I see entrepreneurs, salespeople, and business owners on a continual basis who say that they are so busy. They are doing the activity but just not seeing results.
Make sure you are doing the right activities. We don’t know what we don’t know. And, because we don’t know what we don’t know – it’s those blind spots that come and bite us in the butts. Let’s go over some of the most significant blind spots for the majority of entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals out there.
6 Blind Spots that Are Stopping You From Achieving Success!
1. Lack of strategic planning and clarity.
I see so many people showing up to just spray and pray. They show up and throw up. Ready, aim shoot. They all lack strategic planning. They lack clarity. They haven’t done the due diligence on creating a vision or a strategy. They haven’t planned out their success, let alone their day.
When you ask people what it is they want, it’s really easy for them to tell you what it is they don’t want. Very, very rarely can someone tell you what it is they do want. And if they can tell you what it is they do want, it’s usually very ambiguous. It’s unattainable.
The brain is incapable of achieving ambiguity. The brain is only capable of achieving specificity.
If you’re not planning your goals and success out with an implementation plan, how are you going to know how to get from point A to point B.
You’re lacking clarity.
Most people don’t even plan their day, let alone their week, month, quarter, or year. When was the last time you sat down and really put pen to paper or pencil to iPad and mapped out a success strategy? Or mapped out an action plan to really plugin and do the do?
2. The solopreneur mentality.
I hear it all that time. “I’ll do it myself.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a sales professional, a business owner, or an entrepreneur – to achieve success you must surround yourself with a team of people who believe in you and your dreams as much as you believe in yourself and your dreams.
I’m talking about surrounding yourself with referral partners, networking partners, coaches, accountability partners, masterminding partners, and more! I’m talking about teams of people to help you help yourself and help you help your prospective clients.
If you’ve got an, “I’ll do it alone” mentality, then you’re always going to be creating a time-for-money environment. Surround yourself with success-minded people and avoid going it alone. You do not have to do it all alone.
Allow yourself to focus on doing what you’re good at. And then, hire the things that need to be done by people who are good at doing those. If you are spending your time doing things you’re not good at, it’s keeping you from investing your time and doing what generates the revenue.
3. Expectations management.
If you set out to do something, and you don’t set a threshold of expectations, both minimal expectations, average expectations, and exceeding expectations, and you continue to do the activities, how do you know what’s working and not working? You don’t have a benchmark that you’ve set to compare it to.
That’s where so many people flounder. They keep showing up and doing the activity, but they don’t even know if it’s working or not. They do know that they’re not getting the results that they want or need.
It’s really important for you to set a benchmark of expectations. I like to set three levels: minimal expectations, average expectations, and exceeding expectations. And then anytime I do the actions, I gauge it to what my expectations were.
This also allows you to identify if your expectations are realistic. I’ve met people who expect to go to one networking meeting a month and have it build their business to such grandiose dreams. Then, they get frustrated and say that networking doesn’t work.
Really, they just didn’t work it right.
4. Doing only what’s easy.
Oftentimes, entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals will do only what’s easy or what they’re good at, and they avoid what they think is hard. They avoid what they think they’re not good at.
Stop doing only the easy. I like to fill my days with a little bit of the easy stuff, a little bit of the not so easy stuff, and then one or two things that I know nothing about. This stretches me outside of my comfort zone. If you’re only doing what’s easy, you’re just going to continue to get the results that you’ve always gotten.
5. Confusing activity for productivity.
It is really important for you to be hyper-aware of the difference between activity and productivity. Activity is busy work. Productivity is revenue-producing. Productivity moves you forward. Activity just has you chasing your tail and keeping you busy.
Step back and ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing right now moving me towards where I want to go? Or does it just have me spinning around in circles?”
6. Not running your business like a business.
I’ve found that very few people actually run their business like a business. They lack a business plan. They lack an action plan. They lack a marketing plan. They don’t invest money into their business. They don’t spend money where it should or could be spent. They don’t run their business by the numbers. They don’t pursue it as if it was or had the potential to be a larger company. They treat it like a job or a hobby. They trade time for money.
I invite you to step back and ask yourself, “Am I treating this as a job? Am I treating this as a hobby? Am I investing money in myself in my business? Am I investing in others? Am I spending money? Am I managing my business by the numbers? Or am I just making sure that I have enough money to pay my bills?”