Brain Training

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Just thinking about our business, either as it is at the moment, or how we intend it to be, can prompt us to conceive a whole catalogue of problems. Some of those problems may be real; others are merely imagined, or even manufactured by us. And, with those obstacles in mind, we allow ourselves to be deterred.

However, obstacles are opportunities to grow, not indications of failure.

If the obstacles have been fabricated by ourselves, or are simply the result of our fertile imagination, such manifestations give us the opportunity to see them for what they are and thereby grow beyond them. If we are creating our own confines, making our own monsters, it would be sheer relief to stop, wouldn’t it?

Even if the obstacle is genuine, all is not lost. After all, obstacles are a feature of the path chosen, not a divine judgment on the eventual destination. So, meeting obstacles can certainly be seen as a welcome event, both as a temporary diversion and as a challenge to our creativity.

And the time we spend working through our business obstacles can go towards reducing the time we spend unnecessarily “Brain Training” on our Nintendo DS.

All Change

You may have come across the phrase “if you always do what you have always done, you’ll always get what you have always got.” Notable speakers who have used it in the past include Penny Phang, Anthony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Chris Widener and Zig Ziglar.

I have even used it myself.

Newsflash from my banking clients: that’s (another) coaching myth.

In the past this little mantra has been used to challenge those clients who were stuck in a rut of working hard in a particular way with little success, but unable to come up with another approach.

In those circumstances pointing out the illogicality of continuing in a fruitless pursuit made sense.

But what of those whose strategy has a history of success, but who face more recent set-backs? Wouldn’t they want to keep doing what they have been doing in order to duplicate previous favourable results?

Certainly they will. However, circumstances have changed. Now they need to change too, in order to match the changed situation.

Once the environment shifts, then so must the approach you use. Doing what you once did will not give the previous outcome.

That much is obvious, so what’s the problem?

Every moment of every day every one of us has to make three choices, whether we are aware of it, or not:

1. We have to choose where to direct our attention;
2. We have to choose how to interpret the event or object that has our attention, and
3. We have to choose what action to take as a result of choices 1 and 2.

The peculiar thing is that many people (not you, of course) do not consciously make those choices, because they do not even realise there is a choice to be made.

The consequence is that such people, instead of consciously selecting an action, merely react instead.

They take no responsibility for what goes on in their heads and the subsequent outcomes. “Other people” are being difficult and “the world” is against them. Their behaviour is entirely derived from habit, conditioning and untested suppositions.

Increasingly, as the world moves on, those habits, that conditioning and their suppositions are no longer appropriate. It follows that the results such people achieve become less and less satisfactory.

The results we get depend on the choices we make we make, either consciously from applied thought, or unthinkingly from the subconscious.

It pays to remain aware of our choices; it maximises our chances of selecting an appropriate action that matches the present circumstances.

At the height of the banking boom a highly successful broker drove his brand new, top the range Ferrari down Wall Street and pulled into the kerb to show it off to his friends. As he opened the door to get out the door was suddenly and completely ripped off by a passing truck.

The broker was outraged. He cursed the trucker. He screamed about the cost of the car. He yelled that the body repairers would never get it to look as good as it did new. He wailed about all the expensive extras that he had had fitted.

A New York cop pulled in behind the Ferrari with his strobe lights flashing. He told the broker to calm down. The car was no more than an expensive toy. And did the broker even realise that the truck had torn off half his arm when it passed? At that moment he was bleeding profusely over the sidewalk.

“My God!” the broker shrieked, “My Rolex!”

How invisible are you?

Recently I was talking with a new contact who offers data management services - basically making digital copies of archive documents. He was wondering whether having a presence on sites like Ecademy or Facebook would yield any benefit to his business. On balance he doubted it.

The reason he gave was that he dealt mainly with people like the Senior Partner in a firm of Solicitors or the CEO of a Hospital Trust. He questioned whether that sort of individual would ever look at any website, even Ecademy, to find services such as his. Probably not.

I asked him to imagine that he was a Senior Partner.

Only then did he recognise the full course of events that led up to a request to tender and eventually a signed contract. He realised - for the first time - that although he might end up meeting people like Senior Partners, such exalted beings do not do the initial leg-work to identify possible service providers.

Generally that is done by someone much lower down the organisation, usually a lot younger and with no decision-making capacity - but certainly with the freedom to list, or not to list, those who might provide that service. And, being younger, that more junior person would almost certainly look at Ecademy, Facebook and other similar sites.

Clearly, if his firm had no presence on those portals, then he would be invisible to the list makers of this world.

Being on the list would not guarantee an invitation to tender; but not being on the list would certainly guarantee no invitation to tender.

It was a small point, missed by my new friend until now, but with all the potential to make a difference. And all from a small piece of networking.

So, how invisible is your firm? And would you like to get more noticed?