Creating a Positive Business Mindset

Creating a positive business mindset for your online course business is essential to growth and longevity.

A quick glance at the many ads for online courses could leave one believing that creating and selling a course is a fast guarantee toward business success.

However, what most of those claims of overnight success and multi-figure first launches leave out are the years of experimentation and failure.

The result is that too many online course creators go into the creator economy thinking that they will create a course and people will be lining up to buy it. 

When that doesn’t happen, they frequently decide it’s because there is something wrong with their course or they become discouraged and give up.

The reality is that courses are rarely an overnight success. That comes after building an audience, validating their course, building relationships, honing a message, and carefully crafting marketing.

It takes time, consistency, persistence and the right mindset.

Developing a Positive Mindset

Before I became a copywriter, I spent three decades as a teacher. Helping students develop a positive mindset was important for their success. The same is true for business owners.

Have you ever said to yourself:

• “I can’t do this.”
• “I don’t understand this.”
• “I’m not good at this.”
• “This doesn’t work.”
• “I don’t get it.”

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

Learning how to endure the ups and downs as a business owner comes from developing a positive mindset.

One good way to do that is to adopt the Power of YET!

Carol Dweck coined the phrase “The power of yet” in her book Mindset. The basic idea is that instead of deciding something doesn’t work or that you can’t do something, approach it from the idea of “It doesn’t work, yet.” “I can’t do that, yet.”

Long before the phrase was coined, Thomas Edison, one of the world’s most famous inventors, exhibited the power of yet. Despite having over 1,000 unsuccessful attempts when he created the light bulb he never saw those attempts as failure. We can learn a lot from his mindset.

Here are a few Edison quotes that we can incorporate into our own businesses:

• “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
• “Each time you fail, you have eliminated another wrong option.”
• “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
• “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
• “Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.”

Rather than getting discouraged on your course creation journey, I challenge you to be like Thomas Edison and adopt the mindset of power of yet.

Let’s take another look at the phrases we sometimes say to ourselves and add the word YET:

• “I can’t do this, yet.”
• “I don’t understand this, yet.”
• “I’m not good at this, yet.”
• “This doesn’t work, yet.”
• “I don’t get it, yet.”

Notice the power of that one little word– yet. It’s not that we can’t do it or that our business isn’t successful. It’s that we can’t do it, yet (but we will!) Our business isn’t successful, yet (but it will be!).

The power of yet helps us realize that owning a business is a learning process and that learning takes time and effort. It doesn’t happen overnight. It teaches us that results come from work and trial and error and that giving up isn’t an option if we want to find success.

Foster a Power of Yet Mindset

Here are some ways you can foster a power of yet mindset:

1. Set realistic goals and break them down into simple steps. 
2. Don’t expect perfection and be willing to adjust as needed.
3. Accept that a retry is not failure, it’s progress.
4. Rethink deadlines to make them realistic and give yourself grace when you need to change them.
5. Appreciate and learn from the process rather than just focusing on the outcome.
6. Use failure as a learning tool.
7. Be like Thomas Edison and instead of saying you failed at something say you found out one way something doesn’t work.

Finally, give yourself time to reflect and not react. This allows you to realize that your business is a work in progress and to see that the process of learning is important for it future growth and success.

These are some questions you can ask yourself at various stages of your online course journey:

• What did I do well?
• What do I need to work on next time?
• How did I handle challenges that came up?
• What do I want to do differently next time?

Creating a positive mindset for your online course business is essential to growth and longevity. Adopt the power of yet to reframe how you look at your business will help get you there.

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