Your Business Mindset is Your Business’s Best Friend

If you listen to oldies music (or have been around a bit) you know that Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.  Now that may or may not be true, the diamond thing, I’ll leave it up to you.  But we do you know what your business’s best friend is – a robust business mindset.  Without that your business is stopped in its tracks.  Stopped before it can get out the gate or off the starting line.

A lightweight business mindset will turn your telephone into a 500 hundred pound hulk and make washing the dishes or cleaning the toilet seem more appealing. You’ll do anything to avoid picking up the phone and having a conversation with someone about your business/financial opportunity.  What is a good antidote to a puny business mindset?  Awareness. You weren’t expecting that were you?  But it’s true.

There is a great story in “The Inner Game of Coaching” by Tim Gallwey about a small professional medical office.  Too many patients were being kept waiting.  Gallwey was hired and came in to watch what was going on.  After a morning of observation he said something along the lines,

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It’s sometime around mid-August 1946.  My mom and dad are married exactly one month.  My father is smitten (he stayed like that for the rest of his life – happily, very happily married 60 years) and well you know what happens.  One thing leads to another and sometime in the middle of August roughly 100 million swimming sperm race each other to see which one can get to my mother’s egg first.

Lucky for me the universal energy or the stars lined up and bingo, I experienced the first impossible thing that was to happen to me.  I happened.  I happened against odds that make winning the lottery or breaking the bank in Vegas look easy.  Easy.  And you know what, we have that in common.  We’ve all been gifted the impossible, life.

Now that you know just how lucky YOU are, what are you going to do about it?  It’s the first of the year and time for some reflection, planning and go get ‘um tiger energy.  What do you wish you’d done last year that you didn’t?  Are you going to do it this year?

Just how much money did you leave on the table last year in your business, because you:

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In a coaching conversation today with Sherry Dushaw of Usborne Books, she tells me she’s had a leadership revelation from the behavior of chickens.  I have had the privilege of working with Sherry for a number of years.  This is one smart, accomplished woman.  I found myself intrigued that she could learn anything from a chicken.  Actually, I wondered if any of us could learn anything from a chicken.  But as usual, mother nature had a lesson for me.

Part of Sherry’s commitment to homeschooling has her teaching a zoology class this year to 4th and 5th graders.  The class is focused on birds, that’s how the chickens figure into the story.  Here’s the leadership part.  When there is danger in the barnyard the chicken has a couple of things she can do to protect her chicks, she can:

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