Cultivating Your Mindset: Turning Performance

This month’s column is for business owners who have ever struggled to make a decision regarding a significant capital expense. Such decisions are rightfully daunting, even with the best of economic conditions and the confidence that the financial outlay would be a solid investment in the future of the business. For moments like this, the best financial advice I can offer has more to do with a person’s business mindset than with any specific lending instrument or strategy. Specifically, work on developing a mindset that prepares you for the big decisions when they come along.

So, how do you go about attaining such a mindset? To help answer that question, I obtained permission to share a lengthy excerpt from an interesting article, “The Key To Achieving A Future-Ready Mindstate,” written by Mark Holmes, a friend and accomplished financial consultant.

“It’s not uncommon for leaders to feel as though the ground beneath their feet is constantly shifting, and there is little they can do about it. Think about the massive disruptions we’re witnessing as we speak about technology, politics, the economy and other conditions that offer little clarity on the future.

“So how on Earth can we possibly have a future-ready mindstate?“

Holmes next mentioned a resource he enjoys turning to for answers, a book titled “What’s Next Is Now: How To Live Future Ready” by Frederik G. Pferdt, Google’s first Chief Innovation Evangelist. In the process of reading the book, Holmes said he began thinking about how the directives in the book title could “apply to leaders in a practical way that empowers them to move forward into the future with confidence rather than employ a ‘wait and see’ approach that rarely benefits.”

We tend to think of innovation as being a grand, sweeping gesture and that we charge into the future sprinting. Reality can be and probably should be something much different.

In Pferdt’s view, the future is a place you personally envision based on the opportunities you discover.

“Speaking of the present, that’s precisely where the book begins and focuses on: a future-ready mindstate. The great irony of being future-ready is this: Pferdt sees the key to being fully ready and prepared for anything that happens next as getting your head aligned to fully experience the present.”