Safety In Rural Business - Alecia

Using questions to ensure your business success!

By Lindsay Tighe – Empowered Conversations

If you are serious about having a successful business, you will need to get serious about questions! Keeping ourselves on track, creative, resilient and motivated are essential to running a successful business. But how do we do these things? In particular, if we are in remote or rural areas it can be challenging to connect with other people who may be able to help us. I have been running my own business for 20 years and have been researching ways to help me to help myself and my business to keep on track. One of the best answers I have come up with is to get better at asking myself questions! Let me elaborate. I can honestly say that until 20 years ago my view was that questions were simply sentences with a question mark at the end of them – no big deal! Now you cannot shut me up from talking about questions. But why is that the case, I hear you ask? Let’s start by sharing some interesting research that few people are aware of. We all have something like 60,000 thoughts every single day and typically will have about 95% of the same thoughts again tomorrow as what we had today.. How boring!

It is clear that we have lots of routines and habits that ensure our thinking becomes habitual and routine and, let’s face it, many of us procrastinate and don’t deal with issues, meaning we repeat the same thoughts again and again. Now if you are happy for you and your business to stay on the repeat cycle, this fact may not bother you. However, if you are serious about developing yourself and creating a successful business, you will want to do something about this habitual thinking, particularly when we appreciate some wise words from the Buddha about our thinking: “You are what you think.”

While I love philosophy, and recognise how profound this quote is, let’s also consider the quote in the form of a model: