The founder of the Business Coaching franchise that I joined once said, “Whatever problem the clients say they have, the solution is always money”.
Whilst there is a half-truth in this, I was never comfortable with it as a philosophy. Luckily, it didn’t prove true, or at least not for the clients I work with. My clients already have successful businesses, although some didn’t realise it when we first met.
In conversation, they would say they wanted to improve profits, free up their time or get their teams working better together. But these are just the presenting symptoms of a deeper cause. Fixing their time, team and money challenges was no guarantee that their experience will improve.
What they wanted was to have a different experience of running their business.
One of my clients, John, was the MD of a professional services firm. Every Thursday morning for two years, I arrived at his office for our 8 am meeting, wondering what ‘mood’ I would find him in. Some weeks he would be excited, full of positivity and champing at the bit. Other weeks he would be angry and frustrated, to the point of considering closing the company down.
You might think this is nothing unusual, the classic journey of the entrepreneur as their fortunes shift. Yet, these swings were not the result of his business results. In fact, week on week, they slowly improved as he established control and visibility of what was going on. In any case, it was a predictably solid business. There was no correlation between his business performance and his mood at any point in time.
Your experience of business is not related to what needs fixing or not.
Your state of mind drives it, a result of your thinking in the moment. This is what John demonstrates so well. So, if your state of mind is independent of the challenges and opportunities that you face each day, it also follows that you could shift your state of mind to fix a problem rather than hoping the fix will shift your state of mind.
The good news is you can, and it is what I have been doing with my clients these last few years.
From an excitatory state of mind, you can see things more clearly, which opens wider options from which to select and execute a well-formed response. You’ll find that you don’t turn so many dramas into crises.
Do you think this would give you a better experience of your business?
You don’t need a business coach to do this for you. You simply need to understand how your mind creates your experiences and how to find your very best state when you need it.
You achieve this level of transformation when you:
· get crystal clear about what you truly want from your business.
· update the assumptions you hold about yourself, your business and your markets to ones that support your outcomes.
· access wider sets of options by removing fear and other emotional responses from your decision making and action-taking.
· understand how to connect with others in ways that enrol and enable them to support you.
While this may feel like a substantial transformational challenge, it is merely a return to your factory settings; the defaults you once effortlessly operated in the world.
You can spend an awful amount of time, energy and money dealing with the operational and customer issues as they arise. It’s like that game ‘whack a mole’ at the funfair. Every time you hit one mole on the head, another pops up.
Or you can deal, once and for all, with the true source of your experiences and see the situations you confront daily in new and exciting ways.
