The Think Phase
The Think Phase
Phase 1: Visualization
Let’s explore the Think phase of the Better Thinking Process and figure out why your mind can be working for you or against you. Once your mind works for you, it gives you access to an important tool that helps you implement targets within your business.
Remember the Strategy Bridge we want to build in your company helps you safely cross the pitfalls associated with business growth. A part of growing with less risk is having the correct business mindset and this is why we teach you the Better Thinking Process first. In short, we are teaching you how to think like a business owner.
Building this Strategy Bridge always starts with visualizing what it will look like and then holding onto that vision. Reminding yourself every day what that bridge looks like, and never losing sight of it, keeps your targets on track. It is easy to become lazy and complacent, but something as simple as a daily reminder of your goals, both small and large, keeps your brain thinking about the target your set.
How can you hold onto this visual? By imagining it with crystal clear detail. When you fully commit your mind to building this bridge, the outlook of your business changes, suddenly problems are opportunities, challenges suddenly have solutions, and the “this is impossible mindset” melts away.
In the next section, we will discuss why your mind works against you, and more importantly how to get it to work for you but we first need to acknowledge some facts.
Your Default Thinking Works Against You
Visualization is a powerful tool and a safe place to play around with your ideas before you act on them. Picturing and playing things out in your mind beforehand, prepares you for executing tasks because your automatic mind already knows what you want to do. Therefore it helps a lot to think things out before you go to do something.
Let’s consider studying in school. By studying you are reminding your automatic mind of the knowledge previously learned. That’s why the mere act of going to class was half the battle in school. There is a direct correlation between attendance and good grades. This is why wise parents shouldn’t let their kids skip class and, in some places, not sending your kid to school is against the law. During the lesson, the teacher creates a memorable sticky moment that your subconscious clings to, so when test time comes around you recall that lesson learned.
Let’s consider the world of athletics. Pro athletes harness the power of the automatic mind (often called the subconscious or unconscious mind) all the time. We see them even ritualize their visualization process before the match or game. You will see them looking at the ground, or sky, or closing their eyes. While it often looks like praying, and perhaps it is not much different from that, what the player is actually doing is imagining themselves shooting, hitting, or throwing their respective balls into their respective nets. They are picturing in detail the exact body movements needed to score that goal.
If you want to call yourself an expert, you need to know every single step it takes to complete a task. Most of you are an HVAC expert (or one in your trade), and you don’t even need to be in the home, and you could imagine yourself installing a furnace step by step. This is the power of your imagination, which you can also use to think about the targets you could implement in your company. Just like you can imagine sitting on a beach, surrounded by white sand and blue skies, you can use this same thinking power to image any target big or small.
By simply thinking about every step that needs to be done, be it that talk you need to give your crew, the bad news conversation you have to have with your manager, or that brass-tax discussion with your business partner. Play through the events like a slow-motion sports replay and see every detail and angle. This way nothing will surprise you when you go to have that conversation.
Think back, have you ever had a conversation where you wish you said something else or thought of something even better to say at the moment? If you think through conversations before you have them, you can anticipate what a person may or may not say, this gives your mind the chance to prepare. So, when you have that important meeting, your mind thinks of the best thing to say. This kind of thinking process is exactly what we teach our sales team at A Trades Company!
Phase 2: Outlook
The Outlook or the way you think of your business impacts its success. If you can’t even imagine that you will succeed, how will you ever find the time, energy, and money to achieve your targets? When we get our unconscious mind working for us and not against us, we start to see small edges and details that we would have missed with a negative mindset. Tell your mind how to think and it will listen when you do this with enough positive daily conditioning. For example:
Write it on your hand, write it on the shop wall, look into the mirror every morning, paste it on your monitor, and print it on your coffee mug. Do whatever it takes to keep the idea fresh and alive in your mind.
Now that you can see the strategy bridge in detail, you need to set targets that will help you build your bridge. Our various business process manuals describe the targets you need to set and outline the steps you need to take to safely cross the pitfalls if you’re looking for more guidance on picking your targets.
If you have never had any mindset training, then know that the default way your brain thinks is not very effective for running a successful business. At all costs your mind is trying to keep your expectations in check, so your dreams stay small, your goals limited, and your targets tiny, this way you can avoid mental hardship if you fail. Without a management strategy or a belief system to follow, your plan will fail.
As we know, failing hurts, losing stings, getting rejected sucks, and being passed over for another feels terrible. There are a lot of painful words in the English language to describe situations that fall short of our desires. With this in mind, we all need to look for a better way to think.
You know this all too well if you have ever mustered the courage to ask out a person you liked only to get rejected. Or, studied for a test only to still fail it, practiced for weeks only to get blown out by the better team. Rehearsed hours for a job interview, only not to get selected. Your mind protects you from all of these harsh realities, and it does this by lowering your expectations before you even start the task.
The subconscious has already put safeguards in place in case you fail so you do not feel bad. The problem with this is you put less effort into the task and instead of dedicating 100% of your mental power to achieving your goal, your mind makes you lazy, you devote less, so when you fail it doesn’t feel as bad.
If you have ever barely lost, and nearly won, it hurts a lot more. Be it a game or coming second place in an event, it hurts your pride way more than if you got 50th place. Why is that? Because at 50th place your mind probably gave up long before the game/event ended. It safeguarded you against the loss, and you accepted defeat, but in 2nd place, your mind never gave up, no safeguarding, victory simply slipped through your hands.
Before we go further into discussing the finer points of creating a healthy business mindset a few distinctions between the different layers of the mind should be made clear to assist your overall understanding of how the mind is working against you. Remember our goal is to get our mind working for us not against us.
The Layers of the Mind
The terms unconscious, subconscious, and automatic mind are often used interchangeably by many people, and the same rings true in our mindset training.
While the research is still ongoing, most neuroscientists agree that the mind adorbs a lot of information passively outside of your own activity. That means you can be sitting there listening to someone speak and a deeper layer of your mind is collecting a lot more data than you can actively observe. When you gain experience, your automatic mind is logging the procedural knowledge so you can draw on it later. As for your lungs, heart, and other organs, these are controlled by a layer of the mind that essentially runs on autopilot and is in the brain stem.
The Automatic Mind removes a lot of our agency and predicts what our choice will be before we make it. Making us ask the question, are we in control of ourselves, or are we merely along for the ride?
To prove this, a famous experiment was conducted that showed the automatic mind fires before your Conscious Awareness. The participants in this experiment were tasked with choosing when to snap their wrists up into the air. While they repeatedly chose to snap their wrists their brain waves were measured showing the brain was predicting the choice before it was made.
This makes sense for those who play sports or those of you who work with your hands because you have developed muscle memory. A seemingly automatic process that executes a difficult task with ease. Do you even think about the hammer strokes, or do you just make them without flaw over and over again? Give a child a hammer and ask them to hit a nail, and you will quickly see they have no idea what to do.
Just like we train ourselves to hit the nail on the head every time, so can we train our minds to frame our reality with a winner’s mindset. Set your automatic mind to focus on achieving your goals and targets and watch it play out before your eyes.
The Power of the Mind
If our mind has the ability to trick us into taking less or compromising on our goals, then the opposite is also true. The idea is to reprogram our subconscious and start making it work for us and not against it. It sounds rather funny because it is such a simple trick. Tell yourself you will win, and you will win more often. Look in the mirror every morning and simply say to yourself, I will sell 5 new installs today. Repeat this enough and your subconscious changes from telling you 5 is too many, and you have never sold five furnaces in one day, to 5 furnaces is possible, and you begin to see opportunities that never occurred to you.
You suddenly remember that your newest sales guy was never trained in your follow-up process because he joined in the busy summer season. He’s been using the follow-up process from his previous company! You come up with a clever radio spot and suddenly it leads to a boost in sales leads. By cutting out the negative noise your automatic mind is creating, makes you laser-focused on your success.
Tell yourself what reality you want to live in, and your subconscious mind will try to achieve it.
Phase 3: Think
The target part of the Think phase has several steps and is the work you actually need to do, and in this case, even writing it down might be enough. Writing something is after all a form of visualization.
Leave dreams for sleeping, leave goals for hockey players, because business owners set targets. That means you need to stop dreaming, stop setting goals, and start making achievable targets for your company. Let’s look at how you should be setting your targets.
Setting Targets
The target part of the Think phase has several steps and is the work you actually need to do, and in this case, even writing it down might be enough. Writing something is after all a form of visualization.
Let’s look at how you should be setting your targets.
Set a target, of selling 5 furnaces in one day, this is a short-term target and is very focused. Let’s change it to, I will hold sales workshops once a week for a month and increase each salesperson’s closing rate by 5%. This is a much better target! But, let’s go one level higher and categorize different types of targets.
- Targets I can do today or this week
- Targets I can do in a month’s time
- Targets I can do in 6 month’s time
Try to create targets for each time frame and clearly define the steps you need to take to achieve that target. It is possible a target has several steps, but as long as you document those steps, maybe even add them to the list, having them write it down is key to achieving the target you set.
When it comes to setting goals, keep it as a short sentence, put it on a banner, and put it above the door of your office, “I want to make a million dollars this year.” But how will you achieve this goal? By setting multiple targets. Sit down at the beginning of each month and set at least three targets for that month.
We see it this way, A goal is made up of several targets, and a target is made up of several steps.
Since your brain works against you and tempers your expectations by placing limits on what you achieve, you need to believe it is possible to reach your targets. Once you convince your mind that your targets are hittable, you increase the chances of reaching those targets you set at the beginning of the month.
Once your automatic mind is set on your targets, and you have convinced it that achieving them is possible it will start to log every detail applicable to your targets. Now your mind is fully focused.
Have you ever listened to the same song on repeat and then suddenly discover a riff or beat that you did not previously hear? It was there the whole time, but you just never heard it because you lacked focus. What about a complex film, a detail that you missed on your first watch and only saw on the second viewing? It makes you rethink the meaning of the whole film.
If we return to sports, you will often hear people say things like victory is about small edges. The 100m dash in sprinting pushes the sport to the very limits. The run times for the world’s fastest man/women keep getting lower and lower because everything from what they wear, to how they stand on the starting block, to how they move their arms is farmed for value. Teams of scientists watch how they run and are thinking and seeing exactly how they run. What was considered an impossible time in the 80s, is now the standard that all runners achieve. Once you think it is possible, suddenly you reach to achieve that new target.
The same goes for business, any small edge you can improve in your company adds up, and having your eyes and ears open to any detail is something that can help you achieve your target. Write it down, if it’s a problem how can it become an opportunity, if it’s positive feedback how can you replicate it, and if it’s a weakness what steps can be taken to strengthen it.
How many times have you walked by that problem area in your home and did not repair it?
What about in your business how many small edges have you missed? Think of the times have you ignored an employee’s complaint. How many employees have quit because they are unhappy, and you blame them and not your management style? People have trouble acting on the negative because of the mental blocks set by their automatic minds and ignoring something feels good. But solving a problem feels great!
Your company is not succeeding because you never acted on problems, or never knew there was something wrong and needed improvement. Once you see something that needs to change write it down as a new target and tell those directly related that your door is open. Begin to visualize the problem and ways to solve it. Write down a list of solutions and order them according to time, money, and labour.
Now that you understand how the mind thinks, let’s move on to the next step of the Better Thinking Process, Skill.
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