Clarity, Focus and Action

The Winning Mindset formula

A common definition of success is being better than the person you talk to or being better than the competition. Our definition is about being the absolute best version of yourself possible. Exploring and discovering your full potential or coming pretty damn close at least.

The level to which you achieve this depends only on the Clarity of your perception of the realities around you (Clarity — and not your qualification, education, size of wallet…) and then the Focus with which you embark on your journey and the subsequent Action that you take.

Let’s delve into these three concepts a bit more.

Clarity

Knowing your destination, your customer, your offer and the market

Like any journey, your ability to build a high performing business requires you to have a destination first. Only when you are able to clearly visualize this destination can you start your journey.

The first step on the journey is seeking Clarity on who your customer is, what your differentiated offer should be and how the market behaves. With this clarity, you will find the right product or service that addresses a specific problem or desire that the consumer has and find out how to sell it to the consumer. In doing this, you should be adding tremendous value to your customer.

In the High Performing Business Roadmap, we go through a series of frameworks that will help you get this all important Clarity.

With Clarity, you must now Focus on the right things as you build your business

90% of the entrepreneurs we’ve spoken to say that their biggest problem revolves around focus. The toughest part of being an entrepreneur is having focus and doing what is important for your business. You need to be efficient and effective with your time as it is your most critical asset. I have met many an entrepreneur who is always busy but doesn’t produce results because they are spending time on the wrong thing. This is really what makes or breaks an entrepreneur. It is not about talent or money, its about focus.

Focus is not just about what business you focus on but also what products (or revenue channels) you focus on within your business and what activities you focus on, on a daily basis. You must spend your time mainly on what brings in revenue and do what you are good at and delegate or outsource the rest.

Focus

Focus on the process, not the achievement

As described in the book Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merrymen, Dr Carol Dweck is a psychologist who performed a series of experiments on a group of 400 fifth graders in New York. In one of these experiments, the researchers complemented two separate groups of students for having taken a quiz on a specific subject. One group was simply told that they had great results, and were congratulated on a job well done. The other group of students was complimented on the work they did in the process, saying that they must have done some fantastic hard work in order to get the good results. The research found that the ones that were complimented on their work (the second group) kept getting better and better and were up for bigger challenges in subsequent quizzes and the ones that were complimented on just the results they attained ended up feeling the pressure of keeping up the results and chose less challenging paths later on, so as not to affect people’s impression of their abilities. The first group was thinking about the end result, and the pressure of repeatedly achieving good results led to lower subsequent performance levels. The ones focused on the work (or process) went on to bigger and greater achievements.

In order to become the absolute best version of yourself, and become recognized for being so, you must fine-tune your process. The achievement itself will come naturally as a consequence of this. If you focus on the end result, once you attain this, you might decide that you have attained success and do not want to risk your reputation so you don’t push yourself any longer. You will also never feel satisfied as once you attain success, you immediately start looking for the next thing as you need that validation to keep feeling good. And what if you never hit your target? Then you feel unfulfilled and your morale takes a hit again. Focus instead on the process and enjoy the journey and every day becomes a treat that you look forward to.

Action

Nothing will happen unless you translate Clarity and Focus into Action

You should now have Clarity on where you want to go and understand what you need to Focus on. It’s now time to move to take action on building your High Performing Business. You have to translate all your plans into actionable steps and this involves developing the right habits and environment and learning to overcome obstacles you face along the way. You must know what you should be doing every single day of this journey. As with the example of rock climbing before, it’s structure and planning that ultimately leads to success.

Ultimately, only you can define what success is for you. So discover your purpose, what you want to achieve, visualize it then seek Clarity on how you are going to get there. Focus and move to action quickly according to a plan and enjoy the ride.

If you want more information on The Winning Mindset just reach out to us via email on enquiry@thebusinesscollective.sg. Also, do let us know if you have any thoughts on this topic of The Winning Mindset. We would love to hear from you.