How To Stay Focused On What You Can Control In Your Business

Are you a victim or a victor?  In business it’s important to recognize when you are being a victim or a champion.  Business owners spend a lot of time worrying about things that are either not real or they worry about things they can’t control.

Here’s how to stay focused on the things that you have control over.

The first thing is to recognize what are the things that you do have control over.  When you know what those things are you can spend your time working on those things and not wasting time worrying about the rest.

Mindset

The first area that you have control over is your mindset.  Do you have an abundance mindset (seeing possibilities for growth, positive thinking, etc.) vs. a scarcity mindset (fear, doubt, worry, etc.)?  The first place to start with any problem that you have is to examine your mindset and assess where that is.

Fixed Mindset Vs. Growth Mindset

In the fantastic book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, they reference the growth vs. fixed mindset from a study by Carol Dweck.  The reality is that you may be operating within a fixed mindset and not even know it.  Carol gives a set of questions to determine what your mindset is.  If you do have a fixed mindset then you are trapped in your circumstances when you don’t need to be.  This is the best place to start with any problem that you are having in your business.

Knowledge 

For the second area of focus, I want to stay in your mind and talk about your knowledge.  How often have you created scarcity in your business because you stopped learning and growing?  It happens to the best of us from time to time.  It’s important to continue to learn and grow in your business.

Think about your business for a minute.  What is an area of your business where you lack knowledge?  Is it your finances? Managing your employees?  Where could you go to gain more knowledge?  Who could you hire to help you with that?  Another area to look at is your industry as a whole.  You can’t control the direction that your industry goes but you can stay up-to-date with trends and use that knowledge to stay on top of the wave.

Habits

Next, you are going to have to put your mindset and knowledge into practice.  This is where habits come in.  I have talked about this a ton recently so I won’t spend a lot of time on it here but you can control how you interact with your business.  Bad habits equal bad outcomes.  Good habits equal better outcomes.

Action

The last thing that you can focus on for control in your business is the action that you take.  How you plan in your business and how you work in it on a day to day basis is up to you.  As a business owner, no one’s telling you what to do in your business, for better or worse those decisions are up to you.  The better you get at creating daily focus on the most important activities in your business, the more likely you will be at creating the right outcomes.

I will spend some time in the next couple of weeks talking about things that you can’t control and to be aware of what those are.  For now, take some time in your next power hour and ask yourself how good you are at controlling what you can control in the above four areas.  Make any adjustments needed or, if you are already doing a good job here, pat yourself on the back for doing a good job.

How do you stay focused on what you can control?