I had a vacation recently. I was off for two weeks, and it was very relaxing, but my business brain didn’t totally turn off. I was thinking about some business owners I’ve worked with over the years that have done amazing things, but they are in this trap of thinking they weren’t doing that well.
For driven ambitious entrepreneurs, we can sometimes get in that space where we’re a little bit out of reality with how well we’re doing.
We have a little bit of a negative view on it. So this week I’m going to share with you a strategy of how not to get into that trap. And if you’re in there, how to get out.
As business owners, how do we get into a state where we’re doing okay, or even really well, but we think we’re not? Or we feel that we’re not.
Well as humans, we’re programmed to avoid danger.
If we’re so focused on the negative, we might get what’s called “confirmation bias” where we see so much negative, we think everything is negative or a problem.
That’s our survival instinct, right? Look out for problems and dangers, look out for threats. And if we do identify a threat, we want to neutralize it or get the problem solved.
It’s because we’re not looking at all the wins we’re creating and all the progress that we’re making.
I had a little experience today, when I was out for a run for the first time in a little while, and it was windy, I was into this headwind, my legs started to get a bit of a cramp almost from the very beginning. And then my other leg cramped up. I’m like, “man, this runs sucks. This is hard.” And I got back and I looked at my time.
And, my gosh, it was better than I thought it was, by about 15 seconds per kilometre.
But in my head I thought it was crappy, because I wasn’t actually tracking. If I was looking at my app on my phone to see how I was doing per kilometre, I would’ve thought to myself, “Hey, I’m doing better than I thought, this is pretty good.”
And now I’m going to be a little bit more energized to push a little bit harder, or just to take the win and accept that I was doing okay.
In business this happens as well when we’re not actually tracking our wins with our team, and we’re not measuring progress using a dashboard, so that we can see how far we’ve come.
Now I see this happen in businesses of all sizes, small businesses, large businesses. I see this in the C-suite as well.
We want to make sure that in our weekly meetings with our team, we bring progress through our KPIs, through our dashboard, and anecdotal wins.
Let’s celebrate the wins that we’ve got. We can talk about those challenges – they’re going to be there, that’s business – but let’s make sure that we also focus on the wins and the positive things.
Because when you do that as a leader, and you share your wins, and identify wins that your team have created, it’s going to give them permission to bring some wins to the table too. And everyone can celebrate and raise the level of positivity, so that when you are solving problems and running through challenges, you’ve got a higher level of optimism and energyto crush them.
So this week, What can you do to institute a little bit of positivity and win-recognition for your team to raise the energy level and rock it out big time.
Have a great week, I look forward to hearing about your wins. Leave them in the comments below!
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