In business school, I was made to believe that strategy is everything—that if you have an ironclad strategy, you’re bound to succeed.
But when I started running my own business, it soon dawned on me that while having a great strategy is important, that alone won’t cut it. Your mindset matters. Strategy forms the building blocks of a successful business. Mindset is the mortar that holds it all together. If you’re a business owner, I believe you should focus more on cultivating your mindset rather than your strategy.
Why Your Mindset Matters
As a business owner, I’ve found that having a healthy, positive mindset makes me more resilient in the face of challenges, gives me motivation to keep going and helps me be a good example to my team. My mindset gives me the fuel to implement and adjust my business strategy no matter what situation I’m in. For instance, at one point, my business was growing, but it then began to plateau. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and my business’s situation became worse. Team members had to limit their visits to seniors’ homes to provide care services. Realizing our business could crumble, my husband and I knew we needed to change our mindsets. So, we recalibrated by implementing temporary measures. By using phone-based nursing assessments, partnering with community providers to offer remote monitoring and leveraging fall-detection devices, we were able to care for seniors and adapt our business model to make it through the pandemic. At the core, my mindset translates to the type of business owner I am.
Research has shown the power of having the right mindset.
Alia Crum, who is now an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University, as well as the Stanford Mind & Body Lab’s principal investigator, put it succinctly when quoted in an article in the Stanford Report: “Our minds aren’t passive observers, simply perceiving reality as it is. Our minds actually change reality.”
The Stanford Report article pointed to the placebo effect in medicine as a powerful example of how our mindsets impact our lives. Specifically, the article explained that while for a while, the placebo effect “was viewed as just an experimental hassle,” physicians are “starting to rethink placebos not as a hassle but as an actual path to better health.”
Another example? Having a growth mindset when learning. A study published in 2019 in the scientific journal Nature had a sample of secondary school students in the U.S. watch a brief “online growth mindset intervention—which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed.” Watching the intervention resulted in “improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased overall enrolment to advanced mathematics courses.”
How To Cultivate A Healthy, Positive Mindset
There are several steps you can take to cultivate a healthy, positive mindset.
First, I recommend investing in personal development. You can take courses, watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts and read books on various personal development and mindset topics. Some of my favorite authors whose works I turn to include Maxwell Maltz, Neville Goddard, Joseph Murphy, Robert Collier and Napoleon Hill. You can also form or join a mastermind group or seek mentorship from someone with more experience.
Additionally, I’m a proponent of visualization and affirmations. According to the New York Times (gated), “Visualization has long been a part of elite sports. Al Oerter, a four-time Olympic discus champion, and the tennis star Billie Jean King were among those using it in the 1960s.” As for affirmations, a Psychology Today article pointed to various studies that show “that self-affirmation can improve one’s life in a variety of ways.”
It’s also vital to surround yourself with people who bring out the best in you. I’ve found that it’s invaluable to have people in my circle who challenge me when needed and help me stretch my imagination to envision new possibilities.
How To Sustain A Healthy, Positive Mindset—Especially During Difficult Times
Cultivating a healthy, positive mindset is one thing. Sustaining it is another. Challenges are inevitable in business. It can be easy to fall into negative thinking when dealing with challenges. However, in my experience, there are steps you can take to sustain a healthy, positive mindset.
The foundational step, in my view, is to review your “why” and purpose. By doing so, whenever times get tough, you’ll be able to remember the reason you started your business in the first place. That knowledge can keep you going.
It’s also important to create a workplace culture where everyone has an opportunity to cultivate and sustain a healthy, positive mindset. For instance, on my team, we have short morning standups where we put aside some time for one team member to share something inspirational. We also have a drip email campaign that goes out to our field and office staff members daily to help them maintain the right mindset.
Additionally, celebrate small wins. As business owners, we tend to have long-term goals. However, we reach those goals through a series of smaller wins. I believe that by celebrating those small wins, you will gain the strength and momentum to keep going.
Finally, I believe it’s paramount to wake up every day and think of yourself as the business owner you want to be. I refer to this as “be, do, have.” Be the person who embodies success. Then, you can move into the “do” stage—taking actions that generate success. From there, you can have the results you want. As Maxwell Maltz wrote in his self-help book Psycho-Cybernetics: “In short, you will ‘act like’ the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”
(c) Forbes.
