Are you ready to be self-employed?

Whenever you start a new project, you are creating something out of the unknown. Because our minds are survival tools, when you go for something new, whatever beliefs or agreements you have around not creating that thing will come up into your consciousness.

When you go to create something you set your intention, and then you get stuck in some counter-intention, and you don't create your goal. Here are some common limiting beliefs that come up when people set the goal of being self-employed.

Common limiting beliefs

Limiting belief Truth

I am a failure.
Nothing I do ever works out, and this will be no different. I can never do anything right. I'll never make it. I can't do this. Failure means "missing the mark". You can fail, but you cannot be a failure. You may have failed at many things, but you have also succeeded at many things. Everybody fails sometimes. Do you have the freedom to fail and have it not mean anything about you?

Money is evil. Money causes all the problems in the world. Money is causing all the problems in my life. I want to live without money. I want to live in a society without money. Money is neutral. It may look like money is causing all your problems, but the fact is that you would have those problems even if you had lots of money. Money is not the source of your problems. Money can't create your problems or solve them. Money is just an agreement among people in a society. And if you really want to create a moneyless society, go ahead. But be honest with yourself - do you really want to create that or do you just want to run your victim number on money?

Money will solve all my problems. All I need is a little more money. If I had more money, I would be happy and secure. Money is not a Source. What this means is, as a Divine being, you create your life. Your money does not create your life. Everything wonderful in your life - you created it, not your money. Everything horrible in your life - you created it, not your money. Money is a tool, a thing. It is not a Source. When you pretend that money is the Source of your wellbeing, you are giving away your Divine creative power.

Survival is hard. Consciously or unconsciously, I don't really want to be here. In some ways, I'm looking forward to dying - it would be a relief. "Hard" is an attitude. Survival is hard for some people and easy for others. Which one do you want to be? You get to choose where you come from about your life - that is a choice you have to sit down and make with yourself. How do you want to be with your life?

Some of these may have triggered you - or you might have others. For me, I had this intense belief that having money was wrong, and that it would be much more virtuous to be poor than to have money. And as long as I had that belief, it was hard for me to feel OK having money, and I undercharged people for my work. People would give me more money than I had charged them, because they felt bad that I wasn't charging enough. Gradually I started charging more, as I became more comfortable with the idea and gained confidence in my abilities. This is not about forcing yourself to change your beliefs. It is about challenging them if they aren't working for you.

What to do with your negative beliefs

The three things that have been most valuable to me in my journey so far have been the concepts of choice, commitment, and faith.

Choose to change your mind. When your negative beliefs come up, you will be tempted to believe them, and stop going for your goal. Don't. There are techniques you can do that help - meditation, affirmations - but ultimately you are going to have to make a choice - choose to stop empowering your old beliefs and create new ones. No one can change your beliefs for you, and there is no magic solution. Everyone's network of beliefs is different, and what creates a breakthrough in one person may do nothing for another. That's why you need to go beyond techniques and beyond your mind.

Make a commitment. Commitment is where you define what your goal is and write it down and commit yourself to it regardless of the evidence. It gets you beyond yourself and into the unknown where creation happens, because you don't know how things will show up. Defining a commitment means putting a date on it. Something like:

I commit to being completely financially self-sufficient by Jul 24, 2009.

Notice all the clamoring in your mind..."but, but, but!!". Say hello to your mind...thank it for sharing, and keep going. You are in charge now. You may not know how it is going to show up - well, that's what creating from the unknown is. If you can't be a little uncomfortable about not knowing what the future will hold, you will never create something new. You just have to commit beyond that uncomfortableness. That leads us to...

Have faith in your journey. The truth is, you don't need to know how to do something until you do. And when you do need to know it, that knowledge will show up. Every time I try to anticipate some knowledge that I think I need, some plan I think I have to have, I end up spending lots of time and effort I didn't need to. Things show up when you need them - and not before. If you haven't been self-employed before, you didn't need to know how to do it yet. There was no purpose to you having that knowledge. When you make a commitment to creating self-employment for yourself, the knowledge that is needed will show up.