Building a successful business starts with one essential ingredient: a growth mindset. In this episode, Kellan dives into how embracing growth, resilience, and continuous learning can transform your entrepreneurial journey.

💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The Power of Belief: Why adopting a growth mindset is crucial when starting a business.
• From Setbacks to Success: How to turn failures into learning opportunities that fuel your progress.
• Practical Strategies: Simple daily habits and personal declarations that promote self-improvement and resilience.
• Reframing Fear: Overcoming the fear of failure and discomfort around selling to confidently pursue your goals.
• Community Support: Why growth thrives in shared journeys and how to find your tribe.

🎧 Episode Highlights:

• Personal anecdotes about pivoting from music to entrepreneurship.
• A life-changing conversation with antique dealers that sparked a deeper belief in personal potential.
• Actionable tips for transforming mindset into meaningful business outcomes.

This episode is an inspiring mix of practical advice and motivational storytelling designed to help you see challenges as stepping stones to success. Don’t miss the opportunity to unlock your potential and take the next bold step toward your dream life.

📣 Call to Action:

Subscribe, share your own growth stories, and join the journey of creating your ultimate life. Your success is closer than you think—let’s start now!

Do you like free stuff? Visit www.yourultimatelife.ca and watch my latest video series on how you can create your ultimate life using your existing skills, natural gifts and talents, and life experience.

Welcome to the show. Tired of the hype about living the dream? It's time for truth.

This is the place for tools, power and real talk so you can create the life you dream and deserve your ultimate life. Subscribe, share, create. You have infinite power. Hey there. Welcome to this episode of youf Ultimate Life. Today I am going to talk about.

This is the second of seven episodes on building a business. Now, we've talked a ton of episodes about, you know, the woo woo stuff and internal dialogue and we'll call it mindset.

Although we're going to talk a little bit about mindset today. But these seven episodes are hardcore about business. Business, right? Making money and business.

So yesterday, our last time we had was the first one and today it's about developing a growth mindset. Because if you're going to start a business right, you have to believe that there's growth available.

Like no business starts making a boatload of money, right, to begin with or with tons of customers. You have to. It's a growth process. And sometimes, you know, if you do good planning and stuff, you can have a rapid growth trajectory.

Most businesses are slow and, you know, really slow at first and then grow. And there's all kinds of books and information about how to start a business.

So we're going to talk today about one element and these seven things are just about different parts of starting, starting the business.

Now, the last episode was about building a business and so I just talked about some fundamentals about needing patience and a vision and skills and tools and that sort of thing. And I'm looking in my podcast book to remember exactly the things that we talked about. Part two is developing a growth mindset.

And that's not just the idea though, coming to build a business and grow it big.

Because if you've never started a business before or if you haven't started a business that's been really successful, then you're going to have to be a new person. Something about the way you think, about the way you approach things, you know, just about how you do this is going to have to be different.

Now, one of the things that I found really valuable is to get a lot of guidance. I didn't do that the first time I started a business. My first I wasn't even thinking I'm starting a business.

I liked music ever since I was young and I played the piano from the time I was 5 and several other instruments.

Clarinet, trumpet, French horn, tuba, you know, and piano is when I stuck with most and trumpet next And I played both professionally and you know, did lots. Have done lots of.

Lots of work in the studio and otherwise on keyboard and that, you know, morphed into synthesizers and drum machines and session work and all that kind of stuff. So that's been a really good source of both fun and money and fulfillment for me. Somewhere back there, I decided I wanted to write music.

So then I started writing songs. And maybe everybody that plays a piano or guitar or something. Develops their own melody and hears other songs and says, gee, I ought to do that.

But again, I wasn't thinking about any kind of business. I was just thinking about, I like to write music. So I did. And then as I was in my early 20s, probably 23 or 4, I had an interesting experience.

I went to a movie. Now, maybe it happens to a lot of people, I don't know, but I went to a movie and something happened watching that movie.

And that was the second of two powerful events. The first one happened when I was 20, and I was on a mission for my church. I was in Belgium at the time, for two years. And it's a funny thing.

I played the piano a lot. And I played jazz band piano in high school, at college. And I'd written a little bit of music there and so forth.

But I had never really thought about being a musician, like doing that for a living. I'd always assumed that I was going to go to college and get some job or something. Although I hadn't picked an area of focus or study at all.

I'd gotten a mathematics scholarship when I went to college. And so I was studying math. And then the second year, I studied accounting and decided that was boring and didn't want to be an accountant.

No offense to the accountants out there. I need them, love them, but that wasn't for me. But anyway, I never thought about doing it for business. I went in on this mission.

I went into this antique shop, and it was run by this couple that might have been in their late 30s. And they looked like hippies. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, and so that was like a big cultural thing.

I don't remember what it was signifying, but I remember the procession and all that. We lived in the East Bay, across the bay from San Francisco in Pleasant Hill. Anyway, I went in that shop and met these.

This man and this woman that were running the shop. And I asked him, how in the world did you get into this antiques business? And one of the things I found in there was an old leather coat.

And it was beautiful. It was black and it was long, like, clear down to the ankles. It was very heavy leather. And I don't know why, but had a fascination with leather.

A big leather coat. And it might have looked like a spy coat, like right from, you know, maybe a Gestapo coat or something like that.

But anyway, big leather coat, and it was in Europe and I was in Belgium, and I thought, I need to have that. So I bought it. And in the process of chatting with them and it happened to fit, and that was all fun.

In the process of talking to these folks, I asked them how they got in the business of doing that. And they just said, well, we just had this dream. We wanted to be these dealers. And so we just did it.

And for some reason, I don't know, you know, comes early or late, this inspiration came. Well, if they can just do that, because they said so, then I can be a pianist. Because I said, so I'm going to be a musician.

And that was the birth of the idea. I'm a musician. So from then on, when someone asked me what my profession was, it didn't matter what I was doing at the time.

I came back off the mission and I got a job, you know, like we all do, doing something. I was working in a 7Up bottling plant and did various jobs for a while. I said to people, I'm a pianist. And I wrote that down. I'm a pianist.

And I declared that. Now, as it turned out, I didn't do that exactly, but that was the first thing that happened.

The second thing that happened is a couple of years later, I got home when I was 21, so maybe I was 23 or 4. I went to a movie, and the movie was a B movie. It was a movie called Thief.

And it was a movie about, you know, some bad guys taking over an auto dealership and extorting something as some mafia ties or whatever. I don't even remember the movie. It was a B movie. It never got much acclaim. And the. The main.

The only actor I remember the name of was James Khan, and he was the lead guy. He played the thief who, you know, was trying to break into a safe or something, I don't know. But the thing that stuck in my mind was the soundtrack.

The soundtrack to the movie Thief was done by a group that was very popular then called Tangerine Dream. Tangerine Dream. And it was, you know, Brian Eno and Vangelis. And that sort of electronic music was just exploding.

Jean Michel, Jard and you know, those kind. That kind of stuff. Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk was a German, German band that did that sort of thing. So there were a lot of it, a lot of it going around.

And I heard that soundtrack and I said, I don't know, it just exploded something in me. I'm doing that. That's what I'm going to do. I don't even know what it is, but that music is captivating. It's different, it's weird. And I'm doing that.

That's what I'm doing. So I started studying what that was and found out, you know, the different synthesizers and ways that it was made.

So that was the beginning of my thought. I'm going to do this music. Where that led me to is very shortly after that, a year or so, I opened my own recording studio.

Very rudimentary at the time. I just bought a quarter inch, four track and I just started putting music together. That was my first business.

And I didn't have any idea of starting a business. I was just going to record some music that I like.

Quite quickly I realized, you know, this gear is expensive and I had a decent job, but man, I wanted somebody else to pay for this stuff. So I started renting studio time and so forth. And that's how a business began.

And maybe you've started a business like that or you know, someone that has. I had no plans about how to grow it, how to advertise it, how to find clients, how to make it a quote business.

And so I lacked some of the fundamental things we talked about in last episode about vision and all the rest. And the reason I told that story is because that's how I started my first business and my second one and my third one.

And it wasn't until later that I realized, okay, I've got have a little better plan.

Because those businesses, while I still do music and you know that I have 91 songs in commercial reliefs and I get royalty checks every month and so forth. That never turned into the business. And I'm a coach now and I'm an author and I've got 20 books. And you know the story.

Along the way somewhere I learned that you need to have what we're going to talk about today. And that is a growth mindset.

What that means is you have to get in your mind the idea that you can grow and you will grow and you're going to do whatever it takes. So A fixed determination to get to a certain outcome. The vision of your outcome is fixed.

Now, you can change if you need to, but lack of a clear vision destroys you from the start.

And so because I didn't have that, I just sort of piddled around and I recorded some music and I recorded a little more and stumbled into a little bit of distribution and accidentally did a few things, but it never took off as a real business that turned into something sustainable. So let's talk about growth mindset. How do you get a growth mindset?

Well, the first thing is simply make a declaration that you're going to continue to grow. Now that is a multipronged hydra, many headed beast. It isn't just growing in your skill that you have.

If you write, if you do music, if you paint, you know, maybe you have an account, maybe you went and finished your accounting like I didn't. And so you become an accountant.

There's so many people that start a business around a particular skill that they have, but they don't have any skill in the business aspect of it, which is marketing and clients and all the rest. And we're going to talk about many of those in the next episode episodes. This is number two and there's seven, so there's five more to come.

But this today I want to talk about your growth mindset, like I said, and that is the commitment to grow. Number one, you have a plan of growing customers and that includes marketing and one or more product development. That's clear.

The most important growth mindset is the one inside your heart. Now what do I mean by that? Well, when you go to work for a company, somebody else has handled all that.

The company already has a product, a service, a vision. If it's been going very long, it already has customers and people buy stuff from it. And if I get a job there, you do.

We're just sort of plugged in as a cog and we do a thing. Maybe we're in sales, maybe we're in R and D, maybe we're in customer service. You know, whatever it is, I'm the HR guy or something.

So I'm plugged in to do a function in someone else's vision that doesn't require the same skills as someone who you me start a business and we're everything. Chief cook, bottle washer, product designer, marketer, creator, CEO, cook, bottle washer, all of it. Right.

So one of the things that happens every single time when you start a business like that is it gets discouraging. You can't switch hats fast enough. And you can easily get bogged down for several reasons. One, some things are easier to do than others.

Of those 20 tasks, some things are more fun than others. Some are more draining or boring.

And like anyone, you and I, we tend to gravitate to the easy ones or the ones that are not boring or the ones that are not scary.

If you've never been on the hook to sell things before, the idea of selling stuff, closing deals, I can't tell you the number of people that have come to talk to me about business that hate selling. Hate, hate, hate. Now, that hate comes from a lack of a growth mindset. It comes from a lack of understanding what a sale really is.

I had that in spades. And so when I speak to you about this, it's about me learning to overcome the growth mindset.

The growth mindset means I start every day, excuse me, with a process to make sure I am growing today. I did this morning, a process to make sure I am growing today. I'm getting better at what I do in one or more of the areas.

My vision of where the company is going. In my case, it's more than one company. The companies are going that are all related. How many clients are we going to get? What's the timeframe?

What are the strategies to get there?

My angel wife and business partner, we just had a big meeting yesterday and the day before, two days, talking about some re emphasizing that we're going to do because we're starting a new really, really large growth spurt that has come from prior activities. But the most important growing is me. And in her case, her. And for your business, it's you.

So here are the tools that I use to create a growth mindset. Number one, I have a personal document, a personal Magna Carta, a personal constitution. It is my declaration, personal truth and commitment.

I call it a ptac. That document is my deal, my agreement with God about who I am and what I'm becoming. And it includes things like my relationship to truth.

One of the sentences is I speak only truth. I do what I say. I am who I seem with simplicity, transparency and integrity.

And everything I say or do with anyone, including you right now, or conversations with joy or with clients or potential clients or anyone goes through that filter so that I'm clear that I always speak truth. And that means I don't have to remember things and I'm, you know, I always know what I'm going to say. It's truth.

I don't ever have to think about it or remember anything.

For me, that particular one and that growth mindset piece was huge because in the years of depression and struggle, even though I had some very, very significant corporate jobs and got paid a lot of money, et cetera, et cetera, I did. I had a really bad relationship with Truth. I would say whatever I needed to say to get what I wanted. And, you know, I had a pretty good memory.

So I rarely, if ever got, quote, caught in not doing that, which is embarrassing to say. And so I had a terrible relationship with Truth. Changing that whole thing has allowed me to do a bunch of stuff.

Not only do I not have to remember what I say because I'm telling the truth, but it also allows me to look up my metrics, my bank account, my sales, you know, book sales, music sales, client acquisition, how the clients are doing and all that stuff. It allows me to look, look at that with ruthless transparency. This is where it is.

Not excuses, not blaming, not recrimination, not negativity, but just look in the mirror of Truth with just complete honesty and integrity and then go back to the vision that I had for completing the business growth or this year's worth. Now, one of the businesses that I'm doing right now in my coaching business, I use the name amc. Initials Alchemist, messenger creator.

So in the messenger piece of my business, I'm committed this year to reach 300 million people. With what? Well, with a message and some help. And the message is you can have whatever you want. You can create what you want.

That's why I'm doing this seven episode series on business.

You can build a business if you want to, if you follow the instructions in these seven episodes and then get the help you need, like I finally did after some failures. You can build any business you want and you can create the money you want. That's part of the message.

So the first message, piece of the message is you can build what you want.

That might be a mindset shift or mindset growth for you because you may believe you're unlucky or you can't do it, or you don't know how, or you're not destined to have that kind of success. You might believe all kinds of stuff about that and it's not true. And so that's going to require a growth mindset for you to get out of that.

A fixed mindset says, I am the way I am. I'm not a morning person, I'm a slow learner, I can't really do that. I don't remember details. I'm a big picture person and I can't implement.

All those are just statements of a fixed mindset, like fixed in granite. A growth mindset says I can learn, I can grow, I can adapt. I can listen to some instructions and and then do them.

I can get a good coach and then be coachable. Coach me. You know what I noticed? I had a coaching call this morning with a client.

And before that call, I was thinking about something and it was bothering me a bit. And I was a bit in a fixed mindset about a particular thing. You know what? That very topic came up on our coaching call, and I wasn't even talking.

I'd ask a question about some project the client was doing, and this client answered me with clarity and talked about, you know, doing this and doing that. And as I listened to my client, I thought to myself, I am being coached here about the very question that I had.

My growth mindset allowed me to say, I'm doing this. I'm hearing it, I'm taking it in. I'm going to allow this to shape me today, this day. And it did, and it has, and it will the rest of the day.

So it was fantastic. And it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been in a growth mindset. Not fixed, but I'm looking and able to grow every single day on purpose.

I look for it. One of the statements in my document says that I study, learn from and get coached by sacred words.

And then I list five places and one of them is from each person in my path. Well, because I reviewed that this morning like I do every day. I was there, I was ready and I got coached.

I got coaching and help, but only because I am in the growth mindset and looking for that kind of inspiration and help every day. So the process of developing products and marketing and all the rest, we're going to cover in other episodes. The foundation of success.

So please hear me. The foundation of success before all of that is the growth mindset. You're going to have to learn and deploy new skills.

Maybe it's skills of connecting. Maybe it's skills of marketing. Maybe it's overcoming fear of being on video or speaking in public.

Maybe it's fear of, you know, having to sell and have people not like you. So you sell something to someone and someone complains, you've got a customer service issue. Maybe you've got to learn the skill of hiring.

Maybe you've got to learn the skill of getting rid of perfectionism. Perfectionism is just another spelling of procrastination. There's no such thing as perfect.

You do something as good as you believe it needs to be right now and then you release it. It's why we have version 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 of software and all the rest of the stuff in the world I like.

I'm a Canon camera guy, and the Canon or the camera I'm using to film this on is a Canon. And what I notice is they have a Mark 1 and then two or three years later a Mark 2 and a Mark 3 and a Mark 4 and a Mark 5 of the same model. Why?

Because they have a growth mindset. New technologies, better processors, more features. That kind of growth mindset underlies all business success.

And underneath that it is personal growth. Your business will fail if you can't grow. Your business will fail if you can't adapt.

Your business will fail if you don't seek the right help and mentoring. That's just statistics. I'm not saying it about you. I'm just saying statistically, 99% of people, if they don't get the right help, they fail.

We all know that 85, 90% of businesses are gone in five years or less. And that figure is wildly off because that's only the ones that are reported under or unreported are all the ones that don't even get that far.

So let's think about. Let me give you some thoughts about how to get a growth mindset. One is allow yourself to fail. The failure is not fatal.

It is simply a mark of progress. People that don't fail aren't doing anything. You're not trying if you're not failing. That's just a fact. So allow yourself to fail.

Consider failure just an idp. Interesting data point. Write that down. If I fail, it's just an idp. Okay? I do songs in the recording studio all the time.

I'm going to work on one later today. And I'm pointing over there because the studio is over there. So the recording studio is over there.

And if I do a song and I get done with it and then I mix it and I go listen to it on another pair of speakers and I didn't do as good a job as I needed to in checking that. And the bass is too loud or the parts are there, so the vocals are muddy or whatever, that's a failure. It won't be good in a commercial release.

So I'm not going to release it yet. Now I can say I suck as an engineer. I didn't mix that well, et cetera, et cetera, or I can just. Okay, that's an interesting data point.

I need to go back and check this and that. I wonder why I didn't hear that earlier.

Check my procedures and processes so that I get the mix better for that song and the next one because I adjust the processes. And that all comes from a growth mindset.

The growth mindset is what allows me to do that without feeling attacked or a failure or bad or anything else. So I have a. I have had clients in the past who complain or it feels like complaining.

Well, you know, when we talk, I don't know if it's helping me or not. I could feel attacked as a coach, oh, no, I suck. I'm not doing this. So. But instead, because I One of two things is possible.

One, there is a way in which I can interact about that situation in a better way that's more empowering and more powerful. Or the other way could be. And that maybe they didn't hear me right, or they're not implementing or doing whatever it is we talked about.

Doesn't matter. The outcome didn't happen. Now, if I'm uptight about growing, then my reaction to a complaint, what is perceived as a complaint, would be defensive.

I would quit listening and quit being able to grow and do improvement. Instead, I just go with it. Well, tell me why not? What did you expect to happen? And that's a really powerful question.

When someone is not happy with something asking, well, what did. What did you expect to happen? What do you think should have happened?

And often in that kind of question, this is something you'll see as a coach, if you are, that someone will say, well, I just thought if you tell me something automatically, things would be fixed. Nothing grows like that. A growth mindset means that you're open to thinking and growing, knowing you got to do the work right.

A growth mindset doesn't mean I go to the gym and I walk out strong. It means I go to the gym knowing I got to do the work.

And the growth mindset means I'm willing to show up and get through a little pain and a little discouragement and keep moving till I get to the victory line. Building a business is exactly the same way. So this fundamental piece is the beginning of building a successful business.

It's got nothing to do with products or services or customers or marketing or copy or videos or social media or any of that stuff.

You as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, have got to start working on yourself to create a powerful and open and easily accessible growth mindset. So now let's talk about exactly what some of that is. Okay. Some very specifics. And I'm going to share what I do and what I know others do.

First of all, I have decided already. I'm a work in progress period. I will be till I don't breathe anymore. And I'm okay with that. Which means I expect to be wrong. I expect to grow.

I expect to learn till the last day I draw breath. That's first. And I'm okay. I've learned to be completely okay with that. And second, lean into it. Good. Teach me. Ooh, I get to learn. I get to learn.

The second thing is that this growth stuff is a spiral. It's a mountain without a top. You're not ever going to get done growing.

And the more we realize that, the better our business is going to do, the more adaptable and flexible we are to market conditions, customer demand and product innovations and the more money we're going to make and the more opportunities we'll have for joint ventures and all the other things that come when your business is successful and you start growing. Okay? So those are two first things. The next thing is to develop good daily habits. Daily habits.

Because especially when you're a small business solopreneur or maybe there's a couple of you, you wear 47 hats and you know that getting used to wearing those hats and giving yourself grace when things go slower and stuff like that is a critical piece. So developing a flexible, forgiveness oriented, I say give yourself grace, everybody else too mindset.

Because then it keeps the negative feelings out. So I have a daily creation routine. I spend two and a half hours creating myself every day. Now when I teach you that, I start with 40 minutes.

If you'd like to know the most powerful way to create yourself that exists in the world, get ahold of me. Cause I can teach you that.

I've developed it over 18 years of hard work exploring what makes me the very best that I can be every day, in every situation, in every conversation. What do I have to do to do that? And now that I've discovered it, I love it. And I never skip. Why? Because I can't. I don't like being not on my game.

A game. A game. What would you give to be on your a game every single day? Woo hoo. That's worth, let's say, infinity dollars. Growth, mindset, self creation.

And then the last thing I want to talk about is what I call notice and choose.

Notice and choose is a simple phrase that just reminds us that lots of the day we go through not paying attention to where we're really at emotionally, energetically. Where are we just reacting to stuff?

Something happens when we yell at somebody or we yell at ourselves, or we get frustrated or negative and we're overtaken by emotional reactions.

Notice and choose is a habit to develop that allows you to notice how you feel and then make a conscious choice about your action or your response to that situation.

I want to invite you to three things when I want to invite you to subscribe to this podcast especially so you can hear the rest of the business things. Because tomorrow or next episode, we're going to get into product development.

The next episodes that we're going to get into going over this is the next was creating products or services and then we're going to do marketing and finding prospects, closing deals, and then growth strategies for business, which there's lots of different ways to grow. Those are the next ones that we're going to do. And then there's one before that. I skipped this one. The next one is find your value proposition.

That's next. Before you create products or services. Like your value proposition is why would anybody buy anything?

And what have you got that's unique and powerful? And believe me, you've got something. All right, so here's your three invitations. I invite you to subscribe to this podcast, please. Why?

Not because I need another subscriber, but because my commitment is to help you and I can't if I don't get the chance to share with you what I've learned.

Number two, I invite you to share it with someone else that you know that is working on themselves, working on a business, working on creating a life of purpose, prosperity and joy. Third invitation if you've got a story you'd like to share with the world, I've got a great platform.

We're coming up on a thousand episodes in a few months and we have a large reach. So I'd love to share your success story, your story of resilience, of failure, and then getting back up whatever it is with the audience.

Because those kinds of stories never get old and we need a million more of them. So those are the three things. Subscribe it, share it, and get a hold of me so I can share your story if you'd like.

There's nothing that can keep you from creating a business if you want to upgrading your mindset so you love every day and using all the things that we've talked about to create your ultimate life. Never hold back and you'll never ask why. Open your heart.

And this time around, right here, right now, your opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you. Every episode gives you practical tips and practices that will change everything.

If you want to know more, go to kellenflukegermedia.com if you want more free tools, go here. Your UltimateLife CA Subscribe Share Stand with your heart in the sky and your feet on the ground.