Making the Leap

Hello, fellow business owners, George Swift here from Bigger Brighter Bolder, and today I want to talk to you about making the leap.  

This is usually a two-hour workshop that I run with business owners, so I'm going to give you a really uber-compressed version, but there's a reason why we're not leaping. There's a reason we're not doing what we need to do. A reason we're not really committing ourselves to our objectives or to our goals, to our businesses, our health, whatever it might be. 

Obviously, as a small business owner, we are talking about business right now, first and foremost, but it's the same for anything else in our life. I've got a little slide deck I want to share with you on this one, just to really illustrate to you why we're not necessarily really going for what we want in life.  

So, let's go back in history. Let's go back to our caveman ancestry and our cave lady ancestry. There's this big chasm - we’re on one side of the chasm, and at the moment, it's just risk here, isn't it? There's no reward, it's just risk. If I try and leap across here, I could fall to my death, break my ankle, whatever it might be, or just fall in the pit and not get back out. If I climb into the pit, maybe I can't get back out and I starve to death, et cetera, there is no reason on God's earth why I would possibly want to make this leap.  

However, there are multiple forces playing out that may be why you wouldn't want to leap and may be why you don't want to leap.  

So let's have a little look at those forces. Number one - okay, it could be a leap either way here, right - we live in the modern world. So maybe it's her that wants to make the leap to him. Maybe it's him that wants to make the leap to her. I'm going to talk about him right now and this guy now has a big reward for this leap - a big driving factor in him is to get to the other side, getting the perceived reward of being with this lovely, fine creature here, right?  

There are forces there playing out which are the desire to make that leap. Suddenly, this chasm that just looked like a whole load of risk, looks like there might be a reason for taking that chance.  

Now, we add this little monster to the bottom. Now this adds a lot more risk to it. When it's just this, maybe I'll jump, maybe I'll break my leg, maybe I can't get out. This, perceptually, is a much more scary thing. I fall in, I'm definitely dying. If I don't make it, I'm definitely dying. So it ups the ante.  

The force that’s playing out - I'll zoom in on those, okay - is that there's a belief in you, a positive belief in you, that you can make this leap, that you can achieve this task. There's also a belief in you that you're going to get a good reward on the other side. If I make the leap, then I get to have the fruits of that risk-taking, or whatever, right?  

However, of course, competing with belief is doubt and this doubt is what's holding you back. So the belief that it's worth it, the belief that you should do it, the belief that you're going to get great rewards, the belief that you're capable, are all pushing you to the leap. However, your doubt is holding you back.  

You also have something called negative push that's pushing you, and the negative push is, if I don't make this leap, someone else will get hurt, or I don't get to have that. Or if there's a couple of other lads over here sitting there thinking, “Come on mate, get on with it.” If I don't jump, they're going to think that I'm weak and they're going to think that I'm whatever, right? Make sense?  

So you have that negative push, which is also pushing you to make that jump. There's also an amount of effort involved. There's an amount of effort involved in this leap. That amount of effort needs to be rewarded, otherwise it's just a lot of effort, doubts, risk. What's the point?  

So when you’re facing anything in life or business, where you want an outcome, in this case, you want her, but there's a risk associated with it, there's a degree of effort involved, there is a reward pulling you towards it as well. You have some belief in yourself and belief in the objective but you also have lots of doubts in there. Maybe you have some negative pushing as well. You know, if I don't do this, I'm going to struggle financially. If I don't do this, I'm not achieving my potential. These forces all play out in a way like this. And if reward, belief and negative push aren't greater than doubt, fear and effort, you're simply not going to go. You're going to procrastinate. Does this make sense?  

If reward, belief and negative push is a little bit greater than doubt, fear and effort, you'll make some effort. You'll move forward slowly, right? But if the rewards and the positive belief in yourself and a little bit of negative push in there massively outweigh any doubt, any fear and any effort, then of course you will make that leap.  

The reason you're not fully committing to a goal or objective isn't because you're lazy, isn't because of some other reason, it's really simple and at an unconscious level. Consciously, it's probably not true, but on an unconscious level, your belief in yourself, your belief in your objective, your belief in the outcome, the rewards that you perceive you're going to get from that and the effort that you're going to have to put in, the risks associated with it, all of that isn't playing out in your favour. Does this make sense?  

So your job, when it comes to wanting to work on your mindset to be able to really commit yourself to any undertaking, personal or business, is actually to tip these scales in your favour. You want to make sure that you're really reward-focused, that you're really aware of all of the rewards that are coming from this effort, from taking these chances and putting this amount of energy in and making sacrifices. You need to make sure that you're reward-focused, you need to make sure that you are constantly living in high levels of your own personal belief.  

It's not about being delusional, it's about making sure that you’re not being down on yourself, keeping your mindset strong, that you are aware of your capabilities. If you can't physically make this jump, you don't want to be doing this jump, right? For most people, that's not the problem. They can make the jump, they're just not doing the jump. It's not playing out.  

So you want to make sure you tip the scales in your favour, be reward-focused, make sure you develop real confidence in yourself - not blind confidence, develop and grow real confidence in yourself - show yourself who you are, really tap into who you are, believe in that and believe in the objective, believe in your goals, believe in your vision and what it is you're trying to create. A little bit of negative push, don't rely on it too much, a bit of a kick up the arse that is, “If I don't get going, I'm missing out on the opportunity.” Don't use that as your main driver, but if it's a little kick up the arse to get you going, use that, and then you want to make sure that you keep on top of your doubt and your fears and don't let the idea this is hard work get in the way.  

The truth of the matter is that anything worth achieving is going to be hard work. Anything you're doing of any substance is going to have a degree of risk in there, you're going to have doubts in there. We just want to make sure that we are overwhelmingly tipping the scales in favour of committing ourselves and, as I say, it's a two-hour workshop I do, getting people to really dive into each of these areas and to look at how they can tip that balance for them.  

For now, just an overview to let you know what is going on and why you might not be making that metaphorical leap in your business.