Feeling Guilty About Success Harms Your Business. Part 1

Do You Feel Guilty About Success?

One of the worst things we can tell ourselves about accomplishments and success is that we don’t deserve it, and then feel guilty about it. These feelings may have been plaguing you since childhood and kept you from the success you’re very capable of. Feeling Guilty About Success Harms Your Business in the now even though the source is decades or more old.

Rather than celebrating and touting your success, you may feel unworthy or afraid that you’ll come across as bragging. But when you’re an entrepreneur and in the business of helping others, your accomplishments should be touted.

If your potential customers don’t see you as a success, they won’t have much of a reason to follow your advice. You may even take your feelings of guilt so far as to give away your advice and information – great for the freebie seekers, but bad for your business.

That doesn’t mean that everything has to have a price on it. Successful entrepreneurs usually go the extra mile and provide more solutions and guidance for their customers than necessary. But it should be your choice, not a result of feeling guilty.

Feeling Guilty Doesn’t Serve Your Customers’ Best Interests

When guilt about your success or how much money you make overwhelms you, it may cause you to abandon your career pursuit of helping others. That leaves your customer base that you worked so hard to build without a leader they can depend upon.

If guilty and unworthy feelings are something you contend with, it’s time to nip it in the bud before it grows into an obstacle you can’t overcome. Think about why you feel guilt. Did someone – a customer or loved one – make you feel guilty or berate you for wanting to better your life?

Or could these feelings come from childhood experiences? Unless you find a way to bury the guilt and remove it from your thought process entirely, you won’t be able to fully help your customers succeed – and you will fail, too.

You can’t have Got Everything Wrong

You must have done a number of things right to be at the place you are now. Others are seeking your advice and experience because you’ve obviously accomplished enough to be considered worthy of offering solutions for their problems.

They view you as a person to look up to and emulate. If you let your customers down by becoming indecisive and letting them down, you will lose the business that could eventually make you a success.

First, know that no one has the right to make you feel unworthy of success. Don’t let others beat you down and make you feel that you just got lucky with your success – that it wasn’t a matter of your knowledge, drive and past experiences that led you to triumphs.

And even if you did luck out in some areas, you had the good fortune to know when to take advantage of a situation. As an entrepreneur, you have to tout your own successes.

This doesn’t mean you’re bragging, but that you’re stating the facts. You are good at what you do and you do have the knowledge and experience to help others gain their own success.

Sometimes it’s difficult to fend off criticism from others – especially those close to you. But you have a choice on how to respond. You can either sink deeper in guilty feelings and apologize for the success you’ve had or celebrate what you have and do what makes you happy.

Remember: “Your value does not decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.” ~ Unknown.

Everybody Has Hardships

It’s normal to feel empathy or sympathy for those who are struggling financially. Luckily, with the career you’ve chosen of providing useful information, you can help those people succeed.

You’ll feel good about yourself and the ones you help will be lifelong customers. You’ll both benefit from the help you give. As an entrepreneur who is in the business of helping others achieve success in whatever niche you’re leading, you should go above and beyond.

That doesn’t mean giving away all of your knowledge and secrets for free, but the products you do offer should have meat in the content and go beyond a simple freebie that you secured from the Internet.

You can use much of the free information you research on the ‘net to help others. There’s so much data on just about any topic you can imagine that you can share it with others and they’ll be grateful for it.

When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re considered a leader – and leaders can be assured of their continued success by helping others. One of the best ways to be a leader is to share the knowledge and experience you already have.

Give Value

Your customers are looking for something of value, so you have to be able to discern what they consider valuable. It’s a waste of time to try helping them with something they don’t need or want help with.

Well thought-out blog posts, an easy-to-maneuver website and periodic specials where you offer past information products at a premium price is a good way to share your resources and make your customers aware of unique products and opportunities.

Another way to help others struggling for success is to offer feedback. The criticism should be constructive and transparent, helping improve what they’ve already accomplished rather than destructive criticism that can shatter their dreams.

Introducing your customers to other entrepreneurs and websites or blogs is also a great way to help others. If you know of another entrepreneur or guru who specializes in or offers something your client may feel is important, make sure the client knows about it.

When a client has overcome a particular obstacle or has come up with a new way of doing something, recognize him by mentioning him in a blog post, inviting him to a podcast presentation or any other method that will extol what he’s accomplished.

It’s not always easy to help others who are experiencing hardships. You’ll have freebie seekers who will test your patience. But the connections with those willing to work hard toward their goals and pay a fair amount for the guidance are the foundation of your success and it makes sense to cultivate those relationships.

Tomorrow un Part 2 of Feeling Guilty About Success Harms Your Business we will go into more detail about freebie seekers.