It is all just really in our heads? Ken Baum, author of Mind over Business: How to Unleash Your Business and Sales Success.
I once was complaining that owning a business isn’t like when I was a government employee and I could just show up at work, do nothing (occasionally) and still get paid for it. Not that all government employees do that, but face it, most people that work at a large company (or even some small companies, can get away with doing nothing all day and they won’t go hungry.
But, if you want to be successful in your own business, or build resiliency at your existing place of work (i.e. give your employers reasons not to lay you off or fire you), then you need to perform. According to Baum, athletes are similar to businesspeople, “the bottom line is that if a businessperson or athlete doesn’t perform, that person doesn’t eat,” (Baum xv).
See, Baum is an athletic performance coach, but if you’re successful in helping people reach the top of their profession there’s probably a few lessons here for the rest of us who want to achieve and sustain success in life and in business.
A few thoughts to get you started:
· You have to believe in yourself before you can sell yourself to somebody else (Baum xviii). In fact, this is similar to a line from the classic movie Jerry Maguire, but the line went, “if you don’t love everyone, you can’t sell anyone.”
· “Do or do not, there is no try,” Yoda. Baum also uses this quote but notes that “doing” causes a result every time – and if you keep doing the same things over and over, you’ll get the same results
· We need to work on the entire process – just like a car in an assembly line, you can’t just speed up one part of the assembly line without affecting the others (Baum 1-2)
Like Habit 1 of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Baum explains that in order to be successful, we have to acknowledge what is within our control. He uses a baseball analogy from a time when he spoke with Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher, Randy “the Big Unit” Johnson. Baum was trying to help Johnson get into the zone (a topic we’ve talked about previously in this blog), where he just doesn’t think about whether the batter will hit the ball, what the score is or anything else, other than the next pitch. It’s a great way of approaching business and life – you can’t control much of what goes on around you, but you can control your actions, you can control what you do.
If you can be a master of controlling that which is within your control, then according to Baum, succeed you will, yeeees.
Baum, Kenneth, and Bob Andelman. Mind over Business: How to Unleash Your Business and Sales Success by Rewiring the Mind/body Connection. New York: Prentice Hall, 2012. Print.
