Learning to get the results you want.

Getting the results you want, rather than the ones you’ve got, means something has to change.

The first change is you and as you’re reading this then that’s a decision you’ve already made.
The next change usually falls into one of 4 areas:

• Learn something new
• Start doing something.
• Stop doing something.
• Do something differently.

Depending on how urgently you need to change your results you may have to deal with all four at once.

Let’s talk about learning and the first question to ask yourself is, are you learning the right thing? Learning is always healthy, understanding why you’re learning, is even healthier.
How well do you know what’s most valuable to you about your business?

If you’re still thinking, then your learning doesn’t have a point, it’s a broad brushstroke trying to cover everything.

Pick one of these 4 right now:

• Money,
• Quality of life,
• Leaving a legacy,
• Having a sense of purpose and achievement.

The point is not which one you chose but the learning you’ll need to prioritise to get the better outcome you want. If you chose money is it because you want more of it? Does your business generate good cash and profits and you want to know how best to reinvest in the business? Do you want to exit your business for the best package?
The learning you will need to do in just these three scenarios is different. A need for more money may indicate your sales process is flawed, your marketing is misfiring or your costs and pricing are misaligned. If business is good and you’re focussed on maximising the opportunity is it about your people, your processes or product? Maybe it’s about re-purposing your business? Exiting your business will include succession planning, identifying the right buyer and how you exit without regrets.

Just by looking at three scenarios of why money is important to you there’s ten different things you could be learning to do better. So what’s your priority, which is the key learning you need to do first, how is this going to get the outcome you want?

Once you’re clear about why you’re learning, the next question is how are you learning? The very idea of learning fills some people with dread. Others don’t feel the need to learn because that was something they did back in their school days. Many business owners fall into the trap of thinking that if you just repeat the same ‘magic formula’ you used before, in a new situation, you’ll do just as well this time.

Winning is more than a Win, a winning culture is built on a learning culture.
The only true advantage you have is the ability to learn faster and better than your competitors.
How you build that advantage is about you, your team and your attitude.

Learning may be different for you and your team. Learning is a process and we have a mix of preferences for how we learn. The dominant styles are Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic.
If you’re highly auditory, reading books may not be something that works well for you, listening to them probably will. Likewise if you’re more kinaesthetic, you’ll want to interact, experiment and be hands-on, you may read the instruction manual only as a last resort!
To find out more about your particular preference, send an email to my-pa@actioncoach.co.uk with the subject line ‘VAK for me’ and completely free we’ll send you a self-assessment questionnaire you can score for yourself.

We’ve all heard that two brains are better than one and that’s why you have teams. So how many brains are in your trusted inner-circle leadership team? Do they all think like you or are they positively challenging? Have you built an inner-circle or do you subscribe to the ‘one mind is better than many and I can do more than many people’ leadership model? Which links directly to attitude. Is your attitude one of acknowledging your successes whilst being open and restless for the better way, the new insight, the possibility that you may not be right? Is that attitude endemic in your team and business?

When you’re clear on the point of your learning and you’re learning in ways that work best for you and your team, what do you do next?

Run the process.

Learning is a process which takes in information, picks out the bits you believe are best suited for the task in hand and then tries them out in the real world. Depending on the results achieved you may do more of that, stop doing it, or do it differently. Taking the right course of action means you need a way of getting constructive, unbiased, fact-based feedback.

Learning is the process of gaining knowledge, wisdom is the outcome of applied knowledge.
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, Wisdom is not putting it in a Trifle.

You’re a busy business owner and impatient so you’ll look for quick fixes or justify to yourself why you miss out parts of the process or try to short-cut them. The areas you’re most likely to skimp on are:
• Reviewing why are you learning a particular topic.
• What’s the feedback from applying your learning telling you.
• You don’t like what the feedback says so you ignore it, keeping on trying to fix the symptom rather than deal with the cause.

As Keith Cunningham says in his book ‘The Road less Stupid…’

“The danger is this: If we misdiagnose or mislabel the problem, we will gravitate towards designing solutions and building machines for the symptoms (aka “the problem that isn’t”) and this is a prescription for frustration and failure.”

All of this will be compounded if you don’t have that trusted inner circle that’s prepared to tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear.
Perhaps that’s the first change you need to make, how to build your inner circle?

If you need to talk about this or other areas of growing your valuable business simply drop a line to my-pa@actioncoach.co.uk with the subject line ‘Let’s talk about…’ and we’ll set some time up for you.