I want to emphasise I am not an expert here as I am still learning like we all are, but I am human, and I am in business and have been for many years; I would argue that this qualifies me to at least share with you my own experiences and how I have managed my mindset through some very challenging times.
Challenges that include a less than perfect start would see me mislabeled by the education system, leading to an education that was less than adequate. I was placed in an environment that was alien to me and toxic. Challenges like those faced by any soldier who has been on the front line of active service. Challenges like a significant business failure and, of course, all of the usual challenges of life, love and relationships.
I do not want to say that I have had it worse or better than anyone else; this is not a competition; it is, however, a reality that everyone shares the same DNA components; we are all fundamentally built the same and share the same biology. Our brains all work in the same way. The key may well lie in how we manage our thoughts and our actions. We are all fundamentally the same, and we all have many things in common with each other. Some do need more support, and seeking professional help is, of course, the best option and one I certainly endorse. I can say with a degree of certainty that it is very important for you to find and maintain the right mindset.
While we all share common aspects, we are still individuals, but individuals who need the connection with others are also significant to our mindset. This is why I have already mentioned, and will say again, later in this program, the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people. The right people help you with your mindset, not those that bring you down, directly or indirectly.
mental health, in general, is something I feel very strongly about, and certainly, I believe we could all be doing more when it comes to mental health in the workplace. This program is not about that subject, but I want to acknowledge the importance of mental health, and we all have a role we can play in that regard.
Finding and maintaining the right mindset is the foundation of the success you will experience in your business venture. Your attitude or maybe mindset is something that can be changed, in the same way, that you as an individual can develop your levels of Emotional Intelligence (EQ); we will talk more about aspects of this a little later.
The right mindset is balanced and one that recognises the reality of the present. In other words, you are not looking for the extremes on either end of the spectrum but the solid and realistic middle ground. The ground where you have a clear vision for the future you most want to create, for you and yours and a practical assessment of where you are right now. The healthy mindset will embrace both of these elements and then bring into the mix plans and strategies for bridging the gap between those two states. Where am I now, where do I want to be, and what is the best way to get there for me right now? These questions will be asked again later, and you will be asked to answer them as fully as you can.
So for me, the right mindset is all about being balanced with one foot on the ground. motivated and inspired by the future and the potential, and focused on the now to make progress forward. All based on the past will teach us what we need to do and what we need to do differently in many cases. It is an interesting point, that we can find most of the answers we need in history. mistakes that we have and will make will and have been made before. That is why we need to learn from the past and learn from the experience of others.
Earlier in this program, I talked about the accumulative effect of the actions you take and how the initial results may well be challenging to see. I called this the danger zone. When you are working hard, and you can see little progress being made, this is when you are most at risk of giving up. Let me illustrate this with the following diagram:
When it comes to your mental attitude, I believe the same diagram has relevance, albeit we are talking about a different subject. So the point I want to make with the chart is your mental attitude needs time to grow. You cannot simply say to yourself, today, I will be positive and have a good mental attitude. You may well tell yourself that, and you may well demonstrate some positive traits, but the underlying feelings will only be hidden, and this is nothing more than camouflage.
There is more to getting the upward curve and the accumulative effect of being positive than just saying the words and using those overused platitudes to indicate positive attitudes. When you meet people where everything is fantastic, business is great all the time; you know the type. The rest of us can see right through that facade.
This is not the mental attitude I am talking about. The perspective I am talking about is more akin to a clear vision for the future and a clear picture of the now, a clear plan of action that is made up of physical activity and not just words, a genuine appreciation of the reality of the situation and the people involved.
With all that in place, in unison with a deep-seated desire to learn and achieve, the accumulative effect of this will, slowly at first but then very quickly, create a gap between you and the majority. This is not to say you will not have your moments. That is not to say that you will not wake in the early hours with questions. For example, are you doing the right thing? Can you do this? This is not to say that you won’t, from time to time, have feelings of self-doubt. These are normal and expected. If you were not feeling that way, I would be more worried.
value you, value your ability to learn and commit to that learning, understand the importance of those around you, once you have got rid of the naysayers, of course. Embrace the human element and expect that you may have pangs of doubt from time to time. When this happens, revisit why you are doing all this, review the vision you have for your business, and remind yourself of the incredible and one-time journey you are on. Have fun and commit to making a real difference.
Mindfulness
We can start with the best intentions in our daily routine; the issue is that we can often be distracted from what we should be doing by other tasks or even other interests. These distractions may serve to frustrate from time to time, but you live with the distractions and continue.
Unless you are mindful, those distractions can and will get the better of you. Although not spoken about too much, the distractions can and do contribute to your overall mindset. Particularly with the distractions you succumb to that take you away from making the progress you really need to make. They can easily contribute to feelings of doubt when things are not moving in the direction or speed, you had expected.
These distractions are possibly more serious and more prevalent than you may first give them credit for. It may surprise you to learn that research into this subject has shown that most people spend on average 47% of their time thinking about things that do not relate to the activity they are undertaking at the time, what you might call working on autopilot.
If we think about it, this is something we can all relate to. I am sure we have all started a familiar journey driving in our car, maybe the commute to work or perhaps to visit a family member. We suddenly arrive at the destination, and we realise we cannot remember driving there. We were so wrapped up in other thoughts. We were operating on autopilot. We have all experienced a day in the office when you suddenly look up at the clock on the wall and think to yourself, where did the day go? This is certainly not being mindful of the now, which is essential if you want to make progress and feed the right mental attitude, balanced between the future and the present.
This is not being mindful of the moment you are in by any stretch of the imagination, yet we all do it. I want to make the point that the 47% of time spent on thinking about things other than what you are doing, does reduce a little in the entrepreneurial and managerial types, but rest assured, this is only a tiny reduction. Imagine what you could achieve if you got this 47% back and we’re fully focused. How might that impact your performance?
“Enhanced performance creates enhanced results, contributing positively to the maintenance and development of a winning mindset.”
Chris Batten Author The 7C’s of Why
Let me encourage you to focus on being mindful when you are working on or in your business, with the express mission of making the proper progress toward the outcome. mindfulness at work is so essential to the entire process. This book is all about creating more performance and success for you and your business, and I can tell you mindfulness has a significant role to play. That should be motivation enough for you to join the growing number of business entrepreneurs who are taking the subjects of mindfulness and emotional intelligence (EQ) seriously when it comes to personal and business development.
I want to concentrate on focus and awareness because they are two of the most critical factors in having a mindful approach when working in or on your business. So let us look at ways to improve the focus and awareness we have in business.
many in the world of psychology and business development maintain these skills are just as critical as management and technical skills. A healthy combination of them all is the rainbow that leads to the pot go gold we all ultimately seek.
Here is the important news, you can learn to be more mindful, just like you can learn to develop your EQ, another vital component in success. You can quickly train your brain to embrace mindfulness techniques that will ultimately improve your outcomes.
Start your day right – most of us make the mistake of allowing the stress to take over immediately. To be honest, when you wake first thing, how long is it before you think about work? This is the first thing that enters our minds for many of us. That certainly was the case with me. I would wake and find myself immediately thinking about the problems of business development, which often lead to tiny cracks and self-doubt. This is counter-productive and is doing you no good at all.
I was aware this was happening to me, so I started to explore the world of mindfulness, simply because that is what my most trusted mentors were doing and what the business leaders I held in the highest esteem were doing. I thought that if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. It was difficult at first, as is any new behaviour. But it was all worth it, and I would like you to discover the same.
When you start your day with thoughts of the issues and challenges you are facing, biology takes over, and your brain will release the fight or flight hormone, which will, in turn, create stress. Now you are up against it; starting the day with anxiety is not the way forward. This is not something you can control; human biology and the function of the brain is predictable, and as you think this way, that is precisely what is going to happen; without a doubt, stress levels will rise.
There is, as you’d expect, much evidence to support this view; scientific research has found that we release most of our stress hormones within minutes of waking. So we can change outcomes by changing the way we think first thing in the morning and starting the new day as you mean to go on, not stressed and worried but fresh and ready for the challenges ahead, with motivation and excitement.
The alternative to waking up creating stress by worrying about the day ahead or the business overall is a far better option. So the choice is to make a conscious effort to think differently when you first wake in the morning. This will take time, refer back to the previous diagram and avoid giving up too soon while you are still in the danger zone. Remember, it is the passage of time and the accumulative effect of the repetition that counts.
Learn how habits work to help you break old ones and replace them with new ones. At the end of this section, we will look at habits to help you know how to form new, improved habits throughout your business and indeed life.
Start your morning by concentrating on nothing other than your breathing. I tend to do this first thing. Once I am awake, I will sit or stand by the window and fully concentrate on my breathing for a few moments to start my day free from stress and ready for action. make the breathing deep and slow and fully focus on the breathing and the rhythm you are creating with your deliberate slow and deep breaths.
If other thoughts creep in during this process, force yourself to go back to thinking about your deep and deliberate breathing. You only need to do this for about three minutes, and that is enough to change the start of your day.
I do not leave it at that; I also focus other moments during the day on being mindful. I do this particularly after or before particularly complex, unpleasant or stressful tasks. I always do it immediately before I start work; I simply sit upright or stand and then concentrate on the slow and deliberate breathing. A quick two to three minutes of focus on my breathing, and then we go with the day ahead.
I want to emphasise that you may not see or feel the benefit of this mindfulness exercise right away. But the repeated and practised actions you take will slowly but surely start to impact on you and your stress levels. Therefore your focus, concentration and performance will improve.
Where possible, I also practice this technique before meetings that I attend. It helps focus my attention on the forum rather than a plethora of other potential distractions. When I do not have time to practice this before the meeting, I simply employ a viable alternate. At the meeting, I make sure I am not the first to talk, preferring instead listen for a moment. The key to this is to truly listen to what is being said and concentrate on being in the moment. The moment right now, not a moment that has already passed that you have no control over, not a moment in the future. Instead, focus on the here and now.
There is the added benefit of using this technique as being mindful can help you run shorter, more effective meetings, and so in that respect alone is well worth the effort.
Working mindfully means applying focus and awareness to everything you do. From the moment you enter into work mode, it allows you to focus on the task at hand and recognise internal and external distractions for what they are. These actions can even reduce mistakes and increase your creativity.
When we talk about mindfulness, we also talk about avoiding distractions, we should look at the most popular distractions and suggest how to deal with them mindfully. I guess most would agree that email has become one of the biggest distractions in business. Of course, I am not referring to all emails but the ones that add nothing to your day, the email equivalent of junk mail.
When we hear the ping of our smartphone or laptop, we are compelled to let the notification distract us from what we are doing so we can read the message, which in many cases will be distracting us from what we should be doing.
We are often compelled to deal with these distractions because, in reality, they are smaller and easier to deal with than the tasks that truly make the most significant difference to our outcomes. When we complete them, they give us a false sense of accomplishment with these quick wins, that on reflection, do little or nothing to help our business progress. This also applies to other social media messaging platforms.
The answer to this is simple. Try setting aside allocated time to check and respond to the mail you receive. If at all possible, avoid doing it first thing in the day, as this can just present you with a host of opportunities to become distracted by tasks that are not creating the progress you desire.
The other areas I would like to discuss are decision-making and mindfulness. As the day progresses, we will become increasingly tired. mindfulness, when practised at strategic times during the day, can assist you to remain sharp and improve or maintain the quality of your decision making. The key is short and regular breaks and finding small snippets of time to practice the mindfulness techniques.
I also do my best to complete each day with a bit of mindfulness breathing to create a natural gap between work time and downtime. Do yourself a favour and try this for fourteen days or so and if you do it right, take it seriously, and with the right frequency, you will see the difference it can make to the way you feel, your focus and your overall mindset.