5 Corporate Mindsets Holding You Back Working For Yourself

5 Corporate Mindsets Holding You Back Working For Yourself as an ENFP

“It may take some time to transition to at least a little bit of intrinsic motivation rather than just all that extrinsic motivation that was driving you with fear and stress for so long.”
Dan Johnston

Making the transition and working for yourself as an ENFP

When you’re making the transition from office, corporate life to something else, maybe working for yourself or going back to school, becoming some kind of an artist, there are some very bad habits that are going to be necessary to break If you want to make it work.

A lot of my clients have quit their job. They’ve left the corporate world and they are determined to work for themselves and there are some bad habits that I helped them shed.

Today I want to share five of the really bad habits and mindsets that you’re likely to pick up in the wrong corporate environment.

#1 The habit of multitasking and being available all the time

Number one is the habit of multitasking and being always on and always available. One thing you’ll find if you start working for yourself is the key to success is uninterrupted blocks of time where you can build significant things where you can create systems or finished projects, or think through an effective strategy. It is not doing a million things at once and being always on.

#2 Corporate-speak or robot speak

Number two is corporate-speak or robot speak. Speaking like a nonhuman with no values or personality. I cannot believe how many people come from the corporate world and cannot just communicate basic things human to human. If you’ve been in academia, you’d know that we need to have a six-month detox program where you learn to be human again and break those habits. If you want to do well in business, learn to speak like a human, be clear, be succinct, be direct, and maybe even occasionally have an opinion and a bit of humor. That’ll get you off to a good start.

#3 Miss balancing life priorities

Next up is a huge mistake I see people make, coming from the corporate world is miss balancing life priorities. I can’t even fathom it sometimes, you hear people tell stories where they’re like, “Oh, I was madly in love with her and we were this great fit, but her job was in Pittsburgh, and my job was in Miami.” So get a different job! Really, is that the most important thing in your life? Not your life partner? These weren’t even jobs where it was like, “Oh, yeah, but we were saving lives. We were innovating a new surgery to transplant hearts.” It was accounting work. That’s terrible. We get our priorities messed up.

Here’s why that’s really important, aside from like, your soul, and life fulfillment, and all that sort of stuff – Where I think you might want to check on your priorities is that if you want to succeed working for yourself, you need to have that balance. If I don’t spend enough time with friends and people I care about, I get out of whack at work, it’s really important to have a great life balance in terms of health and diet and time off and long walks and time with friends and all this stuff In order to do great in your own business.

This is still not a standard in a lot of companies and I don’t know why. I’m not going to really try to guess. But if you’re working for yourself, you’ll find very quickly you need to find a balance, you need to find better priorities, and when you’re at your best and you’re happier, you’ll actually get a lot more done and be a lot more successful.

#4 Believing that “More is more”

Number four, this corporate mindset could be really messing you up is the belief that more is more, the more you work – the more successful you’ll be. It’s based on having an insane amount of things to do. I like another approach. I like to minimize what I do and focus on really important things. What you will find is a lot of very successful entrepreneurs work less and do less, but they spend a lot of time and energy on what’s really important and doing that well.

They don’t get caught up in the busy work and measuring themselves by how many hours they put in or how many things they get done. Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of high achiever entrepreneurs and people with a lot of drives. I have a good friend here in Prague who has five YouTube channels, maybe six since we last caught up last week. He started a new channel it seems every week. He’s got something like 5 million subscribers and he outputs a ton of work and works a lot of hours and it works really well for him.

So you may want to do a lot, but again, even in the case of someone like him is he is very focused and his activities and time are spent on what’s really important. So what you may find is you simplify what you do in your working hours, and you focus on the things that generate the most value and get you the best results, and then you end up like writing 12 hours a day, or filming videos, or doing whatever you do well, for long days, just because you enjoy it, and you’re getting so much out of it.

But ultimately, it’s not about counting how much you’ve done as your badge of honor, and the last bad habit you might pick up from the corporate world is a need for external pressure to get things done.

#5 Need for external pressure to get things done

It’s amazing how productive people can be at jobs they don’t really like when there is that external pressure and threat always present, and when you switch over to working for yourself, you will need to find ways to manage and get more done without external pressure.

Now one of these strategies can be creating pressure for yourself through things like deadlines, goals, public announcements, and that you will want to create some pressure for yourself. But if your motivation is always coming from fear, like if I don’t get this done, I’ll be fired, I have to do this just because this person says so it may take some time to transition from at least a little bit more intrinsic motivation, rather than just all that extrinsic motivation that was driving you with fear and stress for so very long.

Now, if you are in a spot where you’re thinking about making the transition from corporate life to working for yourself, or you already have and are somewhere in that transition phase, I encourage you to check out a free training I have.

One of the things I do best is help people transition from a job to working for themselves and deal with the mindset issues that come up when you’re going from all this external pressure and support to working for yourself to being the captain of your own ships. How do you set up your days and be productive? How do you stay focus? How do you deal with fear, friends, family, all these new things that can weigh on you and ultimately have a big impact on whether or not you succeed? So I would definitely encourage you to check out that free training.

As always, check out my Dreams Around The World youtube channel. My mission here is to help you become the best version of yourself all while creating the most awesome life possible for you and those you love. So if you’re new here, hit the subscribe button hit the bell and I will catch you in the next one.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Share via
Copy link