Today, I’m going to share an extremely powerful business idea with you, along with an amazing technique to help you grow your business exponentially in 2022 and beyond. This information could be exactly what you and your business needs, so please take the few minutes required to read it.

Let’s go.

Every business owner experiences highs and lows. Seasons of success and seasons of frustration. Especially since the start of the pandemic.

Here’s something we know for sure: As you face the opportunities ahead of you, your overall results are determined by how you navigate these ups and downs.

When times are good

When things are going great it’s easy to feel confident, calm and assured. And with those positive feelings guiding your decision making, you perform at a far higher level.

You also inspire confidence in others and find it easier to motivate them to hire you, buy from you or recommend you.

You’re on a roll.

But when times are tough

It’s harder to feel confident when times are tough. You’re no longer on a roll. Your focus naturally switches to the problems in front of you. You consider the worst case scenarios and how you would cope. A negative cycle is created and stays in play, until you regain control of your mindset.

Usually, this mindset shift is the result of an external factor.

As from today, you don’t need to wait for that to happen. As from today, you’re in control!

Today, I’d like to show you how I intentionally, deliberately and VERY quickly get my mindset back on track. It’s a technique that you are able to use and because it’s based on facts that you know are 100% true, your mind is fully able to accept it.

It’s based around your past experiences.

Consider the following 5 facts for a moment.

1. You are just one email away from a great client enquiry. Just as you were the last time it happened.
2. You are just one idea away from a life-changing breakthrough. Just as you were the last time it happened.
3. You are just one phone call away from converting an enquiry into your most valuable client ever. Just as you were the last time it happened.
4. You are just one decision away from an amazing opportunity. Just as you were the last time it happened.
5. You are just one conversation away from your largest ever order. Just as you were the last time it happened.

NONE of those are Pollyanna thoughts or wishful thinking.

They’re facts.

Facts you know to be true, based on what you have already experienced.

These real world opportunities and many, many others can happen for you at any time.

This is really important

The key is NOT to just wait for things to happen!

You can greatly increase the speed and frequency of these opportunities, when you focus on the steps required to MAKE them happen, rather than focus on what you fear.

Here’s how I did it.

• When I came up with this idea, over 20 years ago, I needed to regularly remind myself of those 5 facts.
• So, I wrote them down and kept them visible. On my white board, in my notebooks, on sticky notes, everywhere.
• I read them and reread them.
• My mind quickly accepted them, because each one is provably 100% true.
• After a while, I didn’t need to intentionally remind myself. My mindset automatically worked from that spectacularly effective perspective.
• I found myself, by default, working with confidence to achieve the breakthrough I needed.
• It’s been that way ever since and given me a wonderful quality of life and a thriving business.

And that’s what I want for you my friend.

I want you to give yourself the best possible advantage to absolutely thrive in 2022. I want you to succeed more than you’ve ever succeeded before.

And I want you to achieve beyond anything you’ve ever achieved before.

It’s hard to overstate the commercial importance of engagement.

Engagement is the sensation we experience, when someone connects with us in a positive way. It creates a bond between us and them. It fosters trust and forms an extremely resilient foundation on which to build a relationship.

And it’s of immense value to you and your business.

Why am I sharing this with you?

Rather than create powerful engagement and connection with their clients, customers or prospects, many business owners accidentally destroy engagement. And they do it multiple times every day.

For example.

• They send us impersonal auto reply emails; rather than reply in person when they’re available.
• When we call them, we get a call tree (those automated messages with multiple options).
• Their social media accounts primarily broadcast famous quotes and sales pitches, but very little inter-personal communication. No dialogue. Just monologue.
• And of course, the only time we hear from most prospective vendors is when they’re trying to sell us something… rather than staying in touch with us with useful information, so we know where to go when we actually need them.

The list of engagement-destroying tactics is vast. And it’s expanding daily, as business owners rely increasingly on technology, to handle human interaction.

Choosing our bias

It seems we have a choice to make as business owners.

• We can either develop a bias for engagement, which fosters connection, loyalty, relationships and trust.
• Or we can develop a bias for the impersonal approach.

We can choose to go narrow and deep or wide and shallow. To build meaningful connections with engaged prospective clients or push surface level, automated interactions to strangers.

True, the impersonal approach is cheap and quick. That’s why it’s so popular. But that cheapness needs to be looked at in context.

If we think it’s expensive to take time and engage with our clients and prospective clients, we often haven’t fully considered the cost of being disengaged.

After all, if we choose to disengage from our marketplace, the very lifeblood of our business, we set an extremely low ceiling on our potential.

In a nutshell: Whenever possible, try to engage. No, it isn’t always possible. But when it is, and it often is, see it as an opportunity to build a deeper engagement.

As we approach another uncertain year, here are a couple of essential areas I recommend you focus on. They’re from a talk I gave to business owners, which the group found extremely useful.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Move with the changes ahead

Crisis precedes change. We’ve all seen changes as a result of the pandemic. People have changed. Priorities have changed. Habits have changed. Outlooks have changed.

Whilst it’s not possible to know what will change in 2022, we can still be ready for it.

How?

I was in business during the last recession and also during the 2000 Stock Market crash.

The most valuable lesson I learned, was the importance of dancing with the certainty of uncertainty: Developing a willingness to adapt as required, in a hard to predict landscape.

It’s easy to slip into a fixed or semi-fixed way of doing things, but it hampers innovation and growth. This is especially the case in business. Even more so in times of change, when our fixed ideas are no longer appropriate for the tasks at hand. I used this approach with my clients this year and 3 of them achieved their best financial year ever, despite 2 of those 3 being in industries that were very negatively impacted by the pandemic.

There will be outstanding opportunities next year for business owners with the flexibility to adapt. So make it a key focus in your 2022 business planning.

Build a better, not bigger, contact network

We all saw how valuable, or otherwise, our contacts were this year. Thanks to Linkedin and similar services, anyone with enough spare time can build a huge network of contacts. However, the value of a network is in the calibre and quality of the people you’re connected with, not the size of your network.

The general advice I give business owners is to go narrow and deep. Not wide and shallow. For example.

• IF MY NETWORK has 10000 people, BUT they lack influence or hardly know me, it will have a commercial value of close to zero.
• IF YOUR NETWORK has 10 people, BUT they are highly influential, know you and are motivated to help you, it will have a massive commercial value to you.

Here’s an exercise to help you get it right. Draw up a list of the 30 most influential people in your marketplace. These people could include high quality prospective clients or maybe influential introducers; (introducers are people who can recommend you to lots of clients or buyers). Then, put a plan together that will allow you to earn their attention. This targeted approach takes time, but the rewards are enormous, and it should be a part of your planning for 2022.

With a more flexible approach to the unknowns of the next 12 months, and with lots of highly valuable new contacts, you will dramatically increase your potential for the year ahead.