The Hidden Drivers Affecting Your Results in Business with Debra Maldonado

Your business idea and the management of your business are two of the most important factors that determine its success or failure. But there are other hidden drivers that affect your business that are just as important and have more to do with your mindset and persona. 

Debra Maldonado is the CEO of Creative Mind Media, a personal development and coach training company. Together with her husband, she has trained thousands of people across the world and helped them become their true self. Debra has been featured on ABC News and Fox News and in Cosmopolitan an The Huffington Post. Here, she talks about how to accept your shadow and how finding your purpose leads your business to success.

A Bold Promise

Before Debra started her own business, she was working in marketing for MTV Networks in New York. “Marketing was okay, but what I really wanted to do was find love,” Debra remembers. She started going into personal development and thought: It would be great to help people and teach workshops. But she was scared to leave her corporate job. Until suddenly, she got laid off.

Debra saw this as an opportunity to change. “I went to hypnotherapy school and trained to become a hypnotherapist. Because I had a marketing background, I knew how to set up my website and get traffic. I basically just went out there and started my business.” Within the first 18 months, Debra was earning six figures as a hypnotherapist. 

After a year into her business, she met her husband Robert, who is a psychologist. “I interviewed him on my radio show and we started working together. Shortly after, we decided to start our own company. He left his practice and we’ve been working together ever since.” 

Debra and Robert developed a system and a coaching model around Jungian psychology to help their clients understand what’s stopping them in their life. “It’s not therapy, it’s a coaching program,” Debra explains. They’ve run their business for over seven years now, and made their clients a bold promise: Engaged in a year. “Many women who signed up for our program came with this idea in their heads that they wanted to find a man. But as they went along with the program, they discovered that they had found themselves. We weren’t teaching dating tips or changing their profiles. We were teaching them to look inward and understand what’s going on inside them,” Debra explains. Through her method, her clients discovered who they really were and what their purpose was. “That’s our goal, to teach people to find love, but also to find their purpose and success.” 

Sabotaging Your Own Success

But what exactly is Debra’s method and what does Jungian psychology mean? “There’s two aspects of personal development,” she says. “While Freud believed there’s only our brain and body, our history and our patterns, Jung said there has to be a bigger part of us. He brought in the spiritual aspect, believing that there was a collective unconscious because he saw people having the same dreams over again. While Freud thought everything comes down to a sexual urge, Jung saw the psyche as much more complex.” 

Debra and Robert decided to take Jung’s approach and make their method about unveiling someone’s true potential. “We don’t look at the past as much. We focus on creating. It’s not so much about healing and therapy. It’s about moving forward.” 

Debra says that a big part of it is to understand that every person has a shadow where they repress certain sentiments. “Let’s say you grew up in a household where it was better to keep the peace. If you made anyone upset, it was a bad thing. As a result, you would develop a pleasing personality. And most women have that because we have a natural desire to connect and not to compete. So we end up pushing all the feelings of rage, of being mean and selfish and harsh away. We end up making decisions to avoid being that person. But with these decisions, we end up sabotaging our own success.”

 Whatever feeling you’re repressing, it takes energy to push it down and not feel it anymore. “This is energy you should be using to create something, but instead, you’re spending it on suppressing a feeling. By not being aware of your shadow, you’re eventually letting it direct your life.”  

How to Deal with People Who Trigger You

Often, women are scared of charging too much because they don’t want to be mean. Their client doesn’t show up, but they don’t want to come across as bitchy and rather suppress what they’re feeling. “Women often feel that they have to be nice. It keeps our behaviour very rigid. And then we get triggered by people who exhibit the opposite.” 

These are usually people who charge a lot, criticise you, troll you on social media, give you bad reviews or complain about your product or program. “They’re triggering you, they might even scare you. But look at it from another perspective. What they’re really doing is showing you where you’re holding yourself back. Without them, you would never grow.” 

While you automatically want to avoid these people and cushion yourself against them, that doesn’t mean you’re getting rid of them.”There’s a quick exercise you can do when someone triggers you. Let’s assume this person is someone who’s getting all the glory. Associate three adjectives with them. Maybe they’re greedy? Lucky? Then ask yourself: How do you avoid being like that and getting all these opportunities? And how does that limit your life?” Debra says that there’s something our ego perceives as negative when we see such a person. “We get triggered because we subconsciously think there’s something bad about it, and that creates jealousy in us. But if instead we would admire these people, we would actually align with our unconscious potential.” 

When seeing someone being successful, women often tend to think they can never reach that level. “But instead, these people are a reflection of what your own potential could be. Jung said: ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you’ll think of it as fate’.”

Understand Your Bigger Purpose

Knowing how to deal with people that trigger you is one thing. Another is to remember that your business is a business: It’s an extension of you, an expression of you, but it’s not you. “When people start working out their personal issues through their business, it gets messy. They don’t look at things from a business standpoint, but from a ‘feed-my-ego’ standpoint,” Debra explains. While there are a lot of egoistic, successful men and women out there, Debra points out that in a lot of cases, they will eventually fail. “Something will catch up with them and their personal issues will come in the way of their success.” 

The key to running a successful business is to realize that you’re not doing it to feed your ego, but you’re doing it for a greater purpose. “If you can identify what that purpose is, your business will be much more enjoyable. If your purpose is to just survive and have everyone like you, your business will remain small or non-existent. If you’re willing to lay off the mask and put yourself out there, not to cause conflict on purpose but to be truthful to yourself, you will grow.” 

Episode Bonus: 

Curious about how Creative Mind Media could work for you? Debra has a free coaching group on Facebook and you can learn everything about her method on www.creativemindmethod.com. 

[tweetshareinline tweet=””The shadow of success is identifying the hidden drivers that are affecting your results in your business.” – Debra Maldonado” username=”sigruncom”]

Resources Mentioned:

Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul by Claire Dunne

Connect with Debra Maldonado:

• Creative Mind Method
• Let Love In: Open Your Heart and Mind to Attract Your Ideal Partner 
• Facebook – Creative Mind Method
• Instagram – Creative Mind Method
• LinkedIn – Creative Mind Method

Come to Iceland in 2020 for the Selfmade Summit 2020

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