As a small business owner, finding the motivation to make constant decisions and do the work that needs doing, can be really tough some days. So today’s guest Maria Vamvouklis from The Conscious CEO, is here to give us some insight into her work in uncovering the problems that are often hidden away from conscious thought, and give you some simple techniques to help you stay motivated. Maria helps business leaders bridge the gap between strategy and mindset through coaching and training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- Tools and strategies to stay motivated
- What is Neuro-Linguistic Programming and how it helps business leaders
- Simple techniques to start implementing today that will help you with your motivation and mindset
Guest – Maria Vamvouklis
Maria Vamvouklis is the founder and director of The Conscious CEO, a qualified coaching and training company. A professional coach since 2007 and a qualified trainer since 2018, Maria has worked with many individuals across various industries to make a profound difference in their businesses and their lives.
She is passionate about the workings of the human psychology and empowers business professionals to reach the deepest structures of our unconscious mind and uncover what is often hidden away from our conscious awareness.
Connect with Maria
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Podcast Transcript
Nicci O’Mara
As a small business owner, finding the motivation to make constant decisions and do the work that needs doing can be really tough some days. So today’s guest Maria Vamvouklis, from The Conscious CEO, is here to give us some insight into her work in covering the problems that are often hidden away from conscious thought and give you some simple techniques to help you stay motivated.
Welcome to episode eight. It’s so wonderful to have you here with me. Today’s guest Maria Vamvouklis helps business leaders breach the gap between strategy and mindset through coaching and training in neurolinguistic programming. Prior to entering the business world, Maria served in the New South Wales Police Force and owned a natural health clinic for ten years. She now has a passion of a different kind, uncovering the workings of human psychology and the unconscious mind. Maria works with business leaders from the inside out to help make a profound difference in people, businesses and their lives. So let’s welcome Maria. Welcome, Maria. And thank you for joining us today on the Simply Standout Marketing Podcast.
Maria Vamvouklis
Thanks for having me today. I’m looking forward to having a chat with you.
Nicci O’Mara
It’ll be wonderful. Look today, as we’ve discussed, we’re going to be talking about how to motivate yourself as a small business owner, because, as we know, small business is hard. It’s wonderful, we all love it, but there are times when motivation waves, so let’s get going. Most business owners, struggle at times to find the motivation to lead their team and also to grow their business. What have you found are the most effective tools and strategies to stay motivated?
Maria Vamvouklis
Yeah, sure. So motivation is definitely something that I’ve come across quite significantly with business owners and especially with leaders that are trying to lead a team. The first point of call is to assess mindset. You know, you can have a great strategy in place in being able to help people get results, but if their mindset isn’t actually at a point where they’re able to consistently maintain that, what you would find the that a lot of people will actually Plateau or their motivation drop off. And a lot of this is because we really don’t understand what actually motivates each individual, especially as a leader or as a business owner that is managing a team.
Maria Vamvouklis
We need to understand each person psychological make-up in terms of what motivates them and why they do what they do for you and why they working for you and why they’re working in that specific role. So I think it’s really important to understand their core values as to the purpose and the reasoning as to why they’re actually choosing to show up every day in your business to work for you. And this also coincides as a business owner yourself as well. Another way to look at this is to really understand what’s your why, and why you’re doing what you’re doing every day in your business, to keep you motivated and keep you going, because business is never a straight journey where it’s smooth sailing.
There is some obstacles and challenges, and, you know, you need to take a different course at times and the road can get bumpy. And the one thing that keeps business owners going and successful is the motivation to just keep going no matter what. And it’s that why and reasoning as to why they do what they do?
Nicci O’Mara
Absolutely. Look, I’ve done a lot of work on mindset in the last, especially in the last twelve months, but it’s incredible how much your mindset and your limiting beliefs has on how you run your business because you can be the smartest person out there or have the best strategy and have all the money in the world. But if you don’t have the mindset, I’ve just found it’s incredible the difference that it makes absolutely.
Maria Vamvouklis
Absolutely. And I think this is the missing piece for a lot of business owners. Is that bridging that gap between an exceptional strategy, but having a real robust mindset that supports that.
Nicci O’Mara
Yeah. Look, you work a lot with neurolinguistic programming or NLP. How does that work? And what is it?
Maria Vamvouklis
Yeah, sure. So NLP neuro, which is specifically looking at the nervous system. So the neurons and neurology of person, linguistics is the language, the language that we use to actually programme ourselves either positive or negative. And the programming part of neurolinguistic programming is the actual application of the set of tools to reprogram someone’s mind to produce a state of excellence and success. So essentially, NLP is the study of excellence, and we study people to enhance them. We do not fix them, which is why a lot of business owners, sports authorities are trained in NLP, even politicians, to know actually how to positively influence not only themselves but also others to enhance all areas of life. This is not just in business, this is also in relationships, also in health, in various other aspects.
Nicci O’Mara
Is it something like, if someone wanted to look at NLP, do you do your course? How does it work in that sense? How do you help yourself?
Maria Vamvouklis
Absolutely. A great question. So if you’re wanting to go through an accelerated, profound transformation process, whether you’re a business owner or just as for your own personal growth, you can seek out a coach to be coached by someone who is trained in NLP, or you can actually come and do a certification course in NLP, which is what I do specifically. And you actually receive a globally recognised certification qualification as an NLP practitioner to know how to utilise the subset of tools that are taught in NLP itself.
Nicci O’Mara
That’s good. What results have you found with NLP and what results have you found specifically for business owners? How has it helped them?
Maria Vamvouklis
This is a great question. And I’ve worked with many various different business owners in different industries, but I’ll just give you one example. I was working with a lady who worked in the natural health space and a natural health practitioner. She has two clinics, and she came to me initially because her business had plateaued in making money and creating profit, and she had been in business for quite some time and she wasn’t really fulfilled in her business. And what we did was we worked and looked at certain business strategies.
But what I did was I was actually able to bring to her attention that the strategies were working, it’s just the mindset that was driving those strategies wasn’t actually supporting it. So we worked on in terms of what’s happening in her head, what beliefs, strategies, her decision-making strategies specifically, is she running off comparing herself to others, or is she a perfectionist? She was crippled by time. So she was always fighting against time. She never had time and she’s a mum with two kids and a husband.
So she never really felt fulfilled and happy at work and also this was reaching out at home as well. So by being able to identify what was actually inhibiting her with her strategies and specifically around decision making strategy, this is quite common with a lot of business owners. They don’t know how to make well-informed decisions. And we cleared that out and reestablish some really great strategies within her mind and cleared out limiting decisions and created a new inner sense and new identity for her to step into to be able to execute these strategies much effectively.
What we found was that as soon as we did that, we shifted that, she was able to accelerate the support of those business strategies that she had already been implementing, creating results much more quickly and effectively, thus resulting in a 19% profit growth in her business over a period of three months of working with me. So that is the power of NLP. It gets results straight away, and it helps people lead their business, not just the business itself, in a way that’s sustainable in creating growth long term.
Nicci O’Mara
Wow. That’s fantastic. And look, I really understand how your limiting beliefs and things can actually make such a huge difference if you can actually work past them. So that’s fantastic results. Now, what is one common misconception with NLP?
Maria Vamvouklis
Yeah. Great. Great question. And I’m so glad you brought this up because it comes up all the time. And the one thing that people say and I go, oh, yes I’m trained in NLP, I help people, you know, in business with NLP and they’re like, oh, that’s that, you know, manipulative stuff. And I think, you know, people have this internal picture in their mind where they go to a car sales yard and there’s this car salesman and it’s like a dirty kind of sale, you know, in the old days where people were taught how to influence others. You know, sometimes it was done in a way that was done without integrity.
But the biggest core value in my business and what I teach, especially when I’m training people to be qualified in this particular modality is to always use NLP with integrity. And it’s the intention that you actually take out is the result that you would produce because anyone can manipulate anyone, whether they’re NLP trained or not. So if your intention is to be able to positively influence and empower others, you will produce those results, and that will come straight back.
Nicci O’Mara
Yeah. Oh, well, that’s fantastic. I’ve never really thought about the manipulation and the integrity side of things because I suppose I’d only ever heard really good things about NLP and the positive side of things because really, it makes such a big difference in so many areas. I know a lot of people use NLP with weight loss and body image and things along those lines as well as business. And I’m sure it’s got lots of different applications. Now, what’s one simple technique that people who are listening can implement today that will actually help improve their motivation or help them with their business? Because it’s always good to go away with something that they can do.
Maria Vamvouklis
Yes. If you’re a solopreneur. So there are very different various ways to look at this. So if you’re a solopreneur and you’re on your own and you want to be consistently motivated every day, what I would suggest is looking at your values and all you have to do, for example, if you are making sales for that day, you’re on a sales call, you just ask yourself ‘why your sale is important to me?’, and you ask yourself this until you empty out and you get a big list. Then what you do is you remind yourself every day of those top four values, because that’s what actually drives your decisions in what you do and why you do what you do in your business.
Another aspect in terms of how to motivate yourself, which is what I love. Some people may have heard of this, it’s anchoring. This is one of the techniques that is taught in NLP. Now, anchoring can be done through sound. It can be done through visuals. It can also be done through touch. And we have anchors set up throughout various aspects of our lives. Everything is an anchor, but one thing that’s really great is having a particular song or a mantra that you say to yourself that acts as an anchor that triggers that motivation.
As you do that, make sure that the internal picture that you’re creating within your own mind is empowering as well. So it matches that anchor. So that’s the missing link that a lot of people forget. You’ve got to create that internal picture within your own mind as a positive empowering thought and image, linked with the external anchor that you’re producing. Now, if you’re a leader in your team, you can do the same thing. You can create a mantra. Normally, they have, like, a phrase sometimes in the beginning of business meetings or a quote that’s really powerful, and you get them to visualise what it is to create what they’re doing for that day, whether it is a common business goal and to visualise that and to make sure that you’ve got an internal picture linked to that external anchor.
Nicci O’Mara
Yeah. That’s fantastic. Have you got some examples of anchors or mantras that you particularly love yourself and use?
Maria Vamvouklis
Yes. Sure. So manta’s that I use is like, what must I do that I cannot, that I need to do that I must. So that’s kind of introverted questioning. So you can do that. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I must is another one.
Nicci O’Mara
Oh, yeah.
Maria Vamvouklis
Yeah. And that comes from a really old cartoon back in, I think it was like the Seventies of Sixties, and I’ve taken that phrase from that. And I actually use that in my training because it empowers people to do so. The other anchoring you can do is a song, like a really powerful song, and you just close your eyes as you’re listening to that song and you visualise the goal of what you wanted to achieve for that day or that week.
So you’ve got to make sure that you link that internal picture with the feeling and also the external anchor that you’re creating. That’s the key.
Nicci O’Mara
Yeah. Well, that’s really good that I’ll give everyone something to, something to at least start with is always really important. And to give that a go, to actually, to find that motivation some days is really hard. I know this week I’m certainly not having the best week. And I must say, this morning I did turn on, while I was in the shower, I can on I’ve got a Spotify list that I’ve named Happy and just those really uplifting songs to go, okay let’s get through. Let’s get into this. Let’s turn the attitude around and get going, which I find does make a really big difference some days and those days when you’re struggling and struggling to get kids out the door and it’s a good reset. But there’s so much more that we can do.
Maria Vamvouklis
And I love how you said attitude because I think that’s a really great key component. It’s about shifting your attitude and shifting an attitude towards excellence. How can I do something better today that I didn’t do yesterday and then really looking forward to what can I do moving forward rather than what did I do yesterday that I know and dwelling on the past. So that’s a really great key point that you actually brought up.
Nicci O’Mara
Yeah. So look, that’s wonderful. I think that it’s a great place for people to start and if they’ve never heard of NLP. Yeah, it’s a good introduction for them. Now, where can our listeners connect with you online?
Maria Vamvouklis
Yeah, sure. So through my website, which is Mariavamvouklis.com and I’m sure you’ll put the spelling of that somewhere.
Nicci O’Mara
I absolutely will.
Maria Vamvouklis
Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn, which is Maria Vamvouklis or Facebook the Conscious CEO as well.
Nicci O’Mara
Fantastic. Look, thank you so much, Maria, for taking the time and introducing us to NLP and helping motivate some small business owners.
Maria Vamvouklis
Thank you for having me. It’s been great.
