Today we’re going to look at three mindsets that we need to shift as we go into this year. I am coming across a lot of people who are stuck in the mental models, their mental pause in their own minds, and believe that things of the past are going to continue perpetuating into the future. There’s actually time to take charge of our future and say it doesn’t always have to look like that past. So let’s go to number one.
Number one says we’re in a recession…
We say we’re in a recession, so we believe that life is hard; things are tough. Let me treat that paradigm…I’ve got…it might sound a little bit cheeky, but let me say it. So what if we are in a recession? So the paradigm is: we’re in a recession; the new paradigm says so what if we are in a recession?
I was speaking to a client the other day, and he said he went into a factory or an office, and he said there was a little plaque on the door. The plaque on the door said, “This office has decided not to take part in the recession this year.” So we are not part of the recession. So he said he was standing there, and he was looking around the building and he said to himself, “this building and all these people in this building, they’re not part of the recession.” He looked out the window at the office across the road and he said, “But they’re part of the recession.”
These people have taken themselves away from recessionary thinking. Now does that mean that we don’t know there’s a recession; we can’t read what’s happening in the stock exchanges around the world? Of course we know what’s going on, but let me make a point on this one paradigm. If we say “so what if there’s a recession?,” we’re saying to ourselves “let’s get out and go and do the business that really, really counts.
I’ve heard clients that are so busy going out and getting new business that they’re forgetting there’s a recession. That’s the very point.
I have another point to make, and that is that…and I’ve tested this out with people around South Africa…when the going gets tough, the tough don’t go marketing. The tough stick behind their computers because other people believe there’s nothing out there, all the tangles are taken, all the business is gone, so what do they do? They go back into their offices and they do admin. Now, how many entrepreneurs and leaders are doing admin when they should be out marketing? So the point is if you’re out marketing, there aren’t as many people marketing. So there’s a bit of the pie that you didn’t have that you might have because a lot of people are paralyzed by the fear of the recession.
So let’s shift the paradigm from “there is a recession” to “so what if there’s a recession? I’m busy.”
The second one says “life is full of complexity.”…
Life is full of simplicity. Complexity is all the noise, all the messes, all the stuff that gets in your head during the day. Even success breeds complexity. But all the things that happen during the course of the day that cause you to come home and say, “gee, I’m exhausted.” We need to start taking away all the complexity of our lifestyle and replacing it with some simplicity in our lifestyle, and that simply means listing all of the things that are complex to you. It can be your marriage; it can be your children, your finances; it can be your personal life; it can be your business; it can be anywhere. Most things that are creating that irritation inside of you: list those things down and say “these are complexities; this is noise; this is stuff that I don’t need.” And find ways to turn them into simplicity. I live a very simplified life. You might say I’m not a simple person, but you know it, I try and get rid of noise out of my life as soon as possible because I know the consequence of entertaining noise. So simplicity is where that noise goes away.
The third paradigm says this…
Everything is so scarce. There’s not enough. There’s not enough money; there’s not enough business; there aren’t enough jobs; there’s not enough of this; there’s not enough of that, and we start crowding in on ourselves, and we start becoming very very small people. We kinda get closed into our own space. The new paradigm says life is full of abundance.
Someone said, which is true, how many leaves do you have to pluck off how many trees until all the leaves in the world are taken away? How many gulps of oxygen would you have to suck in before there’s no more oxygen left around us? How many buckets of water would you have to take out of the ocean until all the oceans ran dry, and how many spade-fulls of sand would you have to take from the deserts and the beaches of this world until there was no sand left? The truth is it’s impossible to do so. Absolutely impossible. We live in a world full of abundance, but the question is whether we believe there is abundance. I believe that there’s a lot of business out there. I’ve got clients who are turning business away right now because there’s just so much going on, but their mindset is positive. They believe that good things can happen.
So, three things:
* Shift from “we’re in a recession” to “so what if we’re in a recession?”
* Number two: life is full of complexity to life is full of simplicity
* Finally everything is so scarce to life is full of abundance.