What comes first - seeing or believing?

Words: 349 Reading Time: 1 minutes 10 seconds

Relatively few businesses seek any form of outside consultancy or coaching.

In 2009, according to the Office for National Statistics, the UK economy was made up of 525,000 sole proprietors, with another 1,382,000 enterprises employing between 2 and 10 people and another 20,000 enterprises with between 11 and 49 employees.

Of all businesses (2.15 million) 348,000 were under two years old and a further 316,000 were between two and four years old.

Clearly, with so many small businesses and so many new businesses there is benefit to be had from seeking professional help, especially as approximately one in fifty six businesses will have failed in the same year. So why is this assistance ignored?

Aside from issues of ignorance and concerns about cost I believe the main reason is belief.

For any personal or corporate change to take place, first there must be a change in belief. If any part of the old Henry Ford adage is true, it’s the second part, “you can’t if you think you can’t”, because if companies are convinced of their own inadequacy they are unlikely to attempt any change.

In the unlikely event that they do make an attempt, they are unlikely to persist, taking any early lack of success as proof positive of their initial doubts rather than recognizing this as almost inevitable during the first stumbling steps on the road.

Shifting belief takes work, which probably acts to deter most people. When our beliefs change, so will some of our values. And that tends to scare people. What they more easily embrace is surface pattern change rather than deeper belief work. It has the attraction of seeming to yield early results.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the pattern change rarely sticks. Why would it when it is unsupported by underpinning beliefs? Unfortunately this probably leaves the enterprise worse off than before.

To break through this debilitating condition what people and businesses require is a meta-shift – a shift in their belief about belief and the role it plays in their success or failure.

However, I am sure none of that applies to my readers.