Experiments With Hope - Episode 34: Income Plateaus

NOTE: This episode was recorded on February 18th, 2019 and moved from YouTube on January 23rd, 2021.

Some entrepreneurs blow right past income plateaus on the first try. Others struggle for years, or a lifetime, to break barriers to increasing their income. I’m talking about barriers like the $50k mark, or the $100k mark. This barrier often depends on how much you’ve made in a year. For example, if you’ve never made more than $30k a year working for someone else, the $30k market might be your income barrier.

How do some entrepreneurs blow right through these barriers, even up to the six and seven-figure a year mark, while others struggle just to stay in business? It’s not just about creating and running a “scalable” business. Yes, that matters. And, in my opinion, most people who talk about scalability don’t have a practical grasp on how to achieve it. But if you’re already running a successful business, making passive income, and you’re not stuck by time saturation, your income plateau might have another, more bizarre cause…

Your income plateau could be because of your beliefs about what income you’re capable of earning, or even what you deserve to earn. I know, a lot of New Age nutjobs think this is the only cause of income plateaus. That’s not true. Logistics do matter. But, one of my past coaching clients had a strange “habit” of being knocked off track the moment he was on the cusp of earning more than $40,000.00 a year. Incidentally, this was the exact amount of money he’d made at his previous job. When I say “knocked off track,” I’m not talking about by his own conscious behaviors.

Instead, this dude would run into the strangest and most unexplainable streaks of “bad luck” I’ve ever seen in my life. Stuff would happen to him that, to the uninitiated observer, would appear completely out of his control. This bothered me for a few weeks, then I had an idea. I would ask him to accept responsibility for these spontaneous streaks of bad luck as if he were consciously causing them. Unless you understand the concept of action at a distance, or of non-linear cause and effect, this will seem completely illogical. But, the moment my client started accepting responsibility for the things he couldn’t control, something equally amazing happened.

The streaks of bad luck started becoming less dramatic. Then, they started becoming less frequent. Eventually, they stopped altogether and his income shot up to over $100,000.00 a year within the next 18 months. What happened? He stopped what I call “Serendipitous Self-Sabotage” by accepting responsibility for his role in creating it. As it turned out, he already knew how to make more than $100,000.00 a year. He was doing everything he needed to be doing. He just had to get his foot off the brake by acknowledging his own contribution to the problem.

Many entrepreneurs never get this far. They’re too caught up in trying to figure out the logical link between their behaviors and the seemingly last-minute streaks of “bad luck.” This would be like trying to figure out the cause of gravity (something which as of now, we still don’t definitively know) before trying to build an airplane. To go places you’ve never been, you must stretch your mind beyond it’s assumed limitations. This is how you strike a healthy balance between Faith and Skepticism and get beyond your own dogmatic beliefs about what you’re capable of earning, or what you deserve to earn. Are you stuck at an income plateau because of things that seem out of your control? Try consciously accepting responsibility for these things, and see what happens. You might be just as amazed as my client was.

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