Unlock Your Business Brilliance: Maximize Potential

Unlock Your Business Brilliance: Maximize Potential

So, you are putting in 60 or more hours per week in making your business successful.

How is that going for you?

Are you seeing results that you recognize as success or are you just doubling down looking to make an impact to claim as a win and take a victory lap occasionally?

Stop following the crowd and look closely at yourself. Most likely you are in the habit of focusing on quantity, not quality and by doing so you are competing rather than standing out.

What about You?

• Are you living exponentially or linearly?
• Are you focused on effort or volume or are you creating     something qualitatively different and better than anything else out there?
• Are you spread thin, doing five or more different jobs, or do you have a growing team of  people handling your non personally essential opportunities items. (like 80% of our life stuff).

Discovering Who You Are

Here are eight areas I coach my clients to keep revisiting and growing as their business change.

1. What is your DISC Behavioral Style?

Behavioral styles like DISC models helps us understand what drives us and who we are. Behavioral styles help us understand and communicate with others better.

They are several similar behavioral models like DISC. The advantage of each is they make communicating and increasing your insights quicker, easier, and repeatably.

DISC helps classify a person’s communications styles situation into dominant, influencers, stability-orientated and compliance-oriented.

We have all four in each of us – one or two are stronger impactors.

Once you learn how these communications styles work, you can modify your behavior based on who you are communicating with. This process ultimately leads to reduce overall stress in your business dealings.

2. How do you prefer to learn?

From the age of small children, we all learn differently.

Learning in today’s knowledge focused world being fast and getting faster at establishing basic knowledge. AI is now helping that become true. Search Engines and YouTube sure make things less complicated to access new facts, fresh information, and diverse approaches.

We all know our individuality comes about from our past experiences. Each of our life adventures colors our methods of how we learn. Left versus Right Brain thinking, visually, hands-on, or audibly all come into play. Understanding how to use multiple approaches, especially your left and right brain abilities is valuable.

Accessing the right tools comes easier once you know how you learn best.

3. How much Power do you have in your life?

I use a model called Point of Power. It demonstrates where power comes from, both in our lives and in our organizations.

While simple to explain, becoming fluid in engaging it takes commitment and effort.

There are two zones. On the top are ownership, accountability, responsibility (OAR) versus on the bottom are blame, excuses or denial (BED).

In the bottom zone (“Below the Point” is how many refer to it) you are the victim who has no power over your choice or life; it’s always others fault (that dang timer alarm app didn’t work!).

Above the point it goes into your heart, you own your choice and your life. You take responsibility for what you have accomplished or where you have failed.

With accountability, you measure your results so you can assess where you are in your life and act if you don’t like the direction it is heading.

Becoming aware of whether our actions and thoughts are above or beyond the Point of Power will help us change our thinking to have a better life.

4. Do you Find it  Easy to Make Changes in Your Life?

We will always have problems that will require change.

As our business skills grow, we need to identify problems and then address them and make the necessary changes to resolve the problem.

Is it easy for you to make changes? Why is change easy or difficult for you?

Use a tool called the identity Iceberg, a model that governs how long-term change occurs.

• Most of a human is below the water line.
• Like the Titanic what is below the water is what sinks the ship.
• On the surface, we see BEHAVIOR (actions and decisions)
• Below the surface we have SKILLS, our BELIEFS, our VALUES, our IDENTITY(who I am) or ENVIRONMENT.
• You change from the bottom up. Change your ENVIRONMENT, and you change your IDENTITY. Change your SKILLS, and you change your BEHAVIOR longterm.

How to Learn, Grow and Change

5. Using Both Sides of the Brain in Conjunction

 In 1. above, I referenced that both sides of the brain working together makes you more effective.

Time spent working on this topic removes disconnects between the two sides of your brain. Disconnects are evident when you’re unable to express what you are feeling; assign that what you are learning does not align with your experience.

This is why at work you and associates attend the same training, but often remember different things.

6. Confusion and Questions

Sooner or later we all get confused. But confusion is not a bad thing. Depending upon your response, it may help you expand.

When you enter a state of confusion, you may shut down or wait to be told the answer.

A better approach to when you get confused, stop, and ask a new (and maybe better) question. We know that if the brain asks a weak question, it won’t find an answer quickly. If it asks a different or better question, you might remember the answer more quickly.

Example (Weak question): “What was that guy’s name from that one thing?”

Your brain draws a complete blank and you end up spending the next hours scrolling through social media and IMDB trying to jog your memory, only to be sidetracked by click bait videos.

Example (Better question): What was the name of that actor who played the lead in “The Office” and starred in a movie where he was a secret agent?”

Instantly your brain lights up with “Oh, Steve Carell!”

You get the idea. The association with better questions and starting to take better action is almost inseparable.

7. Failure

Yes, this is not a popular topic.

Why that is so isn’t so surprising. Think about the bragging rights deficit: Sharing business success stories is like winning a gold medal- you get to brag. Talking about business failure is like winning a participation trophy in a contest you didn’t event want to enter.

It’s not that you failed, the challenge is the attitude. The question is: do you learn the lesson and apply that knowledge the next time around?

Fail fast is not a cliche. Today it is a business planning element. Having more iterations means cost effective real market engagement learnings. Budgets need contingencies to allow stretching and risk managed experiments.

If you give 100% every day, you will get 100% back, if you 50%, you get 50% back. 

Avoid being that person who tends to live photocopy lives, doing the same thing every year. If you falter or fail, you won’t know what went wrong.

Face it, we all want to get our attitude right to change our future. One of the biggest challenges to success in life and in business is people on the sidelines being scared of failing.

Greats don’t let their failures define them. Instead, they kept going, often humorously imagining alternative paths, but ultimately sticking to their true passions. Their persistence paid off, and now we can’t imagine a world without their contributions.

Becoming aware of whether our actions and thoughts are above or beyond the Point of Power will help us change our thinking to have a better life.

8. Isn’t that Interesting

“I know” – the two impactful words in the business dictionary. Sometimes we just cross our arms and say it to ourselves.

Learning involves curiosity and inquisitiveness. When we use “I know“ we cut off all the ability to learn something new. Instead of cutting off all possibility of learning, it’s better to say, ”Isn’t that interesting.”

Things change and what worked for you last year or when you were younger, may not be right now, so we need to stay open to hearing old ideas perhaps in a different way, or a different time.

By changing our response, you will dramatically shift how you listen to others and how you respond.

Article Takeaway. Jim Rohn, business coach and leader, said.

“Never wish your life were easier. Wish YOU were better.”

Work harder on yourself than you do on your job!”

Want to change yourself and your approaches? Contact me for a complementary conversation to discuss accelerating your goals and visions. – Coach Mike

Column inspired by Karen Callahan, ActionCOACH Foundation. Copyrighted to ActionCOACH ONE and ActionCoach FOUNDATION.

Who is Mike Ronchetti?

With more than thirty-five years of real-life, on-the-ground small business experience across various industries, Mike has owned, operated, and successfully exited seven businesses. Mike lived in Plainfield, IL, St. Paul, MN, Anchorage, AK., and returned in 2013 to Plainfield. In 2020 Mike and Becky, his wife, relocated to South Bend to be closer to family. In 2021 he became an ActionCOACH certified business and executive coach and opened a local office.  His mission is to work with businesses owners to create vivid dreams, establish aggressive goals and then crush them.