You’ve been doing your thing for a while now. You’re earning money. You’re getting good feedback from clients. But you’re not pushing yourself to move your business forward – and you know it.

Perhaps you don’t want a big business. You may have no wish to manage staff or maintain leases or any of that. A million dollar business – or even a six figure business – is not your thing. Fair enough.

But still you know there’s more – you want more ease, more money, more interesting work, nicer, more grateful clients. Maybe you’re sitting on a big idea that’s gone unlaunched, squatting in your brain, for years.

So why aren’t you moving? Could it be self-sabotage?

You really care about the thing you haven’t launched

The more you care about the big idea you haven’t yet launched, the harder it is to launch. And no wonder – you’ve set expectations so high that even an eagle couldn’t reach it.

Worse, in the process of falling deeply in love with all the fabulous details of this thing, you’ve likely forgotten your community.

You already have people in business you’re working with who appreciate what you do, give you great feedback and refer more good people to you. When you’re busy crafting the finer details of an idea, you’ve forgotten you’re in business and instead become an artist. You’re fixated on your artwork rather than giving your audience what they want.

There are plenty of untalented artists with little real creativity and plenty of highly creative business people. The difference is that the artist starts first with the art while the business person starts first with their people.

You suspect you’re a fraud

How many dreams have gone unrealized because of this misconception? Here’s something I see everywhere: those who most suffer from imposter syndrome tend to be people who are sensitive, have high integrity, and have higher than average training and experience.

We all feel like a fraud sometimes. The challenge is to forge on regardless.

You’re busy standing still

So many people fail to start because they’re busy committing to unimportant things that won’t really move their business forward. Perhaps they’re people pleasers or have weak boundaries. But they’re over-scheduled and struggle to prioritise.

Yes and no are two sides of the same coin – when we say yes to something, we’re saying no to something else, and vice versa. And when you’re busy standing still, you’re mistaking indecision for busyness. Because if you made the decision to move ahead, you’d make better decisions on what to say no to.

You’ve mistaken your Ideal Clients for yourself

This one’s tricky because, if you’re in business for the long-term, you need to empathise with your ideal clients. And you need to apply that empathy to your marketing so you’re highly relevant, compelling and memorable.

The problem is when the boundaries become blurred and you begin over-identifying with your ideal clients. Oftentimes, in the process, you may start believing that you couldn’t possibly take money off them because friends don’t charge friends. Which is the beginning of falling down the rabbit warren.

Friends charge friends money because friends want friends to succeed (and not work so hard in their business). And your clients may become your friends in the process of working with you, but there should always be a professional separation. Finally, business is not a negative sum game: your clients don’t lose out by paying you; they gain.

You’re surrounded by naysayers

Sometimes, the reason we fail to succeed is not our fault; we’re simply surrounded by arseholes. If your friends, family, colleagues and assorted others are unsupportive, passive aggressive or outright critical of your business and ambitions, there’s only one way to deal with this: remove yourself.

We are not all born with supportive friends and family. But we can coach others on how to treat us. And the quickest way to do this is to avoid the situations that lead to naysaying. Don’t give people the opportunity to list all the things that could go wrong. Don’t solicit advice and opinions from people who aren’t your target market and haven’t done what you’re seeking to do.

Go find yourself a new community of business owners. There are plenty out there, including Hustle & Heart. Your mafia should lift you up, not pull you down. When you’ve lost the naysayers, you’ve freed up energy to apply to making that dream of yours reality.