By Kathleen Black
5 Common Mindset Mistakes All Business Professionals Make
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As a business professional on a mission to become a top-performing producer, you likely feel your time and energy pulled in many different directions – working with your buyers and sellers, strategizing how to improve your bottom line or boost office productivity, creating efficient and profitable partnerships…
However, no matter the stage of business you’re in, there are a handful of mindset mistakes I’ve seen again and again throughout my decades spent helping build the most efficient, productive, and profitable businesses and teams in the world. Today, I wanted to share them with you so you can break through them to create abundance in your business and your life.
1. Only showing up to work when you have a client calling on you.
The real growth in your business isn’t happening while you’re visiting with a client or signing a deal. It happens in the cracks of time in between when you choose to take strategic, intentional actions that set your business up for long-term success.
This means using this “in-between” time to actively plan for the future, reach out to current or prospective clients yourself rather than waiting for them to do so (an organized CRM can be a huge help in knowing who to reach out to and when!), and strategizing on ways to help your business operations flow smoother and more effectively.
2. Focusing on immediate monetary goals at the expense of focusing on your long-term vision.
As a business professional, it’s very easy to keep your focus on the now and prioritize your immediate business or financial needs.
But what happens when you’ve hit that monetary goal? For many professionals, if they do so without ironing out their long-term vision, this means hitting a wall and losing motivation. The reality is that you can’t lead yourself anywhere new without a vision. All you can do is manage yourself in the present.
This is why it’s incredibly important to put that pen to paper and let your subconscious run the show as you consider what you truly value, what you want to get out of life, and what your business needs to look like to help you get there.
3. Not setting up the systems and processes that will allow you to do your best work.
Though many of us find ourselves getting caught up in the day-to-day and unable to find the time to do much else in our businesses, the reality is that getting the right systems and processes in place is critical to helping us get to that next level (without having to work harder or longer).
To start determining what these may look like for your business, begin by looking at your business from A to Z, picking out the individual elements, and then asking yourself the following: How do I win at each element? And who is the ideal person to excel in this element?
4. Getting stuck in a lack mindset rather than an abundance mindset.
Even if you have the best, most strategic systems and processes in place, if you’re not in a clear and confident headspace, then you’re simply not going to reap the rewards of your efforts.
The reality is that many subconsciously operate from a “lack” mindset. In other words, we spend our time focused on what we want to avoid (ex. having an upcoming deal fall through) rather than on what we want to achieve (ex. having four deals go through quarterly, even if the current one on the agenda happens to not work out).
Focusing on what we want to achieve and believing there’s an “abundance” of resources out there for it to be done draws us into the abundance mindset that all top producers share.
5. Not hiring help.
In business, everyone is a team. If you want to succeed and grow, you simply can’t operate without a team in some capacity. Elite professionals know this. Rather than work harder, they work more intentionally to determine who is the best person for the task at hand.
That said, you also can’t go from a solopreneur to a team overnight. As we often teach in our programs, this transition comes in stages and often involves mindset work along the way: from ego (doing it all on your own as your ego gets in the way of reaching out) to consciousness (empowering and expanding your business with the recognition of your personal strengths and weaknesses) and finally collective (becoming a part of collective collaborations that allow you to become an industry icon).
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To reach top producer status, be sure to take heed of these bad habits, recognize when you slip into them, and create a plan for what to replace them with so you can set yourself up for success.
And if you’re a team leader or solopreneur who’d like additional support in growing into a conscious leader and becoming more efficient, productive, and profitable in your business, then join us this November for our Ultimate Team Summit. You can get your ticket at https://kathleenspeaks.com/events/