In a previous lecture about a balanced lifestyle, some attention was given to the importance of a healthy mindset. As a new entrepreneur, your mind will be your life raft, and it will be important that it is working properly so that you can keep your head up and not go under and drown. So long as you keep your head, whatever disaster may strike, you can put things back together again. Success is not a destination, it is a journey. That journey is not a straight incline to the top. It is a wavy roller coaster to the top. When on a high, remember to be humble and grateful. When at a low, remember to be hopeful and gritty. Failures are only lessons. Success is your diploma after learning.
The uncertainties in business are immense and there will be many factors of which you will have absolutely no control over. One of the most frustrating among these are people, and dealing with people and everything they carry with them will be a very important part of building any business. If you do not understand human nature and/or you take things personally, people will drive you to drink.
You might as well go on and accept that people are funny creatures like water is wet. Deal with it. Anyone who has ever worked in customer service know exactly what I am talking about.
The good thing is that there is something over which you have 100% control over which most people do not control and that is your mindset. In the lecture, “In The Balance” it was stated, “Your psychology is how you interpret what is happening and the meanings you apply to it in relationship to yourself.” Increasing your intelligence will help you interpret things more accurately, yet once you see an event for what it really is, what does it then mean to you? Anything you want it to mean, and the meaning you give it will become your reality. One of the greatest mysteries is how our lives come to confirm our most deepest subconscious expectations, known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you expect to fail, you undoubtedly will. Life is not interested in trying to prove you wrong. Every event that occurs, you will interpret as a sign of your fictitious impending doom and you will begin to make preparations for it instead of getting about the business of winning. People win all the time. Why not you? They are no more fundamentally gifted than you. You may be smarter, better looking and more talented than them and yet they are ahead of you on all accounts most likely because they are not slowed down or dragged backwards by a heavy and darkened mindset, which may be one of your biggest liabilities.
If this is your case I am on, again don’t judge yourself. It is common. Just acknowledge it and fix it. Because it is a habit, it will not be easy to fix. You will have to be vigilant and persistent until it is your new habit of seeing the bright side of everything which is indeed there if you take the time to look for it.
Tell me where I lie:
- Though it may be night now, the sun is shining at this moment somewhere in the world.
- Though I look up and see clouds, sunshine is just behind it.
- Everyday I wake up alive, I still have a chance.
- “I have not failed. I just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” -Thomas Edison when asked about his repeated failures in discovering the light bulb.
- “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life...See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. Have you ever seen color and design quite like it? If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you?” -Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 6:25-29)
- I am more emotionally grateful for those who are being born than grieved by those have died. I celebrate the event of their life more than I mourn its ending. If more were not being born than dying, we would have become extinct 10,000 years ago. Life is winning.
- If love and the forces of good were not winning every day more people would be kicked than kissed, more people would be hung than hugged, there would be more murders than making love and we would have gone extinct long ago. That we still exist is proof that love is still in the world and dominant, and that matters more than all the hate and violence we could ever talk about.
- If justice were not the standard and norm, we would never recognize injustice.
- It’s always Summer some place in the world.
If you don’t want to be happy, continue to focus on what you don’t want. You will find plenty of justifiable reasons not to be happy and not to be hopeful, and who could argue with you?
However, if happiness is your goal, you need to always focus on these positive truths, and from there, you will find even more to be grateful for. Your mind works just like a magnifying glass. It magnifies whatever it focuses on in relation to everything else surrounding it.
Our material world is brought into being through the interplay of positive and negative forces. Everything that occurs has within it a positive and negative force. There is no birth without pain. Rain storms yields flowers, vegetation and a harvest of food. With every danger there is opportunity. No problem ever arises without its solution. The successful entrepreneur will focus on the solution while the masses will focus on the problem and will then pay the entrepreneur a fortune when has found it. In a car, whatever the driver is focused on is what the car drifts toward. Keep your eyes on the road. Keep your eyes on the prize. Focusing on the positive is not simply about feeling good and ignoring reality while living in la-la land. It is about choosing a reality while both realities exist and are equally valid.
Two brothers now grown lost their father to Lung Cancer. He was a chain smoker going through a pack a day. One of his sons has never smoked. The other son does just as heavily and is now developing Emphysema. The non-smoking son was asked why he doesn’t smoke. He replied, “Because my father smoked.” The smoking son was asked the same question. His response was “Because my father smoked.” Same father. Same reason for their choices. Different choices. Different experiences. Why were different choices made? The answer to that question is at the top of the list of determining factors on whether or not someone is going to succeed or fail.
Don King, the boxing promoter is famous for saying that he can call a fight accurately before the bell rings just by the look in the eyes between the two fighters. If Don King were to look at your eyes, would he see a winner? That could be determined by what it is that you are looking at. Are you focused on success or are you concerned about failure and embarrassment?
“All I do is win-win-win no matter what…” -DJ Khaled
This can be your mantra too.
Once you develop the talent of seeing the positive in everything, this will matter much when you begin applying it to people. As aforementioned, if going into business, you will not be able to escape having to deal with people. I am not advocating for being naive and to stop calling a spade a spade. There are many people out there who will try to prey on you and manipulate you if they can. You need to be discerning to see their intentions clear as day and have the courage to call it out when you find something you can not and will not work with. They are like this because they do not believe in justice and may need you to teach them differently. They have had to survive in a world with other people who do not respect justice and yet they want justice. When they do good work, they expect to be compensated fairly for it. So when they do, lavish them with praise and a fair payment. Show them that they do not have to use disingenuous methods to get what they want out of you and that you only respond to truth, honesty and authenticity. Be as hard and ruled as justice is, yet compassionate in your serving of it. When they learn your rules and see you as a just person they can trust, you will begin to see the truth in them, the person they really want to be. To have magic with people, it will be important for you to see that truth before they show it and treat them accordingly, meaning see the best in them. With them, before you even think to criticize them, let them know that you see this truth and that you respect it. You will see that there is something right with everyone if you take the time to look for it. Make it then a habit of looking for what is right about a person before paying attention to what is wrong. Take this as another truth:
“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Once you begin seeing what’s right with people and treating them accordingly and not taking their dysfunctions personally or judging them for it, you will find yourself becoming one of the more popular personalities in town. People will begin seeing the best in you before they even think to criticize. When times are tough, they will look for your light of hope and optimism to push on for another day. This is a quality all great leaders have.
Those who chronically worry, fear, doubt, complain and criticize not only defeat themselves, they turn themselves into a stench around anyone who wants more out of life. People primarily want to feel good and if you can not help people to fulfill that need, how long do you think they will remain in your company? Having to deal with you will be a chore they resist and they will try to get away from you at the earliest feasible opportunity. If this is how you make your customers feel, you are going out of business for certain. If this is how your employees feel, it won’t matter how much you pay them, they are on the hunt for better prospects and their way out, and should you have found good talent, it will be very difficult to replace them and turnover is expensive. If this is how you make your partners feel, they too are looking to bail A.S.A.P. This is how important a positive mental attitude is.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Dr. Maya Angelou
Well, how do you make people feel? Before you poll anyone else, how do you make yourself feel? How do you feel right now? It is very likely you make people feel the way that you do right now and on a regular basis. Do you feel good, grateful, hopeful and excited? If not, take a hard look at your mental attitude and begin at once doing the work of shifting your focus and attention to the positive side of life which is indeed there. You can do this by:
- Journaling your prayers in the evening, always beginning with praise, gratitude and hope.
- Listening to upbeat and uplifting, feel good music.
- Getting up early enough to catch the sunrise.
- Exercising.
- Taking note of your progress and celebrating your micro-wins.
- Eating a healthy, balanced plant-based diet.
- Joining the company of progressive and uplifting individuals, but be sure not to drag them down. Try to catch their positive energy.
- Dress and look your best.
- Affirm yourself daily.
- Praise, affirm, encourage and show appreciation for others.
- Turn off the news.
- Meditate in nature.
- Play at least weekly.
- Laugh daily.
- Surround yourself with beautiful things and in beautiful settings.
- Learn about aromatherapy and use it. Lavender is an excellent feel good scent. Use any scent that transports you to your happy place. If pine scent takes you back to happy times at Christmas, use that.
- Learn about Feng Shui and use it. Google it!
- Give a hug and get a hug daily. Even if you might not need a hug, perhaps someone else does. Don’t deny them.
- Make smiling your make up.
- Commit at least one random act of kindness daily and include it in your prayer journal for the evening about how it made you feel.
- Say “I love you” daily to someone whom you can say this genuinely to and they would understand.
- Find something or someone adorable to love on, a lover, a pet, a baby. Get some cuteness in your life.
- Sleep 8 hours a night.
- Brighten your bedroom with lighter colors and point the head of your bed to the East.
- In 2006, Rhonda Byrne produced a now classic documentary, “The Secret” as an introduction to “The Law of Attraction” and it goes into further scientific detail on the importance of developing a positive mental attitude and other ways to do that. If you have not seen it, or could use a reminder having not seen it in a while, I highly recommend watching it and then beginning a thorough study, research and investigation yourself on these principles and teachers in this documentary.
Make it then your 4th rule to: Keep your head up.
This has been another preparatory lesson for those who want to get ready to tackle their business vision head on with The Baldwin Business Institute thebaldwinbusinessinstitute.eventbrite.com and want to get entrepreneurially fit to maximize their results, for these lessons will not be covered in class. Summer Class starts, Saturday, June 24th. Registration deadline is June 10th. There is a 10 student limit. Don't procrastinate.
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