The Better Thinking Process
The Better Thinking Process
(This section has sub-sections)
The Three Phases
The Service Strategist’s thinking process is a guide to keep your ideas on track until you see them implemented into your business. When you arrive at your idea, it needs to remain constantly on your mind, or it may simply be lost or abandoned. This thinking process helps you keep the idea and eventually achieve it.
Since ideas are slippery and easily escape actualization, due to the mind’s tendency to often work against itself by safeguarding you from failure, we need a regimented way of thinking. A business owner’s job is to think about their company, and simply put, The better thinking process shows just one way to effectively think.
Our Better Thinking Process has three phases and three underlying motivators. The three phases are: Think, Skill and Act. What keeps the idea alive and fresh, are the three underlying motivators that drive this process: On the Hook, The Same Page, and Coaching. Let’s go over the process where the first three phases are how to implement an idea, and the last three motivators keep you accountable.
Now, we will briefly describe the entire thinking process, but each part will have its own deeper explanation in a separate write-up.
- Think | Skill | Act | Motivators
Our Thinking Process
The Think Phase
When you find an idea or innovation to bring into your business, think about it in these three ways:
- Visualize the idea in precise detail.
- Change your Mind’s outlook: Conscious Awareness and the Automatic Mind work together.
- Create a target (with steps) you want to achieve that works towards that idea/innovation.
A painter sees the image in their mind and then applies paint to canvas, the baseball batter practices hitting the ball in his mind before they ever step up to the plate, and the business owner knows exactly how they want something done and creates a process for their employees to follow. Ideas also need some way to form, take shape, and be implemented.
Setting Targets
Apart from thinking about your business as an owner and not as someone working in it, is making targets that correspond with your vision and outlook. Set a target that is specific, double sales this quarter, and create steps that make that target achievable. Believe that the targets you make are possible even if they seem out of reach.
The Skill Phase
The next phase in the Better Thinking Process is Skill acquisition. Once the targets have been set you need to make the pivotal decision on how your company will gain the skills needed to reach your target. Will you learn the skills or find another within your organization who has the skills instead of you? Without the right skills, your idea will never see the light of day or will be far from what you initially imagined during your Visualization.
Anyone can throw paint onto a canvas, but only those who have studied the art of painting can actually sell their work to others. To paint well you are going to need skills. Like how to paint different strokes with a brush or how to mix colors as these are things that separate the professionals from the pretenders. While you can surely paint a tree, albeit an ugly flat 2-D tree, you will be unhappy with the results because you lack painting skills and you will hardly call yourself a painter, but that doesn’t mean you cannot take painting lessons or simply commission a trained painter to act out your tree-painting desires. Let’s leave the world of art and enter the world of baseball.
Can you hit a fastball? If you haven’t picked up a bat since elementary school, then the answer is likely no. Not only will it fly by at what feels like a blistering speed, but you will also hazard to even swing your bat to connect with the ball even a little. And if you do get lucky and manage to connect with it, the ball will not fly very straight. The point is, hitting a fastball is tough. As you know professional baseball players are paid a lot of money for their skills, and rarely do we see GMs of baseball teams stepping up to the plate to hit a few dingers in the bottom of the ninth. Instead, GMs find other people with fast ball-hitting skills as opposed to doing it themselves.
It is not different within a business; you find others with skills to run your departments because they are frankly better at it than most company owners would be.
Hire or Acquire Skills
The bridge to reach your target is already built in your mind, you know the targets you have set, but now you need the skills to build the actual bridge. Remember each bridge that you build to get over the financial pitfall of failing outright is going to require a different skill set.
We then come to the pivotal question where the owner must make an important decision:
- Do I hire someone to build the bridge for me or do I develop my own skills?
Letting go of something you know how to do well or enjoy doing will be hard, but always consider the amount of time it will take for you to complete the project if you were to do it alone.
- Can you answer the phones and deliver stellar customer service on every single call? Of course, but should you be doing this?
- Should the installers and techs be calling you for advice on how to retrofit an old Lennox? No, way.
Instead, hire people to free up your time so you can focus on running the business. Become content with the fact that you can’t do it all and you will certainly never know it all. But what you will gain is the peace of mind that comes with company oversight.
Whoever you choose to hire to operate parts of your company you need an element of oversight and enforce quality standards on your staff. Next, ensure you are imparting your outlook to the person left in charge of building that bridge or it won’t turn out how you first envisioned it.
The Top Three Skills No Business Owner Should Go Without
We are not suggesting you run these departments, but you need both a working knowledge of all three and to closely monitor those you left in charge to run critical departments. Always be sure they know your targets and the vision you have for the company while they operate these critical departments.
The Act Phase
Once you have located the skills within your company to carry out the targets you developed in the thinking phase, you are now ready to Act. To start acting you need to create leverage to strengthen your commitment to the Better Thinking Process, this way you do not give up halfway. Finding personal leverage to act is done by taking the first step and remembering that when the boulder starts to roll it becomes easier and easier as it picks up momentum. Taking the first step is the hardest, but having the skills help you lay out the steps you are going to take.
By making small steps that act as mini checkpoints toward your target, gives you small hits of satisfaction that make ideas a reality. But you can increase your success by incorporating Motivators into your action.
Remember the famous idiom, “Learn to walk before you run.”
Let’s think about moving a car, you do it one step at a time, and that first step is hard as nails. Maybe you can’t even get it rolling! Setting all the steps, getting everyone in the room, having the whole team on the same page, collecting the resources, and on and on. It takes a lot of preparation to get to that first crucial step toward your target. But, when the car gets going the next subsequent steps are slowly easier to make, and once you are rolling little effort is needed.
To help you act, to take the first step, you need leverage to keep you honest, and to fight off your brain’s survival mechanisms that keep us happy.
Example of motivators:
>>> Tell your employees your target so they hold you and themselves accountable (On The Hook).
>>> Rally your entire company and get them working towards this target, every department! (The Same Page)
>>> Seek out a business coach who checks up on you and guides you toward answers and solutions. (Coaching)
Once again, this article is just a brief rundown of the better process, we dive deeper into Think, Skill, Act & The Motivators. What keeps the better-thinking process running in the background of your mind and inside of your business are three calls to action or motivators: On the Hook, Same Page & Coaching. They will hold you accountable for the targets and vision you have created, but most of all keep progress towards building that bridge going.
Find buttons below for all four parts of our Thinking Process.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BETTER THINKING PROCESS
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