I’ve seen a lot of talk this week about “getting back to normal” after a period of time off for many. In my house there’s never really a “normal”, so that doesn’t fit the language we use. When I took my teenage sons to our weekly Pilates session this morning, our lovely teacher Sarah said we were going to “do something different to ease back” into this form of exercise after a couple of weeks off.

The session used new exercises which challenged the brain and the body (if you’ve not done pilates there’s a lot of listening to change for success doing business differentlyyour body as you move to stretch and flex your muscles). It felt good. It felt good to do something different which challenged and not only got us back into stretching and flexing our muscles and mind, but also the change we created by this different form of exercise.

Create small change for success

Just like pilates exercises create small change for success in your flexibility and movement, working your mind as well as your body, so you can create small changes in your business for success.

Another analogy would be how much disruption throwing a small pebble into a lake causes. A lot, right? So what if you made a small change in your business? What effect could that have on your business success?

What could you change?

I’m often asked advice in coaching sessions about what should a client to create success for themselves. It’s not up to me is it? I may have ideas about what could change, but it’s not my business. I don’t really know, even if I’ve been working with a client for a couple of years, as we all have a life and business with lots of cogs interlinked.

There’s many things you could change successfully which effect for your business efficiency and/or financial growth, for example:

  • Price changes
  • Structure of your week
  • Appointment system
  • New product or service introduced
  • New staff member
  • New piece of software to help increase efficiency

Think about what’s important to you and your business. We can’t always know if a change will create success in the way we believe when we first try something out. But we can want to create change to create success.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.

This quote is well known, yet so many of our clients and people we meet at network events seem comfortable. They don’t want to change. That’s fine. I tend to move these clients out of my list as I can’t help them.

You will only ever reach success if you keep taking small steps and creating change in what you do and how you do it. A customer may have requested a red widget when you’ve only ever supplied blue ones. That’s a change. That’s something you can respond to if you choose to listen to the customer request and serve their needs.

Listen to yourself and learn what you’d like to change

Understanding what we could change can feel uncomfortable. Especially in a business you’ve run for a while. You may be in a team that’s “always done it this way”. Without change you’re not going to find those new customers or develop new ideas, even if you know that your team can create and develop more success this year.

The simplest way to work out some of those next steps and choices in your life as well as your business, is to listen to yourself and your team. Yep, that’s it. Just listen.

Listening at work is not just about sitting with a team member and talking about what’s gone on in the past. Listening at work to create success is about spending time with those who care about the development and growth of your business, and re-visiting the ideas you had last year which weren’t right to develop. Or, you spend time listening to each others ideas about their vision for the future and develop a joint 2020 vision for the team and company.

As a corporate listener I’m used to sitting and listening. It’s not easy though as most people seem to want to share their ideas. What if you shared your ideas and your team members listened? Then you listened to their ideas? Would you reach what Stephen Covey in his 7 habits of effective people calls “Win-Win”? You may not know unless you try it. Team development is not about the team leader telling others what to do, or what the vision is. For me, it’s about listening to each other and developing together a clearer vision for the future. For change. For success.

Success for the team means success for the business. Spending time listening to each other will create the space you need to allow each person to create new ideas.

As we all move forward each day, take time to listen to yourself and make a small change. You may need to stretch some [business] muscles, hone some [business] skills, and practice new [business] techniques to create the success you want. I encourage you to listen more, and advise you to work with a skilled listener so that you can really hear what your mind and that of your team is saying. Each of us keeps so much hidden in the depths of our mind that only others can see or hear.

This free workshop series will help you listen to yourself in the first instance and get clarity of the change you can make to create your success this year. We’re working with an experienced intuitive coach to help you take simple steps to success.

If you’d like support for your team or business, get in touch and we can work with the group to get the same results and create change for success.