Free Enterprise Skills in Challenging Times
Doubt is not confusion. Doubt is a safe place to avoid your own success.
Anxiety, fear, and doubt are the thieves of dreams.
If you find yourself living in those feelings on a regular basis, there’s a high probability you’re an addicted procrastinator, an avoider. You are getting ready to get ready. And in doing so, you keep recreating the same situations to fulfill the same circumstances and the same feelings, over and over again.
I know this pattern well. I’ve spent 28 years as a success and addiction coach helping people break it.
Here’s what most people don’t understand: anxiety, fear, and doubt aren’t character flaws. They’re byproducts of the events that shaped your feelings. If you grew up in an alcoholic household, with a narcissistic parent, a tyrant, a bully, if you were singled out, ridiculed, or told you were a slow learner, those experiences lodged themselves into your nervous system. They became the lens through which you see yourself and the world.
Your self-esteem is simply how you feel about yourself. And when those early events pushed your self-esteem into the basement, into guilt, grief, apathy, and shame, you began operating from the rock bottom of the Map of Consciousness. You started recreating the same situations to fulfill the same neurochemical craving. The payoff? Disappointment. And disappointment became the drug.
This is how most of society lives. Chronically in debt, overeating, binging, numbing. Carrying weight in their body and weight in their bank account. Exhausting themselves by holding on to what hurts them.
I Started at Rock Bottom
I am living proof that this cycle can be broken, but I want to be clear about where I started.
One year in prison. Thirty days in a treatment center. Clean and sober, but broke. A beat-up Honda. A brick cell phone like Michael Douglas in Wall Street. A beeper. Fifteen credit cards and $100,000 in debt by the end of 1996, after seven years in free enterprise, four failed businesses, and more hustle than most people will ever know.
I waited tables. I drove a Sysco food truck on straight commission. I sold yellow page advertising. I joined Herbal Life, Amway, Nutrition for Life, company after company. I followed my sponsor to her own company. Mistakes I paid dearly for.
But I kept going. Because I had made a decision.
In 1990, I quit my job and crossed the bridge into free enterprise for good. I was listening to Jim Rohn. I was practicing gratitude. I was exercising daily. I was clean and sober. And I was absolutely committed to never trading time for dollars as an employee again.
My breakthrough didn’t come from a lucky break. It came from mastering skills.
The One Common Denominator
Whether you’re selling a helicopter, real estate, software, a concept, or coaching, the common denominator is always the same: you and the prospect.
In that conversation, you are answering one core question: Is this a qualified buyer?
That’s it. That’s the game.
Is this someone who can commit? Is this someone who sees the value proposition? Or is this someone telling me what they think I want to hear, offering me let me think about it, I don’t have the money, I want to talk to my spouse, or I want to do more research, as a way to stay safe in their own doubt?
Your job is to hear what’s meant, not what’s said. To articulate your feelings with clarity. To ask questions in a sequence without thinking, processing, analyzing, or worrying about the outcome that hasn’t happened yet.
This is what I call Prospecting 101. Closing 102. These are learnable skills. I know because I learned them, from the streets, not a classroom. My degree is in free enterprise.
The Real Barrier Isn’t the Market
People come to me and say, “Jeffery, you built your business in the 90s. Things are different now.”
Yes. And no.
These are the most challenging times in world history. I won’t sugarcoat that. I see it. I understand what’s happening. But here’s what I also see: a woman who just referred me three clients. A private pilot in his second month of independent work who landed a billionaire client and made $86,000. A 29-year-old I’ve coached since he was 18 who just had a $400,000 month.
Challenging times are real. But they are not the barrier.
Your doubt is the barrier. Doubt is a safe place to avoid your own success. It keeps you protected from the very thing you say you want. And when you keep telling yourself nobody has any money, nobody’s going to buy from me, it’s too hard right now, you’ve set yourself up for the exact disappointment you’re trying to avoid.
The Skill That Changes Everything
The number one skill in free enterprise, in dating, in selling, in life, is the ability to articulate your feelings with clarity.
To ask a question and answer a question without thinking. Without the um, without the shoulder raise, without the spin cycle of overthinking. When you come from a home with a narcissistic parent, from trauma, from chronic self-doubt, this is the behavior you have to change. This is the habit you have to replace.
And it starts with the work Louise Hay identified decades ago in You Can Heal Your Life: separating your feelings from the events that shaped them. No longer being the mind-body connection to what happened to you.
It means: I am not a byproduct of my parents’ divorce. I am not a byproduct of a father who didn’t love me. I am not a byproduct of the trauma I survived. I am a black sheep who learned to navigate everywhere.
When you begin to live in that energy, when you begin to let go of the significance you’ve given to the past, you start to operate at a higher vibration. You attract different people. You have different conversations. You start to see that if other men and women are producing six- and seven-figure results, so can you. Because it isn’t a degree of difficulty. It’s a degree of struggle you’re willing to let go of.
The More You Let Go, the Higher You Rise
Letting go isn’t passive. It’s one of the most active things you can do.
Let go of the self-talk that keeps recreating the same outcome. Let go of how you struggle with the new business, the new skill, the new version of yourself. Let go of the significance of the past. Let go of the overwhelm, the resentment, the disappointment you’ve been carrying.
Because the significance you give to a situation determines whether you’re in pain or in pleasure. And as you separate pain from pleasure, as you access higher consciousness, you will improve who and what you attract into your life.
That is free enterprise. That is the work. And it is available to you, right now, in these exact challenging times.
Breathe. Release. Let go.
— Jeffery Combs
President & Founder, Golden Mastermind Seminars Inc. and a 38-year veteran of free enterprise. For one-on-one coaching inquiries, reach him directly at 209-649-1562 or via Facebook Messenger.