Why is it so hard to change our Entrepreneurial response?

Breaking through the entrepreneurial ceiling to build a scalable business is biologically challenging.

In his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, best-selling author Dr Joe Dispenza writes that memorized feelings and emotions limit us to recreate the past. When you are in the middle of an experience, the brain receives external information through the senses, and the brain goes about making sense of the information. He says, “When you identify the event that caused the change, that event in and of itself is called a memory. Neurologically and chemically, you encode that environmental information into your brain and body. Thus, you can remember experiences better because you recall how they felt at the time they happened- feelings and emotions are a chemical record of past experiences.”

As an example, you are at work, production is way behind schedule, and the customers are starting to make noise that they are displeased that their goods are not completed when you said they would be. The brain releases chemicals that create emotions, and you align the story up with a memory where the client took their very lucrative business elsewhere. At this moment, you feel anxiety, your heart rate increases and your chest feels heavy, and you struggle to breathe. You feel the same emotional reaction and feelings thinking about it as you do when you experience it live as your body believes it is experiencing the same event.

Of course, a common event like this could be viewed as an opportunity to create ongoing business systems based on tangible data, but this is not how we are wired. This explains, in part, why so many entrepreneurs struggle to make a meaningful change towards a scalable business.

The great news is, now that we know what we are up against, we can implement a range of tools and strategies to combat the all too familiar response. Building our resilience muscle one experience at a time can create new anchors that will serve us well. Staying the course and leaning into uncomfortable situations is critical if we are to break through the entrepreneurial ceiling to create great scalable businesses.