How To Stay In Control of Your Business

When we’re in a business we often need to think about How to Stay in Control of Your Business.

There’s a direct link between you and your business. When you created it, you inserted your identity into it. You wanted to make it something that has meaning to you but would also create meaning for others out there.

In this piece, I’ll be talking about your IDENTITY MATRIX, which covers four parts:

• Purpose
• Values
• Life Experiences
• Limiting Beliefs

It creates a structure for us to follow to ensure that we can stay aligned with our business and stay on track.

If you look at Apple, for example, Steve Jobs had a vision of providing a high powered, easy to use high functioning computer that anyone could have on their own desk. The Apple Company was created to facilitate that and deliver that. When they removed Steve Jobs from the company, they broke that alignment and Apple started to fail. It wasn’t until they brought him back in and he was able to pull that back together and bring that back in alignment was Apple then able to grow to one of the biggest companies in the world. So based on this example we can see the importance of understanding the impact that you have on your own business.

“The only way to do great work is to Love what you do” – Steve Jobs

The identity matrix is broken up into our four parts as above and it’s in two main sections:

1. Meaning: What does this business mean to you? What meaning do you want to share with people out there? What was the reason why you started it to begin with? This is mainly our:
   • Purpose
   • Values

2. Behaviours: What behaviours are we instilling in this business, which ultimately decide how we deliver it and how we drive it. These are linked to:
   • Life Experiences
   • Limiting Beliefs

When looking at our Meaning, It’s important to have the Purpose and your Values really nailed down because that ultimately becomes the “Message” that we’re sending out to our customers and to the world. This is also the message that we’re putting into the business that people are going to connect with, as well. Having that understanding, and that focus is really important to ensure people fall in love with what you do.

Life Experiences and our Limiting Beliefs have a big impact on our business that sometimes we don’t really acknowledge. For example, if you have a limiting belief around money or the ability to make money, or a scarcity around money that’s going to hold you back from investing the dollars that you might need to invest in to grow this business and take it up to the next level.

If you have limiting beliefs around your ability, if you’re doubting yourself a lot of the times, you’re going to hesitate and hold back from this business. So our limiting beliefs, whether it be within ourselves, or we might have limiting beliefs within our business partners, or the team that we have around us really holds back how we input and drive that business.

Life Experiences are always a big one on our positive and our negative such as our fears, our failures, our successes, our wins, our achievements. These also drive the decisions we make, the reactions that we have to a situation and ultimately the strategy that we put into our business.

Let’s say for example, you had a previous business that maybe didn’t do too well, there’s a bit of fear around there, there’s some trauma held in that as well. So the strategy that you put into your business then might be more of a defensive strategy than an offensive strategy.

That then goes back to our limiting beliefs, because we had a bad Life Experience, that’s driving our limiting belief around whether it’s success or money. So we can see that these two were very well connected then that links back to how we interact with our values and our purpose whether we’re prepared to share that meaning and push that meaning forward, or if we’re going to let these life experiences and limited beliefs hold us back from sharing that vision.

Now, once we get an understanding of these components of the Identity Matrix, we can start to reframe the questions that we ask within our business. So instead of asking “Why”, we can start asking “What?”.

For example, instead of asking Why:

• “Why isn’t my business doing so well”, or
• “Why isn’t it working the way I hoped”

We can now start to ask “What”:

• “What is it that I’ve identified within this matrix now that I need to change or adapt to help this business grow and develop?”

Another question that I get asked a lot is, “Why can’t I attract the right customers?” and “Why can’t I attract paying customers?:

Again, we can change that to “What”, for example:

• What message am I sending out through the purpose and values that I share, that’s not attracting the right people to me? What do I need to change within the Identity matrix to help bring that forward?

Changing the way we question the business by having a framework that we can follow, helps us to build the business the way we want to.

So we can see the power of maintaining that alignment with your business and understanding those four components of your “Identity Matrix”, which are:

• Purpose
• Values
• Life Experiences
• Limiting Beliefs

Harnessing those and creating that framework to follow will give you more control over the business and how you operate in there everyday.

If you’d like to understand your Identity Matrix and how you’re impacting your business, feel free to book in a call, or complete the form below and we’ll get you started understanding the impact that you have in your business now