Looking Into My Crystal Ball

Last weekend I was travelling back from a trip to Bristol and decided to break up the journey by stopping for a coffee at a service station.

At the table I sat down at somebody had left a Sun newspaper, not my usual choice of reading but I decided to have a quick flick through to see what was happening in the world through the eyes of the people at The Sun.

There’s not much to report back to you in the way of real news but one page did grab my attention and that was Mystic Meg’s astrology predictions for the National Lottery which had a rather large prize fund and was being drawn last Saturday evening.

Were her predictions correct? To be truthful I have no idea. What fascinated me about this piece was that there are people out there that do believe in horoscopes and indeed some who plan their lives by them.

So I thought I would look into my crystal ball and see if I could come up with any predictions for business owners for the rest of 2016, and here is one that will prove a challenge for the vast majority of businesses this year.

Take the last 3 months in your business multiply by 4 and that’s your 2016!

Most business owners will hate that because it highlights that HOPE is not a strategy.

Truth is that if you really want the last 9 months of your year to be better than the first 3, you need to start doing something different.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got”…Tony Robbins

Change can be hard but that is not a reason not to change yet a great many business owners will go into denial when they look at their first quarter results or come to the belief that they just need to work harder!

If I was to ask you to finish off this line for me….. practice makes….?

Most will have answered that with ‘perfect’ after all that is what we have been taught.

Truth is practice doesn’t make ‘perfect’, practice makes ‘permanent’.

As an example if I were a golfer and because of the way I held the club my shots always seemed to swing to the left of where I am aiming and if I were to spend more hours practicing this swing I would see no improvement, I would be wasting my time.

In his heyday Tiger Woods was asked why he had a coach to which he replied “I can’t see my own swing”

And there lies a real problem for business owners because they are working in their business and caught up in the day to day operations doing the do so to speak, when things aren’t going as expected the go to strategies tend to be work harder or put more hours in.

So, by practising the thinking of work harder or put in more hours this can become a permanent fixture in the life of a business owner.  

So what can you do?

In life and business you either win or you learn and a vital process that you will find game changing for your business is to STOP take some time out for quality thinking, REFLECT what has gone well what has gone not so well, REVIEW and UNDERSTAND unpack and analyse what has happened and why did it happen? If needed CHANGE if what you have been doing isn’t working and now because you have taken time out to understand why it’s not working it is time to change direction by either tweaking your strategy or changing your strategy

For some of you it may be quite a challenge to take this time out to run this process but what is the alternative?

For all our clients and owners that attend our Ultimate Planning Day a pre-requisite for the day is that they take time out and complete a preparation document which is designed to take them through the first four steps  STOP, REFLECT, REVIEW and UNDERSTAND the CHANGE step is of course covered in the workshop itself.

If you would like your own copy of preparation document just drop us a line.

Your past does not determine your future is it time for you to give yourself and your business a real lift by taking time out to REFLECT, REVIEW, UNDERSTAND AND CHANGE?