As an entrepreneur I always have a focus on the market. I aim to understand the wants, needs and drivers of people in a way that would push forward the companies I worked within.
An explanation from NLP perhaps is a good place to start to see why people miss opportunities. I believe it is a question of focus through consideration we can see the need to blink is clearly apparent.
Blinking is having a wide viewpoint in order to analyse an opportunity for all its merits, followed by a narrow focus on key drivers at the key points of decision making.
I realised through a personal trait a consequence of my market focused approach. Something that could certainly be verified by my wife. When I would have lunch with a potential client or in any business context. My wife would ask me where did you go? What did you have to eat? I could usually recall the location, but as for the food even though the event had only happened hours previous I would struggle to recall accurately what I had actually eaten.
I through practice had trained myself to read and predict decision making opportunities and hence had missed something much more fundamental to others. I had no even realised what I had eaten! Essentially I had removed a particular item from my own focus, that being food, and replaced it with reading a relationship.
Training the mind to blink, and eventually to “blink rapidly,” at a subconscious level is something which will help any budding business person.
Visualisation is an age old technique where you can train yourself to think differently, its something we can do while sitting alone hence it doesn’t involve us involving others, something which would need more time to organise.
Visualisation works in a series of steps. First the wide focus you imagine the scenario, then the individual, then you play the series of possible drivers and consequences in your mind to get the wide picture.
The second stage the narrow focus, you pin point the most likely scenario and you act accordingly, and commit to the scenario and act.
When this occurs the immediate outcome may or may not be what you expected so you have to once again widen focus, and think of what the new scenario looks like. Returning to the narrow focus to act.
This happens at a wide range of frequencies. We may blink very slowly in a strategic setting. In essence we only re-analyse the whole picture quarterly. In a negotiation however we may re-analyse ever few minutes or seconds to get the best results.
Practising “blinking,” will no doubt push forward the depth and scope of your business thinking, so keep practising.
Recent Comments