Dicing up the pineapple industry

To grow your business, you need to look deeper

In my late twenties, I had grown up from that 6-year-old. At that stage, I ran a design agency. While I once sold tattoos for 5 cents, I was now designing logos for fifteen thousand dollars a pop! It might be easy to justify the five cents to fifteen thousand dollars increase to age and experience. Yet that’s not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. To find the key to financial success, we need to look deeper. We need to go deeper into our minds. Most people will attribute maturity and intelligence to our business growth. Then let’s re-examine two facts. Is intelligence and maturity linked to business growth? We can all become wiser, and we all have access to everything we need to grow our business. Yet, why do an estimated 20 percent of new small businesses in Australia fail in their first year? Up to 60 percent of start-up businesses will not survive beyond five years of launching. It cannot be due to intelligence alone. Regardless of how much we know and how old we become, the longer we are in business, the more likely we will fail. So, age and wisdom account for little. If I asked you right now, “Why have your business revenues stalled or fallen?” I would get a summation of your beliefs. A litany of reasons for the demise and you of course would be right. Though people like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Larry Page would disagree. The reason? One word; mindset. With the right mindset even a 6-year-old can start and grow a business. But with the wrong mindset, a genius can fail. Think about it...when times get tough, tough minds thrive while weak minds go bust. What determines taking action to re-engineer your business? What dictates your ability to find creative solutions? What one element tells you to make those phone calls or schedule those critical meetings? Again, one word; mindset. But what is „mindset“ and how does one improve it?

How you see yourself, is how you’ll be yourself

The higher your self-esteem, the better your mindset. Though I must add a layer of complexity to this. Your mindset is a combination of your beliefs, values and the very reasons you do what you do. These fuel your frequency of attempts at success and quality of your behaviours. Your behaviours of course, determine the size of your business. All these invisible mental drivers determine who you think you are. Who you think you are, you are. How you see yourself, is how you’ll be yourself. Your self-image is everything! In the context of business, it‘s either priceless or it‘s stifling. Is self-image that important? No, it‘s critical. I’ve seen intelligent adults with low self- esteem fall apart at the negotiation table. Their self-image is below their counterparts. Like babbling simpletons, they cave in at the first counterattack in the negotiation. When the negotiations start, they’re finished. How we do one thing is how we do everything. If we fall apart at the first sign of stress, we build our neural strategy around stress. We come home from a failed negotiation only to hit the bottle or beat up on ourselves. It’s a simple pattern; life gets tough, and we hurt or hide. This mindset will not get you up that millionaire’s mountain.