You'd better believe it

I remember one day I was thinking about a big proposal my team was working on and wondering how it was going. Then I found myself thinking, it didn’t matter how it was going because we weren’t going to win it anyway. And we didn’t.

I am not someone who believes in sending messages to the universe and receiving blessings in return. I read the first two paragraphs of The Secret before I put it down with a mental sneer. But I have no doubt that our belief set has a huge impact on our performance. Belief in this context is whether we believe it is possible for us to attain a particular future for our business. Henry Ford said it beautifully: whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right.

One of the most powerful books I’ve read in this area is Carol Dweck’s Mindset. She argues that there are two ends of the mindset spectrum:

Growth mindsets which believe that intelligence/ability is not fixed, new skills can be learned and failure just makes the task more interestingFixed mindsets derive their identity from their intelligence or ability, and that you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Failure for fixed mindsets means that they haven’t got what it takes, and therefore they should abandon the challenge.

I see this all the time. Business owners who simply don’t believe they can make the changes necessary in themselves or their business. People who fear failure because of what they think it says about them to others and, more importantly, to themselves.

I strongly believe that the critical factor in our success is what we say to ourselves about ourselves. I remember a woman who started on our programme but gave up after the first session. Christine said she did not believe she could change and that it would just be another experience of failure for her. It was sad because I could see that she was someone with the skills and aptitude to do really well, but she just couldn’t see it.

I tried to tell her that the great thing about working with growing business owners on our programme is to see and hear the change in what they say to themselves about themselves. Those changes don’t come in flash of inspiration, they come from getting new ideas that create possibilities, setting and achieving small goals that lead to big improvements, and above all else realising that they can. But Christine wouldn’t understand, and she couldn’t run the risk of finding out for herself.

A lot of this is down to what you might call your identity – how do you think about yourself? Identity is a powerful explanation of attitude and behaviour. There was an interesting finding to the effect that the only way to stop soldiers committing atrocities on civilians in the heat of battle is to recall their identity to them – “marines don’t do that”. (The mind boggles as to how they tested other options!).

There is another piece of research involving returning lost wallets. The single biggest group of wallet returners reported that they did so because they’re not the kind of people to keep stuff that isn’t theirs.

It’s the same with being an owner of a small business. Do you define yourself as a small business owner or as a growing business owner? Because how you define yourself will define the choices you make. You will see or not see opportunities depending on how you define yourself. You will choose (or not choose) to do things based on how they align with who you think you are. Who you think you are is who you are going to become.

To say you are a small business owner is to define yourself as small, now and in the future. To define yourself as a growing business owner is to define who you are becoming. That’s a much more interesting game to play, and this series is about you: the growing business owner. It doesn’t matter that the numbers don’t say that about you yet. They will.