Awareness is the first step toward mastery.
Whether you’re strategically planning for the new year, engaged in a sales call with a customer or patiently listening to one of your employees complain about how much they HATE their coworkers, awareness always comes first.
Awareness is power. It creates options. It enlarges mental space. And it converts your internal posture from a state of reactivity to a state of objectivity.
AND HERE’S THE BEST PART: Once you’ve created new awareness – of yourself, of others, of the situation – you have the necessary fuel to move forward effectively.
Here’s a list of 11 Recognition Rules that will help entrepreneurs transform awareness into mastery:
1. Recognize fertile opportunities. Always go with growth. Always go where the soil is abundant and rich. Keep your eye open and your ear to the ground. There WILL be more.
ASK YOURSELF: How can you use this situation as an opportunity to learn something about yourself and then change for the better?
2. Recognize income potential. Look for cash everyone. Ask yourself how you can turn this (whatever “this” is) into an income stream. Ask yourself how you can make money with this. Ask yourself what else is possible now that you have this. There’s a LOT of money to be made out there. Donald Trump has the same number of hours in a day that you do. He’s just better at recognizing stuff than you are.
ASK YOURSELF: Who do you have to become in order to contribute differently to your business so that it generates more income?
3. Recognize key moments. Crystallizing experiences. Life-changing situations. Awakenings. Epiphanies. Mistakes. All of these are key moments that you need to (1) recognize, and (2) intelligently reflect upon.
ASK YOURSELF: What are you learning from this suffering?
4. Recognize larger implications. There’s always something bigger at stake. Not everybody SEES it, but it’s there. And only those who are perceptive enough to identify and extract the larger lessons will reap the benefits.
ASK YOURSELF: What does this tell me about the world?
5. Recognize recurrent patterns. This is hard. Especially when you’re on the inside. When you’re too close to yourself. Learn to detach and observe (NOT evaluate) your behavior from an objective viewpoint. Don’t beat yourself up. No worries, no judgments. Just say, “Oh, so I noticed that…” It’s not good. It’s not bad. It just IS. These mental patterns are the keys to unlocking the doors of improvement.
ASK YOURSELF: How well do you know your own patterns and habits?
6. Recognize silent realities. But you have to really LISTEN to the silence. Packed underneath the layers of nothingness is a LOT of truth. Waiting for you to discover it. Listen, listen, listen.
ASK YOURSELF: What does this suggest you need to change?
7. Recognize situations quickly. The ability to immediately size up, appraise and determine the value of things is an invaluable skill. Now, obviously, you don’t want to be TOO judgmental. You don’t want to expend all your mental energy evaluating EVERYTHING. But first impressions tend to be right. So, make ‘em count. Train your third eye.
ASK YOURSELF: Is this an opportunity, or an opportunity to be used?
8. Recognize teachable moments. First, for yourself. Because everyone – and every THING, for that matter – is your mentor. And there are ALWAYS lessons to be learned. Secondly, for others. Notice those moments in which you have the PERFET opportunity to either (1) teach someone something, or better yet, (2) enable somebody to teach THEMSELVES something.
ASK YOURSELF: Whom are you teaching?
9. Recognize the resistance. It’s there, and that’s OK. Don’t be alarmed. The primary goal of resistance is to scare you into believing there’s nothing you can do to handle resistance. Don’t buy into it. Your response to resistance will determine your success. Recognize it, deal with it and overcome it.
ASK YOURSELF: What is resisting you?
10. Recognize unspoken fears. Especially those of your clients, customers and employees. Odds are, there’s heaps of debris under the surface they’re not sharing. So, be on the lookout for words like “always,” “never” and “should.” Take note of what topics they seem to be evading in the conversation. Observe their timing, language, affect responses and non-verbals. Each one is a “tell” of their unspoken fears.
ASK YOURSELF: What message was sent but not spoken?
11. Recognize your blindness. Sometimes you’re just too close. Standing on a whale fishing for minnows, as Joseph Campbell once said. Be mature and realistic enough to spot that blindness and then get some much needed assistance with your vision.
ASK YOURSELF: What ideas are you in love with that might prevent you from seeing clearly?
REMEMBER: Recognizing isn’t seeing.
These past eleven pieces of advice, as powerful as they might be, don’t solve the entire puzzle. Recognition – awareness, noticing, discovering, identification – is only the beginning. The next step is to go from recognizing to seeing, from seeing to doing, and from doing to BEING.
Awareness is the first step toward mastery.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What have you been recognizing lately?
LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
For the list called, “24 Ways to Out GROW Your Competition” send an email to me, and I’ll send you the list for free!
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Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
[email protected]
Never the same speech twice.
Always about approachability.
Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!
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