Business Owners and Schizophrenia

The case for Multiple Personality

Disorder in business

Or how to be the Business Owner

By Roland Hanekroot, New Perspectives Business Coaching http://www.newperspectives.com.au/

Every business owner I have ever worked with has at some stage been stumped by a variation of the chicken or egg dilemma:

What comes first?

• I would like to spend more time developing my business, but I don’t know if I can afford to lose the time.
• I would like to employ extra staff, but I don’t know if I can afford the time to train them.
• I would like to spend more time generating leads and business, but if I am successful at that I don’t know if I will be able to handle the extra work.
• I would like to employ extra staff, but I don’t know if my cash flow will be able to handle it.
• I would like to develop my business processes and systems to be able to handle a lot more work, but maybe I should get that extra work first.
• I would like to employ extra staff, but I don’t know if I will still have enough work for them in 3 months.
• Etc.

So what really comes first?
First comes a realisation. It is the realisation that owning a business involves a particular type of schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder; you have to be three different people at once,

Michael Gerber in his E-Myth books refers to them as:

1. The Technician (Who does the technical work, be it that of a carpenter, a salesperson or a lawyer)
2. The manager (Who does the day to day management of the business: admin, finance, sales, managing people and processes etc)
3. The Entrepreneur, or the business owner (Who does the business building work)

Suffering from schizophrenia is something you would not wish on your worst enemy and what is more, if you are intent on owning a business there is no cure.
You are simply going to have to accept the fact that all three personalities demand their time and space, equally.

Most business owners (including myself) know how and when to be the technician, how to do the technical work (the work of the business), that is how we got started, and who we have always been. Most of us also know something about being the manager and with a greater or lesser degree of efficiency we carry out the work of the manager, maybe a bit later than we’d like, or just pushing the deadlines. Often we feel this manager person gnawing at the back of our minds when we are being the technician on a daily basis, but generally we give him or her the required time and space, otherwise our businesses would have gone down the toilet ages ago.

The entrepreneur

Not many of us know how and when to be that third person though. We really just put her in the too hard basket most of the time. We can feel her fighting to get out of that basket sometimes, but there just is no time this week; that quote must be finished first and project “X” has fallen behind, and we are already a week late with our BAS return etc. So we keep the entrepreneur in her basket, put the lid on the basket, and sit on it for good measure. Maybe we let her out at night sometimes, or on a weekend every now and then, but certainly not during business hours when we have to make money and do the stuff we do, and do it and do it and do it….

Yet, the contradiction is that the most important work that you and only you as the business owner can ever do is the business building work.

The work of the business owner is not the work of the business. The work of the business owner is not the technical work, it is not the administration, and nor is it the sales or any of the other things that the business needs to carry out on a day to day basis.

The work of the business owner is the creative work of developing the business; it is imagining what you want the business to look like in 6 months, a year, 5 years. It is thinking time, it is planning; it is looking into the future and deciding how it will look. It is developing the strategies, the processes, the systems to make your vision a reality. It is creating the methods to measure the effectiveness of your systems and processes, it is learning and innovating, and deciding what the key indicators for the health of your business are, and where to get them when you need them.

This is the work that you and you alone are accountable and responsible for. Only by doing the Business Building work consistently as a matter of priority, will you be able to build your business into the thing you set out to create when you started it.

The challenge

So here is my challenge to you: As a first little step, beginning modestly, starting this week, with the new financial year coming up soon. How would it be to block out 2 hours a week from your diary, every week? Set in stone, come hell or high water, you are no longer available for clients, suppliers, meetings, employees, administration, phone calls, emails, or anything else. This will be your business building time, your thinking time, and your creative time.

You might find it confronting and feel guilty at first to block a slab of time out of your diary for this work, and on a workday as well! What if a client has an urgent issue for example? Well, I would like you to look at it this way; if your clients want to talk to you urgently at 3.00 am on the Sunday morning of your daughters first birthday, while on a skiing holiday with your family, would you take the call and have a meeting with them at that time? (If you answered “yes” you have greater issues than I can deal with in this article).

Build a bridge

So as my girlfriend says: Build a bridge…. (And get over it)…. simple as that. This weekly business building time is right up there with sleeping and holidays and your family. If you are not building your business, you are not building anything. To quote Michael Gerber again: “You have created a job for yourself with a fool for a boss”.

When you do start to step into the personality of the Business Owner you will find that this is one of the rare occasions when suffering from Schizophrenia is highly rewarding, and you will start to find the solutions to those typical business owners’ dilemmas.

One of the benefits of engaging a business coach is that the realities of being a business owner will become inescapable and the coach will help you integrate this personality and the work that belongs to him into your business life.

Further reading:

• “The E-Myth” series (E-Myth Revisited, E-Myth Mastery, E-Myth contractor, E-Myth manager, E-Myth physician) by Michael Gerber
• “Maverick” by Ricardo Semmler
• “It is not the big that eat the small, but the fast that eat the slow” by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton
• “The effective executive” by Peter Drucker

Neuroscience and marketing your business

Your customers, their Amygdala and Sabre-tooth tigers.

Article by Roland Hanekroot, New Perspectives Business Coaching, www.Newperspectives.com.au

There is a small almond shaped region in our brains, called the “Amygdala”. It is one of the most primitive regions deep in the base of our brains. As business owners we need to get intimately acquainted with this lump of cells in your clients brain, and how it affects her decision making processes. It is your clients’ Amygdala, more than anything else that decides if she is going to become your customer.

One of the functions of the Amygdala is to scan everyone and everything it comes into contact with for threats and danger; it is constantly on the lookout for who can be trusted and who can’t. It is often referred to as part of our reptile brain and dates back to the times when survival depended on being able to assess in an instant if the figure coming towards you was about to kill you, take you food or take your family.

And ever since the days of the dinosaurs, and sabre tooth tigers, when men were men, (and just as dense as they still are), rocks were used as tools and women were dragged around by their hair, it has been performing this function for us.

The Amygdala knows that threats are constant and all around us, and so it makes instant gut level decisions, and then goes on to scan for the next threat.

How does the Amygdala connect to your business?

The Amygdala is very powerful; it has the power to override pretty much all other functions of the brain, instantaneously.

So when a potential customer has an interaction with you, his Amygdala does its thing, and comes back with a very quick decision: friend or foe. Once it has made this decision it sends signals out to the rest of the brain to become more or less guarded.

If the signal is positive, other parts of the brain, slightly higher up are activated to start looking for more positives. And here is the thing: this whole process takes place entirely at an unconscious level. The client has no idea that all of this turmoil is taking place deep inside his brain. He won’t even start to become conscious in some way of this process for somewhere between 15 to 30 seconds. But one thing is clear: The essential decision to buy from you or not is made in that timeframe (except that he doesn’t know it yet).

Pain and pleasure
When I say that the client has made the unconscious decision to become your customer, I am not talking about a decision in the way that we normally think of a decision. The word “decision” implies a conscious process. What it really means is that the client in her whole being has decided that you are safe, and a friend, and that either a pleasure will be gained from being with you or a pain will be relieved.

This is a very good feeling for the client. When she gets this feeling she starts looking for ways and reasons (or excuses) to prolong it. And the most obvious way to prolong this feeling is to do business with you. (Remember, we are still very much at the mercy of our primitive emotions, it is a scary world outside the cave, we crave this feeling of safety constantly and we are social beings, safety in numbers)

Confusion
But keep in mind that the client doesn’t actually know that this is what he is doing and what his primitive brain is leading him to, and hence it is very easy to confuse the client at this stage. As soon as he receives a message that doesn’t fit with his first primitive assessment of you, his brain will start to go around in circles, a bit like a computer that responds to some input with an error message “Does not compute”.

We don’t have to be neuroscientists to understand that a client in this confused state is not going to buy anything. A confused client will focus on getting “un-confused” instead. Being confused puts the Amygdala back in a heightened state of arousal again, and while that goes on, buying decisions simply won’t be made.

That is the story of: The customer,
The Amygdala and Sabre-tooth tigers

Awareness of this principle has many consequences for how we as business owners should approach our marketing. I believe the following 5 steps are the first ones to focus on:
1) Be absolutely clear in your own mind what pain it is that you relieve or what pleasure you give your customers.
2) Be clear in your own mind what the promise is that you make to your customers
3) Decide what basic emotions you want to evoke in the depths of your clients brain (safety, confidence, relief etc.)
4) Live and breathe the qualities that are most likely to evoke those emotions – the first 30 seconds - (what you say, what you ask, how you look, your handshake, your confidence, it is all about your clarity and passion)
5) Explain your promise to the client and confirm the emotions you evoked in the first 30 seconds (this is about all the subsequent messages you send, your email, your website, your documents, the graphics, your logo, your voicemail message, every bit of information you give to the client will all be evaluated against her need to confirm her initial emotional assessment of you)

These steps will lead to clients becoming customers over and over.

Customers become advocates
From here of course the real work of your business starts. Now it is all about delivering on the promise you made to the client in the first place. If your business delivers on the promises you make, time after time, without fail, new customers will continue to do business with you for a very long time. Better yet, by delivering on your promise without fail, customers will become your advocates to everyone they know and meet. And when that happens, those first 30 seconds are largely taken care of before you even come in contact with clients. Your customer/advocate will already have put the clients’ Amygdalas at ease and they will be looking to confirm their decision right from the first moment they shake your hand.

I would love to enter ongoing discussions about this topic, I find it fascinating. Please feel free to add some comments

Further reading:
- “Social intelligence” by Daniel Goleman
- “A Users Guide to the Brain” by John Ratey
- “The Human Mind, and how to make the most of it” by Robert Winston
- http://www.columbia.edu/~ko2132/publications.htm
- http://www.scn.ucla.edu/
- http://newperspectives.com.au/downloads/ochsner%20The%20experience%20of%20emotion.pdf
- http://newperspectives.com.au/downloads/Lieberman%20annurev.psych.pdf

Systems Theory, Coaching and all of us

Thoughts:
I have been reading some really interesting stuff in the last few days, about Sytems Theory, in particular "Family Systems Theory" The idea is that there is no value in looking at or working with a person in isolation from his or her environment (the systems he or she is part of in other words), because one can't be without the other.
This idea ties in with a lot of thoughts and insights that have been swirling around in my brain for a while now, and also draws a line to the article i published on this blog a couple of days ago.
All of us are part of a whole, and everything we are and everything we are part of is inextricably linked to us and vice versa. So often we think of ourselves and the people we relate to in isolation of everything else around us and them. What I think of as my reality is only my reality because of what I am part of. My influence on that system is just as great as it is on me. I am really keen to explore that further and how that thinking impacts on how we look at the world and those we work and live with.
At a very basic level it simply means that if you deal with stresses and challenges in a work environment, it is all very well to put enormous amounts of energy coming to grips with that stress, for example, but it is unlikely to be effective unless you put the same amount of energy into affecting the system that creates the stress. Because if you don't appreciate that the work you do on yourself to come to grips with the stress has an equal impact on the system as a whole you are ignoring one whole side of the equasion.

Interesting thoughts for me as a business coach, I wonder if anyone is keen to take up this discussion with me and bounce that thought around a bit further.
ciao for now
roland

Blogging, the brave new world

New Perspectives Business Coaching joins the Blogging world.

It really will be too tempting to polish up all my old soapboaxes now!

I hope that this blog will lead to useful discussions and thinking on Coaching and Business and how develop the concept that Coaching is an essential tool for sustainable business growth.

Topics I plan to write about and Blog about will include:

• Integration of Solution Focused Brief Therapy models into business coaching
• Staff motivation and internal motivation and commitment rather than external commitment
• Harnessing the power of imagination
• Business planning and how to make it have a lasting impact on business
• Business process systemisation

just to name a few

Let the fun begin.............

Your Business and the Universe

If you do what you usually do,

you get what you usually get

Or what the Universe and your Business have in common.

Those who know me, know I have a penchant for soapboxes. I have a large variety of these wonderful contraptions and can get very excited about all of them (not always appropriately I might add)

One of my favoured soapboxes revolves around this question:

Who do you need to be, to have the business you want to have?

I have done a lot of reading, studying and reflecting over the last few of years, and it has become abundantly clear to me that there is no such thing as “I”.

Some of you might have seen “The Secret, and the Law of Attraction” recently or that mind boggling movie “What the bleep do we know” and come away with a frown on your forehead; Or some of you might just have observed at times that what you think about somehow becomes real.

Telepathy and Love
How many of us have been in love at some time in our life and it seems uncannily as if you are telepathically connected to your lover; Suddenly it seems as if they can read your thoughts, they ring up moments after you flash on them, and you find yourself finishing your lovers sentences. These are merely some of the most obvious real-life examples of the concept of our connectedness, but there is no reason to believe telepathy only works when we are in love.
Have you ever wondered how for some people things always just seem to happen? While for others, nothing ever works out.

The simple truth is that we don’t exist in isolation from everyone else or from the world at large, we are an integral part of it, and where “I” starts and stops is simply not a discussion worth having anymore.
The evidence for this statement is clear, all branches of science have started to come around to this view of the world and us in it, especially in the last 10 years and new evidence is piling up by the day.

What does it mean?
So what do we do with that as business owners in 2007? What does that mean? How does that make a difference to us? There is never enough time in a day as it is, without taking up navel gazing as well.

There are many implications of these thoughts but as business owners I would like to focus you on one implication in particular: The idea that your business is a reflection and an expression of you. In other words, your business is what it is precisely because of who you are today. The state of you and the state of your Business are inextricably connected. (By the way this statement is equally true for everything that you are a part of; for example your relationships are what they are today, because of who you are today, etc)

If you accept that statement, there are 2 obvious questions that follow:

Who do you need to be to have the business you want to have?
What does your business need to look like to be a reflection of who you are?

Hence my soapbox: To work on the growth of your business, you must at the same time work on your own growth. If you want to have a business that is twice as big, twice as efficient, twice as much fun, twice as well organised or twice as profitable, you have to make the matching shifts in your own brain at the same time.

Helen’s Brain
This explains why in small and medium business especially the traditional “business consulting” approach often fails. Business owners and consultants as a rule do not appreciate this concept of the intricate connection between the owner and his or her business.

Let’s take a business owner named Helen; the process goes something like this for Helen: We have a problem or a challenge in my business; let’s get a consultant to tell us what to do. The consultant looks at Helen’s business and its challenges and makes his recommendations. Often this involves proprietary systems and tools owned by the consultant. There are templates and processes for Helen and very clever IP. Developed in and for other businesses and based on the latest research and management science. All great stuff, but it misses out on the vital ingredient, namely, Helen’s brain and the connection between it and her business. Invariably, what worked for John, John’s brain and his business, is totally inappropriate and unworkable for Helen, Helen’s brain or her business.

The first step in any business change process must therefore be for Helen to be ready to step up to the next level. Helen has to appreciate that there will be no business change in isolation from her own change.

Threats of violence
A friend of mine hits me whenever I make this statement: “If you do what you usually do, you get what you usually get” and although I appreciate her point that clichés can be nauseating, there is real value in this particular one for us as business owners. You simply can not continue to work, behave and think as you are if you want your business to be something more than it is now.

This article describes the "New Perspective" of New Perspectives Business Coaching. It is this approach that explains how my clients achieve so much more in their business when they work with me and how they sustain their growth.

Further Reading and resources:

• http://www.whatthebleep.com.au
• http://www.whatthebleep.com/create/
• http://www.thesecret.tv/
• “Mind into matter” by Professor Fred Alan Wolfe
• “The Hole in the Universe” by K. C. Cole
• "The Mind of God” by Professor Paul Davies
• "Science and the Akashic Field" By Ervin Laslo
• "The Field" by Lynne McTaggart
• "A Brief History of Time" by professor Hawkins