Your Attitude Toward Yourself
Not surprisingly, your attitudes about business development, marketing, and time management are shaped by how you see yourself and the world around you. And in turn, these flow from a complex mix of inherited traits, learned behaviors, unconscious beliefs, emotions, and a lifetime of experiences. You are, as of today, the sum total of this mix. But you also enjoy the uniquely human capacity of self-awareness, and this profound gift allows you to learn and grow and consciously change that mix, and thus change yourself.
The single most important attitude you can adopt, therefore, is a positive approach toward business growth through self-awareness. There are two reasons why this is so. First, the majority of limitations you experience with regard to business development are internal and powerfully self-regulating. Left unexamined and unchallenged, these emotion-based limitations feel like they’re objectively true, so they pre-empt (or stall) your efforts to change. “He’ll think I’m a snake if I ask for his business.” “I just can’t break through to my next level of revenue.” “I don’t have time to research that prospect.” “I didn’t become a lawyer to have sell myself to people.” “I don’t have the right personality to be a good business developer.” These are internal belief states; they influence your behaviors but they’re not externally, unchangeably true. Self-awareness lets you distinguish between legitimate skill set weaknesses (which can be remediated or compensated for), and negative self-constructs (which keep you stuck).
Second, having a positive attitude toward business development through self-discovery allows you to harness your extraordinary ability to actually change your mind – to change your internal belief states and the emotions that both create and reflect them. Researchers in the field of neurocognition speak of the “plasticity” of the brain, of its biochemical responsiveness to either positive or negative thoughts. Sports psychologists and performance coaches have been helping top athletes cultivate mentally-generated performance gains for the last 30 years. In fact, no world-class competitor would even consider training their body without training their mind as well. Techniques such as “belief management,” “mental rehearsal” and “self-talk reframing” are easily learned and directly applicable to the challenge of business development. The key success factor with these techniques, of course, as with business development itself, is your attitude toward them.
