How To Grow Your Business With Your Mind

You have to find something that you love enough to be able to take risks, jump over the hurdles and break through the brick walls that are always going to be placed in front of you. If you don't have that kind of feeling for what it is you are doing, you'll stop at the first giant hurdle. George Lucas

What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Napolean Hill

The above quotes seem to complement each other nicely. After perusing my saved list of motivational quotes, I chose these two to help inspire my wife to stay encouraged with her business. She operates a small service firm and is in the midst of reorganizing her business for growth. As anyone who has started a business knows, the road is not always easy. Recently, we were discussing some of the challenges the business faced, and how our attitudes, thought processes, and visions, greatly affect our outcomes. If you are in any phase of starting or operating a small business, you may find this helpful. Good luck to you! The following is taken from the email I wrote to my wife, after being inspired by these quotes:

I thought this might be helpful to continue our discussion and thoughts from the other night about how we can positively affect our outcomes, specifically with our new business endeavors. The ideas conveyed in these two quotes coincide with what we've been saying about the need to get ‘excited’ about building our business. If you don’t feel it, see it, and believe it strongly, then as soon as a potential road block presents itself you will view it as some inevitable negative feedback supporting any negative thoughts (conscious or non-conscious) you may have harbored.

However, on the flip side if we are excited, confident, and ever-clearer about our thriving business, then when potential road block appears we will intuitively find a way around it. Or better yet, we will find a way to use that ‘potentially’ negative circumstance as a learning experience which will help us along our way to realizing our goals.

So we now find a way during our busy days to think & see ourselves in our new office, with our professional support staff! See them pleasantly answering our ringing phones! Feel the accomplished feeling you have when the "name of your business here" are words well recognized and respected in the industry! So, here are some thoughts inspired by the above quotes:

Your Goal - Keep It Ever Present

Think about and visualize your thriving business everyday, and keep it going! Never underestimate the power of the ‘status quo’ and it’s affect on keeping us comfortable with our own mediocrity. Once we understand how the two parts of our brain work (conscious vs. unconscious) we can understand why we have to continually keep our goals, thoughts, vision, ever present in our minds. You see, our conscious mind is active with creating ideas, plans, etc., that coincide with our desires. But it is not very good at sustaining our desires.

Take a look at how crowded a gym is with new members right after the New Year, and then take another look sometime in mid-February! What happened? Our good desires were trumped by our beliefs & habits. That well-intended original desire never got fully transmitted to the non-conscious part of our brain. So the non-conscious did its job of reinforcing our held beliefs and habits. In a sense we are held captive by our beliefs, whether we know it or not. The answer to sustaining our desires is to understand how the subconscious mind works and reprogram it with new beliefs.

Creating New Habits

Do you think you are in charge? Remember this: Beliefs will ALWAYS win over desires, as they are self-fulfilling. This is because habits are much stronger and way more powerful than desires! And it is your habits, not desires or other conscious thoughts that affect your actions. Science in neurological research has recently discovered that 96 to 98 percent of all your behaviors are automatic. This why we set goals, but don’t reach them. Setting them is a function of the conscious mind. Reaching them is a function of the non-conscious mind. John Assaraf and Murray Smith, © The Answer 2008

Two powerful tools that we can use to combat the insidious trappings of the ‘everyday’ is visualization combined with excitement.

Visualizing and maintaining positive, clear thoughts about how we see ourselves in our new scenario is very instrumental in order for us to reprogram our non-conscious depository. Keep in mind that our habits are reinforced every day, without us even being aware of it. So we have to introduce new information to that part of our brain, new thoughts, new pictures, new excitement! It's also important to realize that our subconscious mind only knows the present tense. It operates in the present time so when we visualize our goals and see them in our minds, our non-conscious brain presents this scenario as real & present to our conscious brain – something happening now, not in the future. The non-conscious mind does not recoginze past or future, so it begins to work with the conscious mind to make our thoughts & pictures real right now! It begins searching for circumstances that will support what we're telling it, and it allows us to find those circumstances, things, people, etc., that will reinforce and build upon our thoughts, pictures, feelings, & beliefs. Getting and staying excited about your progress also helps to keep sending your subconscious the right information and pictures so it can do its job of creating new beliefs to reinforce your thoughts. Over time, your non-conscious mind learns to stay keenly alert, searching to support your new reality. Then, you begin to develop new habits from your new beliefs. You will find that the more in tune you are with this principle and the more you understand how the subconscious mind works, the more you will see it come to fruition.

Key Action Steps

Here is what is important in putting this principle to work.

1. We have to continually keep our thoughts of what it is we want in our minds and in front of us daily. The more we think and see ourselves in our new situation, the faster things begin happening to get us there.
2. Details, Details, Details! Another key is to be clear about what it is we want. Details of our business must be thought about, talked about, and visualized as often as possible and on a daily basis.
3. Give your mind some quiet time each day. This is important because it allows your mind to settle and focus on what your feeding it. Our days are full of activity and that's good, but allowing yourself to clear your mind of the daily clutter will enhance your results.

Thoughts held long enough and clear enough become beliefs…. And new beliefs are what we are creating for our non-conscious mind… and beliefs become new habits that can replace old habits.

Remember that our thoughts are actually made of energy (as science has proved) and our energy then resonates with similar thought patterns and frequencies to bring about our imposed reality. We see this all the time with people and their circumstances. Unfortunately many times the examples around us are of those who sustain negative thoughts of one kind or another and consequently seem to find things that support their continually-held thought patterns. The non-conscious mind works non-stop to manifest the thoughts we present to it.

So, armed with this knowledge, we can practice presenting our non-conscious brains with what it is we desire. Try it, be persistent, and be mindful of the positive changes when they occurr. They will occur and you will succeed!