I’ve been helping clients with their annual strategic planning for the start of the new financial year.
It’s always a busy period but I enjoy the renewal of looking ahead at a new year of possibilities.
I too have been reflecting on the year ahead and what I want to achieve.
What projects do I want to work on?
Which projects go live and which projects stay on hold?
And this got me thinking about todays topic - the head and the heart.
Confirmation Bias is our subconscious tendency to favour information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.
For example, ‘left-handers are more creative’.
In life, we often seek out people that share our views which helps to reaffirm our beliefs.
When accessing stories in the media, we interpret them in a way that supports our opinions.
And we all do it.
Without knowing.
So, is Confirmation Bias a help or hindrance?
How often do you feel like you are on a merry-go-round of never-ending tasks and priorities?
Each day more projects are added to your onerous workload.
You suffer increased anxiety as you work through an endless list of tasks, feeling you have completed all of them poorly.
Aiming to please you say’ yes’ to everything and suffer the consequences later.
Enter essentialism.
One of the key differences between ‘high-achievers’ and the ‘also-rans’ is the ability to manage risk.
If there was zero risk involved in executing your actions, you would have an infinite market edge in business. You could merely execute constantly and your returns would multiply.
If there was 100% risk involved in executing your actions, it would just be a matter of time before your working capital is exhausted and bankruptcy would follow.
Of course, in business there is risk, but it sits somewhere in between. While you don’t know to what degree, you must have some market edge to stay in business over time and be profitable.
To execute effectively and efficiently, you must develop a balanced relationship with risk.
We are surrounded by overnight success stories.
TV features, weekend magazines and social media posts constantly promote perfect individuals that have achieved amazing success.
These entrepreneur’s stories appear flawless and they seem to have experienced one success after another.
It can often lead to business owners feeling like under-achievers.
But what the feature articles on success don’t talk about are the failures on the journey.
How busy are you?
Have you filled up your capacity so much that you have created a vacuum where you don’t have time for anything new?
Filling your capacity may seem noble but nobody likes a busy fool nor should you want to be one.
Capacity 2.0 is shorthand for opening up your capacity by allocating more time to new and emerging opportunities.
Capacity 2.0 releases the vacuum and lets opportunities into your life.
