[EDITOR’S NOTE: VITAL has begun its second year of monthly CI Business Mastery Classes where it addresses important CI business topics via webinars. Each class is supported by an industry brand. VITAL has agreed to share some of the information from these classes in a monthly column of highlights from its most recent webinar. The topics are the same as the previous year’s classes, but the content is refreshed. This CI Business Mastery Class was on mindset, and it was supported by D-Tools.]
Mindset is not something that comes up every day, but it has everything to do with your success. Our brains are just big hard drives. Every moment that you’re awake, your five senses are taking in a constant stream of information. These experiences are stored as memories like a computer’s data, but we don’t recall most of this information in our conscious minds. Our subconscious works in the background to maintain a constant body temperature, organ function, and balance among all the chemicals in our body. This is referred to as homeostasis, and your subconscious mind also maintains homeostasis in your mental realm by keeping you thinking and acting in a manner that’s consistent with what you’ve done and said in the past. Your subconscious mind causes you to feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable whenever you attempt to do anything new or different or to change any of your established patterns or behavior.
The limbic system of the brain controls our emotional process, and at the heart of this system is small collection of nuclei called the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that is very primitive. The limbic system oversees fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and, of course, fornication.
We as a species have not evolved very far and rely on this essential brain function for our reactions to loud noises, fear of animals, and other primitive behaviors. Thus, we spend much of our time overreacting to stimuli that our subconscious has been programmed to react to. This means that we must actively program our subconscious to be less fearful of the things that had once caused us great fear.
Conquering Our Fears
Challenge is the key to growth, not comfort. Are you challenging yourself in the areas that will make a difference in your business and your life, or are the challenges you gravitate toward well within your comfort zone?
Many of us let the business drive our actions and live in the reactive game. We are all guilty of thinking that working harder, putting in more hours, or just hiring this next person is going to solve the problem, but there is more to it than that. For example, you might know that you want to get into selling lighting fixtures, but you are aware that you don’t know how to complete a lighting design. But that is something that you know you don’t know — what about the things we don’t know we don’t know?
Once you get clear about these blind spots, you can begin to reprogram the mind to do something about them. The work of making progress toward resolving these blind spots begins with the understanding of how the conscious and unconscious parts of your mind work. The primary job of your unconscious mind is to keep you safe and alive. You must reprogram the unconscious mind to know you as who you want to be so that this new territory will no longer be unsafe.
Steps to Create Lasting Change
A lot of people struggle over and over in life to make change or get what they want because they’re missing one or more of the steps in the path to creating real change.
- Decide: You must take the time to create clarity around your vision. Decide on what you’re going to do, who you want to be, and what is your purpose. Create a personal mission statement for yourself and read it every day.
- Commit: Figure out what are you truly committed to and get real with yourself about those commitments. If you’re committed to starting and growing your business, what are you doing to work on your business instead of just in it? If you’re committed to buying your next building instead of leasing, but you just keep spending all that money on things that don’t matter, are you committed to making the change or being comfortable?
- Take Action: Imperfect action today is often better than perfect action a month from now. We are literally an industry of perfectionists, which is one of the things that makes us great, but it also holds us back. It’s time to stop letting that perfection get in the way of your progress. Subconsciously, you should make the best decision you can with the data you have at the time and then put in the work necessary to make that decision work out in the best way. Stop getting stuck inside of your decisions.
- Track and Reward Progress: Rewards are massively more motivating than consequences…this is proven by data and research over and over again. Start by rewarding yourself or your team for taking even the smallest of actions toward the goal. Small rewards for small actions, big rewards for big actions. We often make the mistake of only rewarding results, and that can lead to a lack of motivation early in the process where the results are out of reach and motivation is lacking. Don’t make the mistake of chasing shiny objects or, worse, treating one-off situations as reliable data. Pay attention to trends, as they will drive those decisions. Not everything you’re going to do will work. You need to become okay with that.
- Maintain Momentum: When things inevitably get challenging and you’re about to give up or you’re just stuck, get together with your team, reframe, and get back to your purpose in your vision.
- Celebrate the Results: When you follow the path to create lasting change, you get to celebrate the results. That doesn’t come easy because many of us give up way too early. Taking new and better action makes the difference. It isn’t just about knowledge — we’ve got to turn that knowledge into action.
For more information about the CI Business Mastery Classes and the other services VITAL provides, visit http://growwithVITAL.com.