Profit Producing Decision #1 – Entrepreneur Lessons I Learned from Extreme Marathons
Welcome, Jon Berghoff here. Before I get into this I need to acknowledge that as an small business owner one of the things you don’t necessarily get paid for is your time. I understand that you get paid for results that you generate within time. I’m saying this because I want you to understand that I’m doing my best to make sure that this secret will be worth your time. The other thing I want to recognize is that as an entrepreneur myself, you probably share the opinion, that being a entrepreneur feels like being the loneliest person in the world, but being the person in charge, I think we both know that the value of a single decision is sometimes life changing. Sometimes the outcome of one decision is the difference between thriving and surviving.
One of my personal goals is to learn something from everything. I mention this because the secret that I’m giving you right now is an example. In my day to day work I’m a peak performance coach and I teach the science of influence. There are different types of influence – there’s influence over other people, which is the kind most people know of; but there’s also the influence over the self. If you’ve ever faced the struggles of running your own business, you know what I’m referring to. Much of what I’ve learned in business as a coach and as a business owner and as a salesman has also been helpful to me in running extreme marathons. Last year for example, I ran a 100 mile ultra marathon through the Shenandoah Mountains and it just so happens that that day was the hottest day of the entire year. It was going up and down steep mountains through 100 degree heat and a lot of what got me to the finish line were the lessons from business and sales.
Right now I’m going to tell you the first of 6 profit producing decisions that are critical for every business owner to understand.
Decision 1:
The power of deciding to manage your mental state. I teach influence in my day to day work and one of the phrases I use often is influence equals transformation. Influencing someone means they change from one person or state to another person or state – whether that means influencing a customer, a prospect into becoming a customer, or a team member into hitting their goals.
I also truly believe that you can’t give what you don’t have. You can’t cause somebody to feel a certain way if you don’t know how to feel that way yourself. As the person at the top, whether you have zero employees or a hundred employees, whether you have 3 customers or 3000, your mental state is critical. I’ll give you a couple examples of what managing your mental state means.
Oftentimes when I start discussing mental state, people come and ask, “Are you a motivational speaker?” I don’t use that term for myself because there’s science to it and I prefer to keep that in mind. We’ve probably all had moments where we wished we had the ability to be more motivated. But at the end of the day in my personal study of the truly successful, they aren’t motivated all the time. They have the ability to get it done whether they feel like it or not. So what drives them?
If it’s not motivation as we know it, I call it energy. The definition of the word energy is to do work. Basically, when I talk about managing our mental state, it’s really about managing that internal energy. I know that energy comes across as a fuzzy, weak term that you can’t really put a number on. But let me ask you this. Do you know anybody who you could feel an energy from when they walk into room? I’m a big believer that sales is an energy game. You don’t always need to have the most energy. Quantity does matter but it’s not the only thing that matters. Sometimes the type of energy matters more.
Let me give you some specifics here. What are some ways you can manage your mental state? Because if you’ve ever gone into a meeting or attempted to sell someone on an idea and you weren’t in the right state, you already know that this is a critical decision that can affect your bottom line.
Here are two examples that will shift your energy. One of them is your perspective. I’ll show you two powerful questions to use here. The first one is, what are you focusing on at any given moment? As the business owner, what you focus on makes a big difference.
But there’s another question as well. Because you can take two people in the same industry and same business and they might both be focusing on identical thing and getting varying results in the same tough market. But one of them succeeds and the other scrapes by. So what is the other key ingredient of perspective The second question is, how are you deciding to focus on whatever you’re focusing on? This is just a classic example and sometimes we overlook the power of this. It’s helpful to look at what’s not working in our business. But how are you looking at it? Are you focusing on the negatives, on what you don’t have? As an entrepreneur when we focus on what we can’t do, or don’t have, we start working from a place of fear, on a primitive level. When you’re afraid, you try tocling to what you have and you’re not focused on expanding and giving and finding new opportunities. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have or can’t do, decide to focus on what you do have and what you can do. What you appreciate, appreciates (expands). I’m big into motorcycles, and where you look is where you end up going. So what you focus on is your perspective, and how you focus shifts your energy which shifts your mental state which shifts your bottom line.
I’ll give another example of when I use the word energy I know it’s not really measurable. But I’ll talk about something else that affects our energy – it’s choice of emotion. Where really I should say your emotional patterns. As a peak performance coach, often I have entrepreneurs or sales directors ask me, “Jon, how is it that you’re going to come in and talk about these peak performance principles? How’s that going to improve our business? How’s that going to affect our total sales?” If you’ve ever experienced the rejection, failure, or ups and downs that are inevitable in running any business in any industry in any market, I think you already know how important it is to make a constant decision to manage your emotional patterns.
I’ll just give you one question here that I find really powerful. As a coach I’ve always got questions to help you come up with the right answer. A good question to ask is what emotion is appropriate for the moment? Sometimes people think when I start talking about managing your emotional patterns it means you have to be happy go lucky all the time. But there is a place and time for intensity, a place and time for laughter and playfulness, a place and time for anger, in my opinion. I’m not going to get into all the different uses and strategies for how and when to use these emotions. I’m just going to encourage you to perpetually ask yourself, what is the emotion I’m feeling right now and how does it really help the moment? As I often share with my coaching clients, it’s being consciously aware of how you’re feeling. I promise you whether or not you’re consciously asking these questions right now, everyone around you senses and feels how you feel. If you lead a team, I’ll also promise you that they end up mirroring and matching your emotional patterns.
Manage your mental state, and your energy by deciding your perspective and managing your emotional patterns. That’s the first profit producing decision learned on the running trail that every entrepreneur must wrap their head around.
I’ll take a step back now. I didn’t point out the connection earlier, but hopefully you understood it on your own. Running 50 or 100 miles at a time, managing the mental state is 99% of the game.
To get all 6 profit producing decisions, go to my website: www.400milerun.com
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