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As humans, we have a tendency to move away from pain, right? We will move towards gain, but we’ll move more quickly away from pain. And sometimes it’s simply a reaction; we’ll just move.
And I see this with business owners sometimes, where there’s something going on in their business that they’re not happy with, and it’s painful for them. Whether it’s to do with profits, or time, or business is just generally not working out the way they want it to.
And they want to react and change something external. They want to move away from the pain.
But what they’re not clear on is where is that pain actually coming from?
The business is the manifestation or the embodiment of what’s going wrong. And they’re looking at that, that outcome as what needs to change.
But they’re not looking internally at the roots that are leading to those fruits not being the way they want them to.
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
Confucius
And what that means is, wherever you change direction – whether it’s a product line, a service line, a different business altogether, a different geography, hiring somebody different – you’re going to show up the same way as you always have been if you don’t change your thinking. And you’re likely to replicate the same challenges again.
So whatever challenge you might be facing in your business right now, it’s not necessarily a function of your business. It’s a function of your thinking. I’ll give you an example.
I sometimes work with business owners that are working far too many hours. They can barely keep an appointment. They’re just going like crazy. They’re so good at what they do and they’ve attracted so much business they can barely keep up. And they’re frustrated. They’re not seeing their families. They’re exhausted, etc.
And so they say, “the business is taking too much out of me.”
At the moment, that may be true, but that’s an outcome. And we work back, and we realize they’ve never set clear boundaries for themselves.
They’ve never said “I’m going to run my business on 50 hours a week or 45 or 40” whatever it is, they just react to the frustrating outcome. And so nothing really changes.
It’s not their family upset they’re coming home late that’s the problem.
The problem is they’re not doing the thinking work around setting boundaries.
So if you think about any challenge you might have in your business right now, and work it back to the thinking.
Business results or lack thereof, are outcomes.
Outcomes happen through action.
Actions come from decisions,
which come through questions,
which come from thought. The way that we think leads to all of the above.
So if you’ve got a challenge in your business right now, I encourage you to work your way back and decide for yourself, “Is the way I’m thinking about this challenge is what’s keeping me stuck? Am I asking myself the same question all the time? Or do I have some new questions I can ask? Do we need to talk to somebody different?”
Think about the challenge you’ve got and who do you know who’s crushed that challenge, who’s gone through it? Have a chat with them, ask them what kind of questions they ask themselves. What was their decision-making framework or criteria to move through the challenge?
So if we want to change our outcomes, or the fruits, we can’t just *want* to change those. We have to change the inner. We’ve got to change the roots that lead to the fruits.
So I hope that this has been food for thought this week, you to think about where you need to think just a little bit differently, different questions for yourself. And I hope that leads you to slightly different decisions and different outcomes, and different results for you and your business.
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