it in school but brought this belief forwards into the rest of her life.
Today though, if you talk to her about anything to do with figures, her face lights up. Now, she loves financials. Now she believes that she is a numbers person.
What changed?
In very simple terms, my job was to help her find a way to take action DESPITE her inner story, her inner script. To show her that if she took action she would improve her ability, in this case, with numbers.
It’s a prime example of what I call flipping the script.
In my experience everyone has several things they would love to be better at but have accepted a belief that they are just not an ‘x’ person.
It could be anything:
What’s your ‘x’?
Everyone can flip the script and I urge you not to accept second best for the things you’d really like to change. When you recognise the inner script causing the problem, sometimes it’s enough to cause a serious change.
I’m attaching a short e-book called Flip The Script which you can access for free. It’s something myself and my colleague Dr. Michael Gerharz have created as a lead in to our Flip The Script program which starts soon.
It might just provide a spark that will make you really challenge an inner script that up until now, you have been believing.
What’s your ‘x’ and what can you do to challenge the underlying belief around it this week?
The e-book is here.
Best,
Shane
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