Entrepreneur Mindset: Tips for Service Providers

Entrepreneur Mindset Introduction

Embarking on the entrepreneurial journey is a transformative experience, requiring not only a set of skills but also a steadfast mindset. Whether you’re a small business owner looking to scale or an aspiring entrepreneur with a big idea, developing the right mindset can be the most important factor in achieving entrepreneurial success. The most successful entrepreneurs—like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson—didn’t just rely on innovative solutions and hard work; they cultivated characteristics of an entrepreneurial mindset that allowed them to embrace challenges, think critically, and approach problems with a growth mindset.

In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at how the entrepreneurial spirit, combined with a positive attitude and intrinsic motivation, can help you create a thriving business. Along the way, you’ll discover how embracing failure, stepping outside your comfort zone, and adopting a creative mindset can transform your approach to new ventures. Let’s dive into what it takes to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking and unlock your potential for personal growth and professional development.

Need help with entrepreneur mindset? Limiting beliefs are the #1 blocker to your next level of success. For years, I’ve trained and taught clients about mindset, the nervous system, embodiment, and manifesting abundance. I cover some of these topics in my first book, Embodied Abundance.

Entrepreneurship requires building an entrepreneur mindset foundation. In fact, my work with service providers and coaches has uncovered specific mindset issues.

This post teaches you the four main mindset issues and the tools that “fix” them.

We’ll also cover:

• Your identity
• Celebration
• Worthiness

Worthiness and Identity

I see worthiness show up with service providers all the time, and in particular, regarding their pricing.

But what is worthiness, exactly?

Worthiness is a type of self-assessment in which you question whether you’re “good enough,” deserving, or valuable, and it’s tied strongly to your identity in the online world and in entrepreneurship. Comparison exists everywhere in the world, but online entrepreneurship expands the reach and possibility of who we compare ourselves to because we’re exposed to so many more people at one time.

It’s also true that being an entrepreneur can create a bubble. We forget what the “real world” is like in some ways, and we expand what we think is possible financially compared to an everyday nine-to-five job. That said, even though we’re in a bubble, it’s a pretty big heckin’ bubble with lots of comparison opportunities.

Does this sound familiar?

When you see ads all the time and click on a Facebook ad, you see five more on similar subjects. What does that turn into?

An information bombardment loop and biases can become facts in our entrepreneur minds and reflected in our realities. The same can happen on Instagram or any online platform. It can serve us well, but it often harms us because it creates constriction around our possibilities. Put simply, comparison makes us question our worth.

We hear that certain things work and certain things don’t. While it’s helpful to follow other people’s strategies, it becomes harmful if we start losing self-trust. You have to remember to constantly tune back in to yourself and what you want, and remember that there are unlimited outcomes, and unlimited ways of doing things available to you.

I call this coming home to yourself.

Coming home to myself is how I recovered from a significant burnout that happened as a result of being out of alignment for so long.

In 2022, I came to terms with the fact that I had somehow become addicted to masterminds. I thought the next income jump was right around the corner with the next investment I made. It was only after maxing out a second business credit card that I realized throwing money at people wasn’t the solution to my stagnant business growth.

My realization finally forced me to slow down and pivot.

Instead of investing in another business mentor or mastermind, I invested in a spiritual coach.

I intuitively knew that I had outsourced my power so much that I no longer knew or trusted myself. Not only that, but doing things out of alignment for so long put me outside my window of tolerance. In other words, my nervous system had become dysregulated from being in a heightened stress state for so long, and it caused stress by constantly doing things I didn’t want to do. I thought other people knew better than me, so I ignored how I felt and tried to plow through the pain.

When I finally invested in a spiritual coach, I learned about embodiment. I began my somatic healing certification that same year, and I learned to tune into my body again and heal from the trauma my business caused. It finally led me to create abundance in my life and business again, from the inside out. I created peace and gratitude inside myself, which I eventually reflected in my reality.

Learning to come home to yourself over and over again in your business is your new north star.

To make it happen, you must celebrate who you are.

We are the way we are on purpose. It’s easy to lose sight of what we actually want when we compare ourselves to others or focus on others’ frameworks.

Celebrating your identity is about recognizing your unique qualities, experiences, and values that shape you as a unique creator. By celebrating your identity, you acknowledge the journey you have been on and the growth you’ve achieved. You express gratitude for the person you’ve become and embrace your true self with love and acceptance.

When you celebrate your identity, you create a positive entrepreneur mindset that empowers you to step into your authentic power and live a life aligned with your values and purpose.

Wealth Wounds and entrepreneur mindset

Worthiness doesn’t just show up in how you see yourself in general, but also in how accessible you feel success is for you.

Unworthiness is one of the five wealth wounds I identified in Embodied Abundance. You can take the wealth wound quiz anytime for free at AlisonReeves.co/wealthwound-quiz. It can help you identify some of your current limiting beliefs, and assess how those limiting beliefs might be impacting your business.

You might “trade” wealth wounds during different times in your business. Worthiness has stayed pretty consistently in the top two most popular responses for wealth wounds in the quiz results for all time. The other wealth wounds I mention in the quiz results  are scarcity, avoidance, fear, and martyrdom.

Embodying worthiness provides a foundation for the way you:

• Package your offers
• Deliver
• Set boundaries

When you feel worthy (which starts with celebrating your identity), you begin vibrating at a higher frequency for manifesting.

It’s easier to attract great opportunities when you feel worthy.

If you embody unworthiness, it becomes easier for you to attract clients that create challenges for you. There’s no need to develop fear that a bad entrepreneur mindset attracts bad clients. Rather than try to avoid challenges or judge yourself in any way, find the lessons.

When I have challenging clients, I say to myself, “Isn’t that interesting?” Then I look at what the situation can teach me. I also ask myself:

• Do I feel unworthy in some way and attract a client that makes me work extra hard?
• Is my unworthiness causing me to struggle with boundaries?
• Did I set any boundaries in the first place? Can I set some now?
• Did I feel scarcity and take on a client that isn’t really ideal for me?

I recently encountered two demanding clients at the same time, who both struggled with boundaries and health communication. When I journaled about the situation, I drew an oracle card for additional insight, and the card said, “purification.”

The card reminded me that the challenges I experienced with these clients weren’t new. I’d already learned the lesson, but in a new context when equipped with new tools I didn’t have before. This worthiness wound for me goes all the way back to my full-time career in corporate, before I worked for myself.

I repeatedly attracted two things in my career: overworking and having a job where I filled multiple roles without appropriate compensation.

Fast forward: I found myself relearning a worthiness lesson, but in working for myself.

Isn’t that interesting? 

Do you notice the common denominator? Hint: it wasn’t my bosses. 

It was me.

So I learned my worthiness lesson a second time in a new context as a part of a purification process to help me more deeply embody worthiness in my career.

It’s important to remember that recognizing that I’m the common denominator in these situations doesn’t condone other people’s bad behavior or put all the blame on me. It’s an opportunity for me to take responsibility and realize I am, in fact, in control.

Value and Alignment

When it comes to packaging and pricing, limiting beliefs are so prevalent. Very few people I work with charge what they want to charge right out of the gate and feel awesome about it. We almost always have to work through specific things.

You can also get into a comparison trap when it comes to pricing and packaging. Yes, you need to charge enough to make a good living and get paid for your expertise. But you also don’t have to raise your prices if you feel amazing about where you are. Lean into worth, and also trust yourself at the same time.

I never push clients to be the most expensive service provider or coach because “that’s what the top-tier quality people do.” Your pricing is based on both value and alignment.

Value, meaning the deliverables you offer, the results they get, the time it took you or your team, and the years of experience you have.

Alignment, meaning what feels good to you.

For example:, $1,000 might be a price that reflects the value of what you offer; but you might want to narrow down who you’re working with and charge $10,000 because that is what feels good to you. Another person may offer similar value, but charge $100. This second person will have to sell to more people to meet the same income goals, but will also probably serve more people.

There was a time in my coaching business where I charged as high as $4,000 monthly to work with me. I never thought I would charge that much, but I also experienced a “supply and demand” problem with my time. Truly, I was so busy that I raised my price on almost every sales call and people still paid in full.

I was busy, people bought it, we got results.

But to be honest, that number never felt aligned. My coaches were pushing me to raise my prices, and I was paying a ton of money for my own coaches and other expenses. I could argue that there was a lot of value in my coaching package given client results, the amount I’d invested in myself, and the amount of time I invested in clients. But that pricing felt like a lot of pressure on the client to get results from our coaching.

I’ve since lowered my coaching prices exponentially, and it just feels better in my body.

All that to say, the highest-ticket pricing never felt aligned. I felt immense pressure for clients to get results, which isn’t a bad thing, but I can’t control outcomes when other people are responsible for their actions. Clients also felt that same pressure, and while many of them made a lot of money, many of them also had to take breaks from business after we worked together because their nervous systems were so dysregulated from the ups and downs.

Lower Prices Doesn’t Mean Lower Income

I launched a course related to the content of this book in 2024, and I was initially going to charge $2,000 for a twelve-week program. I felt some constriction in my body at this price point, and decided instead to launch the program as a course for about $200. That was the sweet spot because I felt amazing about it; it was high enough for people to do the work and low enough for me to feel no pressure but give a heck-ton of value.

One of those clients added $80,000 in revenue from that $200 course. This price point felt abundant, and it also felt like relief in my body. However, if I had charged $44 for this whole program, it might have been hard to sell because it was too low. I may not have felt as motivated or excited, and people may not have done the work.

My point is that worthiness and pricing are based on value (to a degree), and they can also be very subjective. Learn to listen to your gut and trust yourself.

Blue Ocean: What is Unique About You?

In marketing, the terms “blue ocean” and “red ocean” refer to different market spaces and strategies for competition. These concepts were popularized by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their book Blue Ocean Strategy.

Red oceans represent all the industries in existence today, the known market space. They are highly competitive as companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a larger share of existing demand. The market is crowded, with many competitors fighting for the same customers. The market structure is well-defined, with accepted boundaries. Strategies in red oceans often involve competing on price and differentiation to stand out. This can lead to fierce competition and “bloody” rivalry, hence the term “red” ocean.

In contrast, blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today, the unknown market space untainted by competition. Blue oceans offer uncontested market space over new demand, rather than fighting over existing space in the market. Companies in blue oceans innovate and move away from competition. The market boundaries are defined by innovative thinking and new business models. Strategies focus on value innovation, where a company offers unique value to customers. This leads to opportunities for growth, profitability, and reduced competition.

Example

For example, the “Greatest Show on Earth,” or Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, offered audiences expensive, time-intensive exposure to animal acts, acrobatics, clowns, and a variety of other entertainment. In contrast, Cirque du Soleil created a blue ocean by combining elements of circus and theater, without animals, resulting in a new form of entertainment that didn’t compete directly with traditional circuses or theater productions.

Understanding these concepts helps businesses decide whether to compete in existing markets or to innovate and create new market spaces. Red ocean strategies focus on competing in existing markets, beating the competition, and exploiting existing demand. Blue ocean strategies involve creating new markets, making the competition irrelevant, and capturing new demand.

How does this apply to your business?

We can always create a blue ocean opportunity where there’s not a lot of competition by utilizing your uniqueness.

The first part of entrepreneur mindset work as a service provider is all about intentionally celebrating your identity. If you want other people to appreciate you, you have to appreciate and take care of yourself first. You have to see your value and uniqueness before others will be able to.

Nervous System

Being able to regulate your nervous system and balance emotions is critical in entrepreneurship.

Many people attracted to my work are heart-centered, and heart-centered entrepreneurs usually have a lot of empathy. Being empathetic is a very positive quality. But without boundaries in your business, empathy can lead to over-delivering, codependency, and taking on the emotions of your client.

Take it from me: You don’t want to take on your clients’ emotions!

When your clients feel stressed, you might become stressed yourself. It takes more effort and intention to maintain calm, as opposed to absorbing the emotions and energy from others. I’ve seen this pattern regardless of your business type (coaching, providing services, or even providing digital products).

Something else has made it much easier for me to stay in a calm state regardless of how another person feels, and that’s having a flexible nervous system.

If you initially take on someone else’s constriction, a flexible nervous system allows you to more easily get back to a relaxed state. That’s what we need when working with people.

This is less of an issue if you’re not working with people directly in your business. For example, if you’re just blogging and creating written content, your personality is not a huge part of your business. But if you’re a creator posting videos of yourself, a service provider working with clients, or a coach working with people and companies, it’s much easier to get entangled with other people’s energy. So you have to be able to calm down.

An affirmation for entrepreneur mindset

My coach recently suggested I use this affirmation: “Just because your job [meaning my client] is stressful, it doesn’t mean my job is stressful.”

So what does that look like when I’m taking action on it?

We’ll talk about boundaries later on, but here’s an example of how this affirmation impacts my actions.

When I gain a new client, we agree on ways to communicate. For example, we use email for general conversation, Asana for project management, and Slack for faster direct messaging.

Recently, a client sent me a text message at 8:30 on a Friday night to make sure I posted about an upcoming holiday the following week. Obviously, it wasn’t urgent. No one would die if I wrote the post Monday, and texting is a pretty terrible way to make sure I do something because it’s not what I check to work with that particular client. But because the client felt stressed, probably because they got a similar urgent text from the founder, I immediately felt I needed to put the social post together.

At that moment, I felt an invitation to calm down.

“Just because your job is stressful, doesn’t mean my job is stressful,” I repeated to myself.

I decided to make that post.

But when they sent me more messages over the weekend, I turned off read receipts and notifications. The following week, I reminded them that I created an email that automatically creates tasks for me.

Boundaries don’t work if their success depends on anyone but you. I reminded the client of the most productive ways to work with me and reinforced that I would not text back and forth.

I was able to calm myself and separate my energy from the energy and emotions of the client.

Having a flexible nervous system will help you in many ways in business, but especially with clients.

Many business owners get into services because they can make good money, but then later, they want to get out of services because serving clients is really stressful.

But what if it didn’t have to be stressful? What if you could simply make really good money?

That’s also a reality available to you.

Sometimes, when something good happens, you might subconsciously try to mess it up because it feels uncomfortable. Our bodies often think it’s safer to stay in the same place. To help alleviate this, try to imagine your future and see what that might look like.

Do you find it difficult? You might if you aren’t used to visualization. But over time, it’ll get easier.

For example, picture your bank account growing with your service business. It can actually help you feel calm when you “see” more money in your bank account!

You can also do this exercise by visualizing what your future self needs. Imagine what kind of support you require. Do you need a mentor? A quiet space at home? A monthly massage?

Visualization can help you with your service-based business in spite of the chaos that your clients throw at you.

Entrepreneur Mindset Conclusion

The entrepreneurial mindset is more than just a buzzword—it’s the foundation for business success and personal growth. From adopting a positive mental attitude to leveraging innovative ideas and embracing new opportunities, the best entrepreneurs understand the importance of resilience, adaptability, and continuous self-education. As an aspiring entrepreneur, taking conscious effort to develop entrepreneurial skills and embrace challenges will empower you to see setbacks as valuable lessons and fuel your journey with a fresh perspective.

As you reflect on your own entrepreneurial mindset, remember the words of Nelson Mandela: “I never lose. I either win or learn.” The path to success often lies in how you navigate external factors, refine your business idea, and apply a creative mindset to solve problems. Whether you’re building a new business, refining your business model, or pursuing professional development, a clear understanding of your goals and values will guide you toward entrepreneurial success. So step boldly into your journey, celebrate your unique identity, and remember: the best way to thrive is to embrace the process with unwavering belief in yourself.