There are only 3 reasons you are not as successful as you'd like to be.

The first is that your mind is not open enough to the possibilities.  You can imagine being more profitable (who can't?), but you can't imagine how that might look.  Why? Because it doesn't exist, because you can't take your eyes off the way things are now, and because you don't have time to go into your mind, and even if you did, you don't know how to picture it.  Fundamentally it means change, and we prefer to stick with the familiar, no matter how ugly it is, rather than step off the ledge.  Don't feel bad - the human mind does closed very well.  That's where everything is automatic and done in what you could call the semi-conscious.

Let's say you have an idea about how things could be improved.  Let's say you even manage to visualise it and take the first steps towards it (maybe it's a new market or a strategy of working only with particular kinds of customers). The second reason you haven't reached your potential is that you don't stick at it, despite your best intentions.  This is because you don't have a process or a system, something external to you, that happens whether you initiate it or not.  The process you need if you are going to be more successful in business has to cover two areas:

• Inspiration: you need new ideas to create possibilities that will motivate you to persevere.  What is motivation after all but the sense of opportunity for reward?  You need a process of getting regular inspiration, because you're unlikely to get it from where you are now.
• Implementation: you have to honestly review your progress, develop confidence from your achievements and redouble your efforts where you've fallen short.  The idea of some secret way of making wonderful things materialise just by thinking about them is simply childish.  Your parents were right: anything worthwhile in this world takes effort.  The problem is that when we fall off the wagon, the inclination is to stay off, and so we get dragged back to our toxic present.  We need a process so that we can regularly review our progress and re-commit to our goals

Before you can create a process like that, you run into the single biggest reason you're not as successful as you want to be: you don't have time.  That process only works if you're prepared to put time into it.  I had a couple of conversations recently with very successful business owners.  They were doing lots of good things in their business to make it even more profitable.  And then I said, "This is great, but if you want to double your profits, this won't get you there.  What's the big picture?"  Being smart guys, they both had answers that sounded pretty good.  Until I asked them what was stopping them.  The great thing about these guys is that they didn't blame the economy or anything outside themselves.  They've been with me long enough to know that the results we get are our responsibility alone.

What they said was that they didn't have the time because they were busy running the business at its current level.  As we explored how to make the opportunity happen it became obvious to them that they had to step their role up to another level, and the only way to do that was to dedicate a specific period of time every week to the big strategy.  To do that, they had to hand some of their current role over to others.

The success process is really so very simple: create a picture of a better business, and then create a process for getting inspired, putting new things into place, reviewing progress and re-committing.

And at that point, most people feel overwhelmed and give up because the process sounds like a lot of work and they don't have the time. 

I've been running a very successful business and personal development programme for owners of small businesses for the last 5 years (and spent a professional lifetime in the strategy and change management business).  All that time I've been trying to understand the essence, the simple truth about being more successful.  I'm a great believer in the 80/20 principle and I'm also an avid collector of great questions.  The one I'm working on now is, "what's the 20% of the effort that creates 80% of the outcome for coaching?" 

It's got to have the three elements:

• the content has to be illuminating and inspiring
• the process has to have review and accountability hard-wired into it
• it has to be kept simple, succinct and powerful if people are going to feel they've got the time to commit - a maximum of an hour a week

I've got a couple of ideas about this, which you'll see more of over the next couple of months.  In the meantime, ask yourself these questions:

• am I getting regular inspirations?
• do I have a process to review my progress, honestly, objectively and regularly?
• how much time do I put into my long term future?

Mike Ashby 21 March 2008