Take your business to the park

All business owners want to be successful and make a ton of money, but many of them never reach the level of success they want. Being a long time business owner myself, this is a question I have been asking for a very long time:

“What do I have to do to take my business to the next level?”

Over the years I have undergone some amazing transformations as a business owner, because things started clicking together – when I first started I had little pieces of the business puzzle, now I could see the complete picture.
I have found a wonderfully simple way to double my business, and continue growing and be more satisfied than ever before – all I did was to take my business to the park.

Going to the park is an analogy I use as I’m coaching business owners to grow their businesses. Here it is in five easy steps:

At this point you must be asking – Ok what is this “park” and how does it fit in with my business?

Here is the story:

Imagine that there is a park not far from where you live. It is a beautiful place and you love going there because you feel good when you are there, you meet people you like at the park and many of them become your clients. To get to this park you get out of your home and turn West.

Imagine that one day you set out to go to the park, you get ready, wear your best suit, get your brochures, you get in your car and the autopilot in your head turns the car East instead of West – pretty soon you get to a dead end – at the city dump! What a waste of time you think, and you turn around and head to the park again. This time you make it there, but you notice no one wants to talk to you anymore they’re all holding their noses because you smell of the dump! The day is over any way, so you go back home.

Everyday the same thing happens, you set out for the park but you are so preoccupied with thoughts of “how am I going to pay this bill and that bill” and what should I do to drum up more business, that your autopilot keeps taking you to the dump instead of the park. Then one day, you decide no matter what, you are going to go straight to the park – and guess what? Your determination and focus take you straight to the park, you have a fantastic day and make many new contacts. The next day you are really excited about going to the park and you go straight there. Pretty soon your autopilot is programmed to take you to the park and you never end up at the dump again.

The moral of the story is that if you don’t program yourself to think positively you end up at the dump. If you end up at the dump, you smell bad and it takes too long to get to the park. In the process, you have accidentally trained yourself to head towards the park – that is your default direction and that is where your autopilot takes you. If you go straight to the park life is easier and more fun and you get much better results. I listen to people going to the dump with their words all the time without knowing. And that is why even though they want positive results, they don’t get the results that they want. They think that they are being positive because they want a positive result but in reality they are sitting at the dump.

Our words reflect our thoughts and beliefs. Our beliefs form our universe. If you don’t believe that something is possible then for you that is the reality of your life. We all know that and agree with it. What most people don’t understand is that when we talk of a subject we energize it. So if we don’t want something to happen what we need to do is to take our thoughts off it.

For example, I hear kids say “I have a big test tomorrow, I hope I don’t fail” and with that they went straight to the dump because they activated failure.

I hear people say “I am going out on a date, I hope he’s not a loser” and they activated “loser” in their universe – which is the exact opposite of what they want.

I hear business people say “it’s tough” and they activate tough. I hear them say “it’s hard to find clients” or “people don’t want to pay that much for my product or service” and they make that their reality, and then they say “it’s true, so how can I not say it?”

“Say it only if you want it to be true in the future” is what I tell them. If you want your reality to shift you need to shift your thoughts about it first. With everything that I have learnt on my journey, I have put together a program to help people avoid the dump and go straight to the park. For more information on this and other useful tidbits please visit my website, zmahoon.com