Developing a business mindset means knowing how to think like a successful entrepreneur, by adopting an optimistic yet pragmatic attitude in order to make the right business decisions. Let’s look more closely at how your mind works when it comes to minding your business.

Are you a worrier – dwelling on worst-case scenarios, feeling down about your lack of success, rejecting possible ideas because you assume they won’t work? Are you a planner – making a mental list of what to do next, staying focused and motivated? Are you overly optimistic – seeing many opportunities, not able to prioritize, needing direction? Are you a procrastinator – coming up with good ideas but never feeling ready to start?

How you think about your business influences your abilities and your actions? Negative beliefs and critical self-talk hamper your efforts, while constructive, optimistic yet pragmatic thinking helps you to take big steps. Developing an entrepreneurial mind-set– the combination of thinking, feeling and sensing that is the hallmark of successful business owners– is the next step in your business education.

Counsellors often have a part of this mindset developed, but need to activate additional elements. For example, we are often very skilled at sensing, and can read subtle cues and unspoken signals. This is good and can be very helpful in business situations.

But we must also learn to use the linear, unemotional thinking that is necessary in business. Successful entrepreneurs tend to display the following six qualities in their thinking:

Given a set of challenges, successful entrepreneurs see opportunities. Counsellors face particular challenges just from being in a profession that is not well understood by those who could benefit from its practices. To deal with this, you need to see the opportunities inside each challenge and keep an optimistic yet pragmatic attitude. Can you see the opening in every rejection, the break in each obstacle?

Given a problem, successful entrepreneurs are both optimistic and pragmatic. Being a successful entrepreneur means that you can balance dream with reality. Can you stay upbeat and at the same time assess the truth of a situation? Taking right action when you are in a challenging situation means that you have the skill of combining a confident stance with levelheaded expectations.

Successful entrepreneurs expect a lot from themselves and others. They want a lot for themselves and other. Expecting a lot from others – those who work with you, be they staff or clients – means having clear boundaries around your requests with clients or staff. Express your needs and wants directly.

Expect those around you to come from the best in themselves, and hold yourself to this expectation as well. Wanting for others means that you can hold a big vision and goals for those around you.

When one of your clients sets a goal, you will support the achievement of the goal by staying interested, by brainstorming, and by celebrating when it is met, but you don’t demean the client by reminding or nagging about the goal. You are there as a very interested party for your clients to report to, but not for babysitting goals.

Successful entrepreneurs operate from a state of abundance. When you, as an entrepreneur, begin to feel that there is a profusion of resources in your environment, it is easier to hold a big vision for your clients and yourself as well. You come to believe that there is enough in the world for each client you see to have a meaningful life, satisfying work, enough money to live well, love and happiness.

Successful entrepreneurs are persistent. Business is not for the faint-hearted. It takes effort to land a contract, set up a thriving counselling practice, identify and cultivate referral sources, fill a workshop, land a training contract, get a book deal. It’s nothing personal when your goals take more effort than you thought they would. Can you find it within yourself to stay with your goal long enough to get results? If so, you have persistence.

Successful entrepreneurs enjoy making a profit. As an entrepreneur, your developmental task is to develop an adult relationship with money. You need to understand that as a business person, making a profit from your counselling practice is as much part of your job as being a counsellor.

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“What type of business to start…A good starting point in deciding what type of business you should start, or if you should consider starting a business, begins with understanding who and what you are. In a society such as ours, few people understand themselves-a fact borne out by the number of counsellors and psychiatrists employed. Most people are running to satisfy expectations and demands placed on them from the outside. They never stop long enough to spend time with themselves to get to know that person inside. To get to know that person inside generally requires a degree of isolation and quiet. Our world is one of overstimulation, where most people hide from themselves, constantly in a state of overstimulation. Surrounded by people and noise even when alone, the television, stereo, or radio are on: something, anything, to drown out the quiet.

A period of reflection and meditation in solitude to acquire a degree of personal understanding is often required before making life-altering changes. Without a sense of self, the tendency exists to continually chase that “something out there.” “I want to go into business to get rich.” “I want to make a lot of money.” Such reasoning is dangerously superficial. Begin with the right reason for you; go into business if doing so will bring a sense of fulfilment to you.

Every person brings himself or herself into business. Personal strengths and personal weaknesses within the context of a level of skill and talent will tend to create for the entrepreneur a realm of opportunity and a realm of constraints. One’s personal strengths need to be strong enough on which to base a workable business concept, and personal weaknesses must not be such that they could cause the business to fail. For some people, the entrepreneurs always knew the type of business they wanted to start.”

Source: Urlacher, L.S. (1999). Small business entrepreneurship: An ethics and human relations perspective. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Simon & Schuster.

In the next post we’ll start to investigate some of your attitudes and behaviours to help you identify relevant business opportunities. By looking at your attitudes and behaviours, we can begin to compare them to those of an entrepreneurial mind-set. The entrepreneurial mind-set may be used and/or developed to contribute to your success in the business world.

Please note: You may notice that this particular reading is talking specifically about “coaching”. Due to the similar nature of professions, the information in this reading is applicable to counselling.

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Starting any new business can be an exciting but challenging time. As a counsellor, your forte may be in helping clients make changes in their life but may be unsure of where to start when venturing out on your own in the business world. 

This series is particularly useful for those counsellors (or other mental health professionals) who are thinking about starting their own practice but have limited understanding on how to go about doing this.

There are many aspects that the counsellor/business starter will have to consider. In this series, the following topic areas will be covered to help you set-up your own business:

Assessing your own entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours - By examining your attitudes and behaviours, we can begin to compare them to those of an entrepreneurial mind-set. The entrepreneurial mind-set may be used and/or developed to contribute to your success in the business world.

Generating business ideas and defining your concept - Business opportunity ideas are those ideas that may create profit or assets, and/or develop or advance the business.

Enjoy!

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With the assessment complete, the next step to ensure that the needs of the child and family are met is case planning.

Essentially case planning is the process of setting goals and building in strategies to meet those goals. The counsellor must work with the child and/or family to decide upon the goals that are necessary to achieve to bring about desired change. Involving the family in case planning will encourage honest participation.

The process involves examining what the problem is, and how to bring about change to improve the family situation. Clear discussion of what is expected from all parties is essential to minimise confusion and ensure everyone is working in the same direction.

Some questions that might be asked include:

1. What changes are necessary to safeguard this child’s wellbeing?
2. How will we know if the change has occurred?
3. What will we need to change to bring about the desired result?

In child protection and family support work, often the child and the family are linked to multiple forms of assistance and support, hence co-ordination of those external supports (i.e. agencies and/or professionals) is required to ensure resources are not doubled-up or wasted.

Tilbury et al. (2007) outlines the process of operationalising an assessment as:

1. to develop a plan
2. to provide the necessary services and resources or arrange for those services to be delivered by an outside source
3. to monitor the interventions to ensure delivery of the services and that they are attending to what they were assigned to do
4. Evaluate the process to ensure the desired outcomes are achieved
5. Reviewing the plan and making the necessary adjustments as required

There may be more than one type of plan required. There may be a need for a therapeutic intervention, a placement plan, or a contact plan but all the plans must be integrated to ensure the interventions are directed towards the same goals.

The case planning process is intended to encourage participation and accountability and to ensure that cases do not get lost in the system without some form of active intervention. Hence, regular meetings between the participants are scheduled to bring about focussed and purposeful discussions prior to key decisions being made.

Such decisions may involve statutory processes. For example, the decisions may apply to a change in a court order, certain decisions regarding the place or extension of a child’s placement, and even decisions regarding the child returning home.

Depending upon the type of support and assistance the family is receiving from an agency, other decisions that may need to be taken into account include the a change in the family’s place of residence, employment status or child care arrangements.

Also included in the process of child protection is the avenue of the different types of case planning meetings. Case conferences with child and family workers and other involved professionals allow the sharing of information to discuss the relevant assessment and intervention processes, to ensure the best possible support and resources are made available for a particular child and family.

Facilitated family meetings can ensure family participation in the decision making process, while placement meetings enable counsellors and carers, to plan and consider all relevant information regarding future placement issues.

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There is not a clear cut off line from where the assessment ends and the intervention begins in child and family work.

Following is a number of approaches to intervention that have been selected because they are consistent with values of self-determination, respect, dignity empowerment and social justice: values commonly drawn upon in child and family work (Tilbury, et al., 2007).

The Systems approach is based on the theory that whatever happens in any part of a system, it impacts on all other parts of the system to a greater or lesser extent. For example, unhappiness within families produces unhappy family members; hence every individual in that family is affected. This also implies that every individual family member has a responsibility in improving the level of happiness in the family. 

A systems approach allows for consideration of a range of variables impacting on a subject which would include the individual and family; school; work and peers; the community and societal influences.

The goal of the systems approach is to achieve equilibrium between the individual and their social environment. Helping individuals to build bridges between the needs that they have and the available resources they have access to or are capable of achieving.

Family therapy approach

There are numerous family therapies that are based on psychodynamic and system theories, however solution focused approach has recently emerged as being an effective way of helping families.

The solution based approach focuses on solutions rather than problems. This approach promotes brief interventions that focuses on what is happening now, rather than why it is happening.

Strength approach

Strength based therapy emerged in contrast to the problem focused theories of the past. Its main value is focusing on the strengths of the individual, the family, the community, and the available resources.  With an emphasis on self-direction, personal responsibility, it allows clients to gain a greater sense of progress. Efforts are concentrated on the future and building resilience rather than seeking to remedy the problems of the past.

Cognitive Behavioural approach

The fundamental basis of CBT is that what an individual thinks,  influences what that same individual feels, which then influence how that individual will behave. The CBT approach is goal orientated, self-directed, and challenges irrational or negative thinking patterns.

This approach could be considered useful particularly where children have experienced childhood trauma, as cognition (memories) can become distorted, children can blame themselves (irrational thoughts) and CBT helps to challenge and change those irrational beliefs to more realistic and less damaging to the client, through positive reinforcement, affirmations, and other methods of challenging distorted thinking patterns.

Crisis Intervention is a brief immediate method of intervention. Work is directional in that advice and guidance may be given. It is a structured process involving attending to both cognitive and behavioural reactions in the beginning, middle and end of a time limited intervention. The aim is to help individuals to gain coping mechanisms that can be used in long-term change. The effectiveness of crisis intervention is limited for people whose lives are in long term crisis; due to poverty, discrimination or other social circumstances.

Community Development

A community development approach to child protection attempts to understand, at the local level, the needs of parents with children. For example; members in a local community recognise the need for a culturally appropriate community child care facility in suburb A. Members of the community form a group and set about developing the services or facilities to provide that need to the community.

The underpinning theme of community development is to link people together, building individual skills, knowledge and confidence. Furthermore, by connecting community members with the decision-makers in government and business to bring about positive changes in the community, from which individuals will benefit.

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