If you want to grow your business, you need to know how manage yourself even more than you know how to manage your business. From my experience as an advisor, men aren’t stuck in their business. In fact, they’re experts in their industries. They know their suppliers, they know their products, they know their competitors, and they know their consumers. But what they don’t know as well is their mental blocks.
A mental block is something you don’t see that is stopping or slowing you down from making progress. Your mental blocks are difficult to identify because you’re using the same thinking that’s created them, to actually find them. Unless you’re extremely reflective and can observe yourself from multiple angles, you’ll continue to operate with these blocks. Business is fundamentally a series of decisions and actions. As you remove your mental blocks, you’ll make better decisions and take more effective action.
Here are the three most common mental blocks observed in men:
1. “I Know What I’m Doing”
Yes, you may know what you’re doing and that’s the very challenge. Past successes definitely increase your chances of future successes, but they don’t guarantee it. What you have done to get to this level isn’t necessarily what you need to do to continue further.
You must continue to learn different approaches and see things from different angles. One way to do this is to apply strategies and tactics from other industries. It’s a great way to bring new and fresh ideas into your business. When I advise CEO’s, I always get them to study another industry because it breaks their pattern of thinking. Eventually they learn to find their own patterns which they can break themselves.
2. “Doing” More Than “Being”
Men are always so focused on doing, but sometimes they have to stop and focus on who they are being. It’s a subtle difference in thinking that has a massive difference in outcomes. When you’re caught up in doing, you get stuck in autopilot. Studies show that the average person runs 47% of their day on autopilot.
When you’re constantly doing and not being, you’re missing out on the subtle signs that could change your trajectory in business. You’re just too busy to see them. Sometimes the smallest hints can have the biggest impact. Geniuses like Einstein were always on the lookout for these little hints that gave them insight on their ground-breaking experiments. Einstein would go through the same neighborhood for walks and pretend to be a different person. He would see things that he never saw before.
This one statement has stuck with me for years, “You are a human being, not a human doing.” Keep doing, but don’t forget who you are being as well.
3. Thinking In Isolation
You may be so focused on overcoming a challenge or a new business venture that you forget to see the entire system. Everything is connected in some way and is one of the basic laws of the universe. What you change in one aspect of your business has an impact on another. Every decision and action has a ripple effect. When you map out the entire system and identify the possibilities, it is easier to predict the outcomes and how you should react to them. You’ll never be 100% prepared for everything that’s going to happen but at least you’ll be more than 0% prepared.
The reason why the best chess players are significantly better than good chess players is they have mapped out the possibilities for each move far ahead. They are seeing the board as a system rather than individual pieces or moves. Think of your business environment as a system and you’ll get much further ahead.
This is one of the reasons our firm has developed the Complete Strategic Advising system for business owners and leaders. Other advisors and consultants are providing isolated insight and not looking at the entire business system. Our complete approach has far better and faster results for business profit growth.
Summary
Be aware of your mental blocks because they are there. You just don’t see them. The faster you find them and deal with them, the faster your business will grow.
All the best,
Purdeep Sangha
The Strategist For Businessmen
