Mindset-taming? Take a chair and a whip…!

Phil McSweeney MA MBA

Mentor, Coach, Chair, Author

Funny thing about #mindset, eh!

You think you’re in charge? Ha! Then you realise you’re not!

Because your mindset always gets there before you.

Do you find that, whatever it is you think about doing, your mindset has already made up your mind for you? It tells you whether you can or you can’t do anything because it’s more powerful than you are. A customer asks you for X. You think to yourself ‘We should do X, shouldn’t we?’ and the words come out ‘Sorry, we don’t do X.’ That’s mindset speaking.

Your mindset is the collection of ingrained beliefs and values you hold that predetermine how you’re going to respond to events. The wrong mindset can be so self-limiting.

I’ll give you a simple example from my mentoring experience.

I have two conversations with two founders about working with them as an advisor. One is very positive. We discuss what I’ll focus on, how I’ll spend time with him, and we get to an agreement quite quickly. I believe that he believes that, fundamentally, good will come of this.

The other founder, I suspect, has a difficulty with trusting people. He wants to beat me down on price and explore the minutiae of what I’ll do. We are slow to get to any agreement. I’ll probably walk away because of this negativity.

Two different mindsets, one pro-collaboration, one too suspicious to try.

For founders, your mindset is critical. It has to be taking you in the right direction and, if it’s not, you have to tame it.

Let me put this fabulous 'no-words' cartoon I found here that just absolutely captures the untamed mind.

I'll mention three mindsets or beliefs that are going to predetermine how you are going to ‘be’ in business, whether it’s building it up or engaging with investors.

Mindset 1 – Customer at the centre

My first priority – understand who you are doing what you’re doing for. Customers! Everything you do should revolve around the customer. Warren Buffett quotes “I’ve never seen a business that delights the customer that doesn’t succeed.”

Years ago, I came across the Kano Model, a model of product development and customer satisfaction developed in Japan in 1984 by Noriaki Kano, Tokyo University of Science’s professor of quality management.

Each attribute of a product or service is assigned to one of three groups of attributes. Let me use booking a hotel room as an example.

You expect a clean, comfortable room with bed and bathroom, and basic amenities like soap, shampoo, towels, kettle. You expect accuracy in the room-booking and reservation process. These are called Threshold attributes in the model. The absolute basics that all customers will expect.

Next, you’d consider a responsive customer service that quickly solves customer issues, or speed of check-in. These are called Performance attributes or satisfiers. They’re what most customers use to compare one service with another.

But the Kano Model talks about a third group - Excitement attributes – like being given a room upgrade for no extra charge unexpectedly, or premium brand soaps and shampoos in your room, or a sandwich in the fridge if you arrive late. It’s these attributes that delight by exceeding customer expectations; it’s these that give you competitive advantage.

After you’ve built your MVP, got customers onboarded, what next? Get sticky? Delight customers? Build your culture around them?

Mindset 2 – self-belief

Exceptional founders do this.

They embody an unshakable belief in their mission that can defy all doubt or logic. They have a resolute belief in both their product and themselves.

Take the solution first. A passion for a problem helps you with belief in a solution. You must believe it is really good, much more than good enough. It is the best solution possible. You must be confident that customers will want it, no I mean really need it, and be prepared to tell them about it. When they know about it, they will reach out for it. We might best describe this as zeal – a belief that makes people evangelise and convert sceptics, a belief that is infectious.

Self-belief is a superpower. You can nurture it.

Carol Dweck says you can nurture a positive mindset. What is your job as a founder? It’s simply to enthuse, to get people to follow you. Whether it’s your staff or your customers or your investors, they’ll believe in you only if you believe in yourself and your story. And that comes from nurturing your belief until it is unshakeable, until you are irrepressible.

An Apple employee Bud Tribble described Steve Jobs’ ability to encourage his team to complete virtually any assigned or delegated task as a reality distortion field (RDF) - a phenomenon in which an individual’s intellectual abilities, persuasion skills and persistence make other people set aside scepticism and believe in the possibility of achieving something very difficult.

?“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” Henry Ford

Mindset 3 – Love building your company

But success isn’t only about customer delight or self-belief. There’s a brief video clip of Sam Altman that says you have to fall in love with building your company. A lot goes with this. Building a culture must be top. Success is about learning the importance of relentless execution.

It’s an ‘every waking moment’ thing.

Take breaks, of course, but find the energy to continuously push the company forward.

Daniel Priestley has done some interesting research (seen in a YouTube video recently) where he talks about the difficulty many founders face in going beyond 12 employees because it takes them out of their comfortable existence. If you’re not in love with the idea of scaling then you don’t have the right mindset to become an exceptional entrepreneur, to get beyond running a lifestyle business.

Yes, you can

Mindset-taming for founders is about making sure that what predetermines your attitudes and actions is exactly what you want it to be.

Sometimes, coaching may help in getting you to examine these influences and making plans to positively change them.

One common problem, and we all face it, is internal chatter. And sometimes that voice within is not helping us. It likes to remind us of self-limiting beliefs, to talk us back down from our optimistic but psychologically unsafe highwire ideas, to stop us straying outside the comfort zone.

What have you tried to do to tackle this ‘attack on self’? You can attempt a few things like meditation or box breathing. You can give yourself positive affirmations. You can give yourself ‘full focus’ on something and lock these voices out. Or you can say ‘Enough! You’re not helping!’ and get on with what’s important. Really, you know what you don’t want to be thinking like, don’t you?

Sometimes you just have to start small; small challenges, short term changes, build habit, find a friend to nudge you along, take the time. Then you can answer the question 'What does success look like here?'

It’s getting to the place where you’re happy for your mindset to speak for you because it’s not going to hold you back.

Now go tame it!?