Train your brain for business success
Business mindset is vital to business success, whether you’re a small business owner just starting out on your own or the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation. How can it not be? Your mindset is the framework of beliefs in which you process information and make decisions.
For example, say you’re in a sales call with a potential client and they question your pricing, claiming it’s too expensive. Do you respond to that information by doing a U-turn, lowering your pricing and feeling guilty for attempting to charge so much? Or do you trust in yourself and your product or service and acknowledge that it's just not right for them right now?
It depends on your mindset AKA the perspective you choose to take. In that way, your brain can hold you back or enable you to achieve ambitious goals.
How the brain can block business success
Do you feel like you are capable of more but you’re not sure how to actually achieve more? Of course, there are the factors of skills and knowledge which can be learned and gained. Don’t overlook working on your mindset. Your path forward could be cluttered with obstacles that with a different mindset would be more easily cleared.
Limiting beliefs
Our limits begin and end with what we believe to be possible. It’s incredibly hard to achieve a goal you don’t truly believe you are capable or deserving of. When you hit a bump in the road, it will only reaffirm the limitations you have put on yourself and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your mind isn’t poised to look for solutions but to look for problems. That’s the secret, isn’t it? Believe you can and you will, somewhere, sometime, somehow, because your mind is looking for ways to make it happen.
Procrastination and perfectionism
You know when you need to do something, something really important, but you don’t and you keep not doing it until it becomes a problem? It’s not due to laziness. It’s more likely due to overwhelm and stress. There’s a belief somewhere in you that you’re unable to cope with the task in question so you avoid it altogether. Alternatively, or in addition, there’s the factor of perfectionism. You want to do the task really well and worry that your capabilities in the circumstances aren’t up to par. 99.9% of the time, you are absolutely capable of doing the task well and your good enough is someone else’s perfect. So go ahead and show them how amazing you are!
Storytelling
Sometimes my brain thinks it’s a mind reader and psychic capable of predicting the future perfectly! I have thoughts like ‘They must be thinking that’ and ‘This will happen because of that’ when in reality none of us know for sure what other people are thinking or how they will react to certain situations. More often than not the stories we tell are stress responses that are projections of our own fears with no evidence. We can tie ourselves in knots about things that haven’t happened, and don’t end up happening, which is an unnecessary drain on energy and headspace.
How to train the brain to support and generate business success
Just as much as we can get stuck in thought patterns that send us into downward spirals, we can build up thought patterns that keep us focused, energised and growing. Shifting into a growth mindset and away from a fixed mindset takes intentional action.
Self-awareness
First things first is to check in with your mindset. What beliefs influence the thoughts you have and the decisions you make? Raising self-awareness is a highly valuable activity because if you don’t know what’s going on with you, you can’t identify and resolve areas of resistance. I repeat some of the monthly themes of my journaling clubs every year because the topics are too important to leave our beliefs around them to chance.
Choosing beliefs
Once you are aware of your mindset and the beliefs that govern it, you can make conscious decisions about the beliefs you want to be guided by and the beliefs you’d like to leave in the past. This gives you greater control over your thoughts and your actions and therefore your results.
Conscious gratitude
When I say ‘control over your thoughts’, I mean choosing what you focus on and how you interpret information. You could perceive a week to be bad because you received one coldly worded email that makes you doubt your business offering. Or you could perceive that same week to be good because you’ve received positive feedback from 3 separate clients. By focusing more of your attention on what you have to be grateful for, you reserve energy and headspace for what’s going to drive you forward.
Habit stack
Brains aren’t the best at responding to change. They’re wired to keep us safe so are attracted to what’s familiar. I find that implementing smaller gradual changes faces much less resistance. If you can organise the change you’d like to see into habits that you can gradually add to your routine, progress will feel more achievable and more sustainable.
Track progress
You don’t know what you don’t know. That rule applies to your progress. If you don’t look at it and keep track of it, you’ll have no idea how far you’ve come, motivating you to keep going or to get a move on. Did you know if you write down a goal, you’re significantly more likely to achieve it? Keep a journal of where you’d like to go, how you’re going to get there and how you’re doing so far.
Business mindset is a really interesting topic. We spend so much of our lives not thinking twice about our mindset and the beliefs that are framing our experiences and impacting our actions. But when we give ourselves the time and space to define and grow a business mindset that meets our needs and matches our goals, whatever is going on in life we can get ourselves back on track.
Come and explore your business mindset inside the Find Your Vibe Business Club. You’ll be part of a community of business owners with the same dogged determination to make their businesses work for them and the same appreciation for self-improvement and self-coaching through journaling. Define and Grow Your Business Mindset is the theme for the daily journal prompts and guided workshops in April so join us ASAP to be a part of it.
