I was listening to an elite sport coach talk about big moments.
Big moments are what you train for and spend your career preparing for.
All of your training, preparation and time is put into being your best in these big moments.
Then the parallel to business hit me.
Most of our weeks and many of our days in business live within the bell curve of normality.
‘Business as usual’ is the norm.
This is universally the same for all of us.
I spent four years writing my book The Fourth Moon and I learnt a lot of things. Not all of them were about writing and publishing.
Many of the lessons equally apply to business.
I’ll never forget a lesson I learnt from the Senior Editor of my publishing company.
Don’t edit when you are creating.
Let me pull this apart for you.
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.
