44: How the stories you’ve built impact your business decisions

How do your beliefs and stories you have learned about yourself, affect your business decisions and your life as an entrepreneur?

First off, let me tell you my story.

I grew up in Singapore and I went through the local school system. If you know anything about Singapore, you know it has a very competitive education system. It’s all about rankings, and what grades you get on different exams, and what school you end up going to. A lot of your worth and your value as a human being is tied up in the grades that you get. It’s also a reason why Singapore has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world.

When I finished primary school, my grades were really good and I ended up going to the school of my choice. At the beginning of my first year, I had one of the top grades in the entire class. At the end of that first year, I went from being one of the top in the class to being literally the last.

When I was 14, we started doing high-level math and I was struggling so much. I built a story about how I’m such an embarrassment, how I really suck at this and I ended up dropping that subject. I was the only one in my class to drop that subject so I thought I must be stupid. I must genuinely be stupid.

It was only six or so years later when I was in Amsterdam, that I was diagnosed with ADD. Finally, it all made sense. I wasn’t able to sit and concentrate for hours on end on something that was so intense and just required a different type of learning than what came easy to me.

When I moved to Amsterdam, one of my first classes was ‘Supply chain and logistics management’, and that involved complex fractions. I was at school doing some homework, next to the smartest girl in the class, she was top of the class for every subject, and we were doing this complex fraction. I solved it in probably less than a minute, to me it wasn’t complex at all, it was something I had done when I was 13. She looked at me completely shocked. That was the moment I realized “wow, maybe I’m not bad at math! Could it be that I’m actually not bad at math, that I don’t suck, that I’m not stupid?”

A lot of these stories that we tell ourselves come from things that were said to us in our formative years as children, as young teenagers, that we then just believe. 

We don’t even realize how it’s holding us back. I have friends who were told that they were terrible writers in school. If you have that core belief that you don’t even realize it’s a belief, you just take that as gospel, as pure fact. Do you think you’ll be able to write good sales copy for your sales pages, for email sequences, or even just a Facebook post? No, because you have the core underlying belief of “I’m terrible at writing.”

I want to challenge you to think about what stories do you have from your childhood, from your school years, from your formative years, that are now affecting things that you do – your pricing decisions, how you communicate with clients, etc. What stories have you potentially created for yourself that are just simply not true? Then get in touch either via email or Instagram.

And as always if you’re looking for help with business and marketing strategy, then hit me up, and let’s have a conversation about how I can help you improve your profitability, pay yourself more and get more visible in front of the right dreamy clients.

Love + magic,

Maggie