by Sharon Jones

Image via Pixabay

When you think of what it takes to make it in business, your mind may be drawn to thoughts of financial graphs, and quarterly growth reports, and an excellent approach towards marketing and market research.

While all of those things may well be required for the success of many different types of business, there is one thing that is essential for success across all domains of life — mindset.

If you believe that you are doomed, and can’t summon up a productive and empowering thought process no matter how hard you try, then your likelihood of experiencing overall success is marginal at best. Plus, you’ll just have a terrible time with whatever you’re doing, as well.

A project management system can help you get organised. A set of pharmaceutical scales can ensure that sensitive medical goods are delivered in exactly the right quantities. These goods can be a tremendous help – can even be essential to your business – but without the right mindset, you’re still in trouble.

Here are some reasons why working on your mental game is so important in business.

What you visualize and aim for has an immense impact on what you perceive

A famous psychological experiment involved researchers watching a video of several people passing a ball back and forth, while asking the test subjects to count the number of passes made.

At a certain point in the video, a man in a gorilla costume walks into the frame, but doesn’t obscure the sight of the ball.

Believe it or not, but a large proportion of test subjects didn’t notice the “gorilla” at all.

What you focus on and aim for, has a tremendous impact on what you perceive. For this reason, if not for many other reasons too, visualising success in your field attunes your attention to those things most likely to bring you success.

In business you need to be attentive, both to opportunities, and to ways of innovating your operation. If your attention is weighted towards “professional growth” you may notice that innovative bit of equipment that can make all the difference to your operation, be it a particular model of scale, or a new storage solution.

It’s very difficult for customers to believe in someone who clearly doesn’t believe in themselves

People, by and large, are naturally quite good at picking up emotional cues from other people. If someone is boiling over with rage but doing their best to contain it, it’s a fair guess that almost everyone in their vicinity will pick up on the subtle signs and feel deeply uncomfortable.

Likewise, when someone is trying to sell you something, but strongly lacks confidence and is riddled with uncertainty and doubt, you will generally pick up on various micro-cues and feel disinclined to give them your money.

The more you believe in yourself, the easier it is for customers to believe in you. The more sensitive your business, the more this applies. Someone who sells pharmaceutical goods that have to be carefully processed, weighed, checked and packaged, will need that much more “trust capital” from potential customers.

Hardships and mishaps will occur, you need the mental resilience to move past them

Mishaps and setbacks will inevitably happen in professional life, and especially in the life of an entrepreneur. You will, at some point, lose an important client. A business might fail outright.

The key to long-lasting success in any field, is to have the mental resilience needed to move past hardships and mishaps, and to learn from them, rather than being crushed by the weight of them.

Part of this is sheer mental grit. Another part is having a mindset that is positively oriented towards learning, adapting, and overcoming.