As a small business owner, if you want to have a breakthrough in your business growth, you have to start at the top. That means you.
There are lots of business levers you can mess around with, such as increasing your marketing spend, refining your message, improving your digital marketing, creating a new product and reaching out to a new market. You can even try working harder. On their own, they will all add something, and they will also require additional resources, time and hard work. Then the results are likely to be incremental. None of them alone will cause a real breakthrough for your business – unless you add one important ingredient – a new way of looking at the challenge.
Whatever is your starting point, you can’t expect to reach a big business goal using the same thinking that got you there in the first place. It just doesn’t work like that.
Albert Einstein was famous for saying, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” And this one, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
It is, however, easier said than done sometimes as most of us have discovered, and every person and every situation is different.
My number one tip to cause a breakthrough in your business is to back yourself 100% – and then take yourself on a journey of growth, so that your business can grow into the vision that you have for it.
Commitment to your Vision
As you embark on the journey for growth, it is important to be open to feedback, listen to expert advice and seek out strong mentors. Having said that, trusting yourself and your vision trumps everything. Do your research, get clear about your purpose, and then having satisfied yourself that you are on the right track, select the advice, expertise and tools that meet your needs, and avoid being drawn away with other people’s ideas, passions and agendas.
Self-Awareness
We all have an inbuilt unconscious mental and emotional program written in our brains and our bodies that was established when we were very young and it is all designed to keep us safe. For some of us, the program that generates our view of the world can be more limiting in business than for others. It can have us be cautious where we don’t need to be, it can have us be distrustful where we don’t need to be, and it can have us second guess ourselves every time we start stepping outside our comfort zone.
At any time that we want to expand our business, we will be confronted by the same limiting thoughts and behaviours, showing up in various forms, because by its very nature, expansion takes us outside of what is the known, the comfortable, the status quo.
The trick here is to expand our awareness of our own values, beliefs and motivators, and seek out ways to leverage the ones that work for us and change the ones that don’t.
Invariably, we need outside stimulation and/or support to help us cut through some of the stronger, unhelpful responses that are getting in our way. Here are a few suggestions:
- Get a good Business Coach, recommended to you from someone you trust
- Engage a Professional Mentor who has done what you want to do
- Do the Landmark Forum
- Go Skydiving
- Take an extended sabbatical for travel to exotic places
- Read Dr Joe Dispenza’s book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
- Guided meditation – download an app or buy expert audio online
Something like skydiving or the Landmark Forum deliver an externally driven ‘peak experience’ that is guaranteed to have you revisit your business planning from a more powerful view of yourself and the world you are dealing with.
Meditation supports these external stimuli by helping you focus on the messages you are giving and receiving from your body and mind, and thereby giving you more power over changing certain things that aren’t working for you.
I recommend you seek out these kinds of tools every time you want to cause a breakthrough for your business. The effects of moving those business growth levers such as marketing, message, target customer and product and service innovation will have more impact when combined with a massive shift in your thinking: new ideas and innovations, new conversations, new connections and a whole new level of energy are possible. That truly is the recipe for a breakthrough in your business performance, and it is something you can do over and over again.
