Who doesn’t want to create new business opportunities? We must all keep evolving to stay ahead of the competition. Problem is that we can become so focused on what our competition are doing out there in the marketplace, that we forget to look for our own new opportunities.
Take a bird’s eye view of competition
Have you ever put out seeds for a flock of birds and watched them feeding? You can put out several piles of seeds for the birds, more than they could possibly eat, yet when one bird goes for a pile of seeds, soon the others will leave their little pile and chase the bird away.
It looks hilarious and we shake our heads and laugh. Silly birds.
But look more closely, and you may find that we often behave exactly the same way in business. We are so focused on what the competition is doing and chasing the same customer and the same opportunities that we may miss new opportunities walking straight by our front door.
Don’t display the same behaviours as your competitors
Human nature is such that most of us model our behaviour on other people. The way we learn as children is to model our behaviour on our parents and as we grow older we look for role models and adopt their behaviour.
So it is natural that in business we will look at what others are doing and copy them. We see someone else, a competitor perhaps doing something that appears to be successful and instantly we think ‘I need to do that too. I must chase the same market, the same customer, offer the same product, match or better the price or adopt the same gimmicks’.
We are essentially displaying the same behaviours as those silly birds. We are leaving our little pile of seeds to try and take some seeds of the other guy or fighting hard when someone else comes along and tries to muscle in on our little pile of seeds.
Psychologically, what is behind this is that we tend to adopt a scarcity mindset. We believe there is only so much to go around and we must fight to get our share. So we fight over the same seeds.
Do something different
The American educator and coach Bob Proctor once said; “Amateurs compete, professionals create”. Instead of being concerned with what the competition is doing, trying to match them or scare them off, you may be better off doing something the competition isn’t doing.
While the scarcity mindset says that there is only so much to go around, the abundance mindset says that there is more than enough to go around, but we have to look for it in places we are not currently looking.
We know from scientific research that we only consciously notice around 5% of all the stimuli we are presented with every day. The scary thing is that it is the same things we notice all the time. That is because we consciously notice the things that support our values and beliefs. What we see becomes evidence of our beliefs.
So if your belief is that there is only so much to go around and your focus is on the competition, everything you see is evidence of that and chances are you will miss opportunities to do something they are not doing.
Adopt an abundance mindset
Forget the competition. Let them do what they will do. If there really was only so much to go around, the world would never have evolved from the dark ages. Everything we enjoy today is a result of someone creating something the others weren’t doing.
If you adopt an abundance mindset, you will start to see evidence around you of new opportunities that you didn’t see before when you were concerned about protecting your own little pile of seeds or looking for how you could get some of the seeds the competition was already feeding on.
At The Positive Lane we help you to achieve better outcomes, improve your experience of life and discover what really makes you happy.
