This One Concept Changed My Speed of Change

A friend was recently sharing with me how he felt stuck, almost frozen into inaction, over a decision as to whether to scale his business or not. It had been months of going back and forth, in overthinking and hesitation, as his debts continued to grow.?

I thought back to the time when I had done the same thing. For years I had been trying to recreate success after going through bankruptcy. The answer finally came in the form of a mentor, who had what I later learned was the missing piece to changing outcomes and success.

Because it was new, I fought him, resisted, spent hours overthinking, doing the same old thing, for six months, living in the sandbox of inaction, fear, and excuses.

Then, I peeked into the nuance of what he was sharing with me and discovered a very simple principle of success that most of us don’t understand.

I falsely thought that my character drove behavior, in reality, he made clear to me that behavior drove changes in my character.?

I can't say, for instance, that I’m the person who eats 500 calories of chocolate every day if my behavioral change is only to eat 100 calories.? I need to acknowledge my new understanding of myself.?

It's a far smaller mountain to move behavior than it is to move character-- we accelerate change, and therefore the outcomes of new ways of thinking, and they lead to new understandings of ourselves-- we don't need to change fundamentally, we need to change incrementally.

What I see in the world: maybe in business... We think we have an outcome problem in business, and we do, but the habit that drives that poor outcome is often more easily changed than we think: if we have a habit of disregarding someone's comment on our business process-- the simple fix is to listen more and see if there's a tweak in there that may change outcomes.? Suddenly, outcome changes are manageable, not massive.? As it is in ourselves, it is in our business.

If it would benefit you to discover other insights into your habits of thinking, that may be sabotaging you, your business, or your family, please DM me, I’d be happy to connect and chat.