Image by Grant Cochrane
In business, you tend to start your career being trained in what are called “hard skills” and I was no different. Hard skills are quantifiable and can be measured to some extent as they are centred around your technical skills, marketing management, operations and sales abilities. You can see yourself how well you are doing in these by how much money you save and how much you are actually selling. Yet, these skills are not enough to make you successful in business in the long term, according to modern business advice. Where your fate as an entrepreneur will be decided is in your “soft skills.”
A fair numbers of years ago, I began to look into training for soft skills, these skills are more to do with the mind and are demonstrated in behaviour, motivation and emotional intelligence. Why are these so important? They can affect the important decisions you make in your business and I have found that many entrepreneurs focus almost all of their training on hard skills, to the detriment of equally important soft skills. There has certainly been a sea change in training and business advice over the past 25 years in business and there has been a significant shift to emphasise soft skills both in large and small businesses. This is because business owners and CEOs need to be able to recruit, retain and develop talent effectively, and to do this you need to be able to understand the mindset of employees.
Critically you need to develop a positive working atmosphere where people communicate well with each other and are highly motivated to succeed. For this to happen you, as an entrepreneur, have to be able to handle your own moods as an individual because your emotions and the actions that result from them affect those around you. Moods can change day to day and these fluctuations can actually have damaging effects on your business. Freud used the term Free Floating Anxiety to define a general feeling of anxiety – essentially the fear that something will go terribly wrong or something bad will happen. This anxiety can be to the detriment to us succeeding in business. Being aware of this issue, I have utilised a very simple technique that I have used over the last couple of years which I would like to share with you. For me personally, it has made a significant difference in my own performance.
When you have anxiety and you feel all those worries start to overwhelm you, stop whatever you are doing and take in a few deep breathes, saying to yourself “let it pass”. Try to let those thoughts wash over you and focus on the breathing instead. The point of this exercise is to realise these worries and thoughts are not part of you. Disassociate yourself with them and remind yourself most of these concerns are about situations which will not ever happen. A simile I like to use is to think of thoughts like the weather. You have good and bad weather but it is ever changing and you have to decide whether you want all the decisions you make to be based on the changing weather: your changing moods, worries and concerns.
If you don’t then its time to take control, manage your emotions and start to be more positive, focused and motivated regardless of the situation you are in. It is the only thing you can rely on to succeed. For me, developing this “piece of mind” has led to significant, positive changes both personally and in a business sense. For the next 10, 20 or even 30 days then, try this approach and see how it works for you. Generally speaking we cannot control what’s going on around us but yet our mood is affected by it. Take this business advice on board; don’t let it get to you, don’t dwell or ruminate, simply let it pass through you and sit back, knowing you can’t control the weather, just your own actions and frame of mind.
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Paul has also written lots of articles for Bright Green Leadership.
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