Everywhere, be it school, career, or business, we have been conditioned to push harder, that the pinnacle of success is hard work, which is true in most cases. The new psychology of success talks about the abundance mind set versus the scarcity mind set, but it is the competitive mindset that most often drives the entrepreneurial journey.
We need a competitive mindset to push the limits beyond normalcy and explore more exciting opportunities. Healthy competition is a good thing. It sharpens your senses and makes sure you’re at the top of your mental game.
So you’re a budding entrepreneur or just starting your journey in the corporate world, these powerful mental strategies should always be part of the journey. Competitiveness is a trait many employers look for. They say so right in their job listings with terms like “sports minded” and ” highly motivated,” or when they talk about your individual sport in high school, they are looking for a determined competitor.
Table of Contents
What is a Mindset
Our mindset is an orientation of how we think and behave to make sense of ourselves and the world at large. It revolves around our innate values, experiences, and opinions of our wider world. I can invent new products and services, create jobs, and accelerate economic development with the right competitive mindset.
What is a Business-Oriented Mindset
Business mindset is a way of perception that treats problems as opportunities and utilizing these opportunities to business advantage. A business-oriented mindset is what defines the traits and characteristics of successful entrepreneurs.
We need to have a positive mind and follow their ability to maintain good customer relations. With an unshakeable resolve, they can chart their course. To become a successful business-oriented person, we need to capitalize on the following traits:
● A restless spirit until you surpass targets
● Taking control through leadership skills
● Excellent budgeting skills
● Risk-taker
● Unmatched confidence levels
Success depends in large part on your confidence. Having confidence means you have a self-belief that surpasses fear while taking risks. Confidence is important for new ideas and innovations. A business-oriented person is tech-savvy and quick to understand d and gets around any situation. We should also hang around with business-savvy people.
We need to avoid dwelling on past mistakes but only use them as a learning opportunity. In addition, mistakes are part of the business growth process. To build a successful business, we should avoid stagnation by developing new skills that open more opportunities.
We need to have a character to listen, focus and have excellent interpersonal skills. Take time to listen to the ideas of others, ensure good relations with your employees and direct your energies to areas that need to be rectified.
We should encourage and take feedback positively to eliminate negative perceptions. Develop strong relations with end-users and address their concerns conclusively. Listen to ideas to get a feel of what works well.
We need to confidently build our thinking and develop excellent interpersonal skills to make intelligent decisions that yield better outcomes in the future. Mental toughness and a stronger competitive mind-set will guide your business journey through a competitive world.
Why you Need Both Business Mindset and Leadership
Starting in the business world can be unsettling if we have everything else but are missing out on the mindset to absorb inherent risks and failures. It is significant for us to develop a mindset for business to chart its course and the risks we are ready to take to make it a success.
A look at successful looking at successful people and successful entrepreneurs, in particular, reveals a unique way of thinking and acting that beat the ordinary. They craft and implement a radical out-of-the-box strategy.
A business mindset helps us navigate the competitive environment, deal with the Nexus of uncertainty while looking for a competitive advantage. We need to open up your various income channels. A business mindset allows us opportunities for smart decisions for positive outcomes even under challenging circumstances.
How does mindset affect leadership
A business mindset helps us in other facets of life, such as leadership. Incorporating the right business mindset into our daily lives helps us counter rejection or failure and keeps us moving. As leaders, we can incorporate the entrepreneurial spirit to plan and anticipate potential barriers to our business.
An entrepreneurial mindset opens our minds to creativity and innovation. If we employ creative thinking to solve our business challenges, we can help propel it to greater heights in the long run. Consequently, we will gain trust and be seen as leaders in our field and make connections and important contacts. Research on some of the successful names in the industry provides valuable information on what works well.
How Can I Develop a Competitive Mindset
Business success is all about developing a competitive attitude. Competition is healthy for business growth and personal inspiration.
Competition defines successful businesses as challenges that present an opportunity to test my resources and flex muscles to venture into a more competitive market. Competition pushes me to better my brand to compete at the same or a higher level than my competitors. I can give my potential clients an excellent experience when interacting with my products and services compared to competitors’ offerings through innovations.
Using current technological innovations, I can differentiate my offers by providing superior customer service and quality products. In addition, I strive to enhance the experience that customers will achieve from our products and services.
Strategic Growth
By applying the strategies below, I can comfortably develop my unstoppable competitive mind-set:
First, I respect my competitors because we are in this business together. They build and make me better. Whenever they sell, I am also happy because we are dealing with the same products and services and that my competitor was luckier this time. Next time I will go a notch higher in marketing. But still, he may be thinking the same, so I have to think smart and craft a workable strategy to counter his moves.
They drive me to always be on guard. They keep me on my toes. Without the competitor, my products would be of low quality, and customers would look for alternatives. My competitors are racing with me, and I need to offer a valuable product. Although this race has no finish line, I have to give my best to take this race to the wire.
The competition encourages innovation. Without competition, there would be no innovations. Constant innovation increases the quality of my products and allows me to present unique selling propositions. Competition forces me to access my strengths and weaknesses so that I channel my energies to improve them. I need to improve my brand visibility through marketing and offering new differentiated products and services.
Secondly, I should carry on to win because ‘winners never quit, and quitters never win. Giving excuses is not an option as it slows me down and makes me lose focus. Every day provides a new challenge to deal with challenges. Persistence pay at long last; even if they are small wins, I treasure them. Courage makes obstacles disappear, and just a mere thought of losing is in itself a loss.
The adage of joining them if you can’t beat them helps me strike partnerships. As such, I ride on their platform while they do the same. We can achieve collaboration through cross-platform marketing while thinking of prospects of future mergers.
Keeping an eye on competition on how they run their business through competitor analyses using Google Analytics to determine how rivals run their businesses. I should invest in building a customer-centric strategy that exceeds customers’ expectations. As a result, I achieve customer loyalty to my products and services and ward off my competitors.
Thirdly, I love the craziness of competition, and my performance is at its peak when faced with an uncertain environment. As the environment is uncertain to all the players, we are at the same level. With more focus, I can think clearly and set up long-term goals. The essence of the business and personal success is key. Fueled by a determined mindset am ready to unleash my powers to greater heights.
If you’ve gotten this far, I found a great course, Business Mindset 101 on Udemy I think you may find interesting.
How does Mindset Affect Behavior?
A mindset portrays a series of actions, beliefs, and techniques that arise out of the way we view the world. It becomes an incentive to perform actions based on past behavior influences how we respond to challenges through learning and a desire to discover new things.
Here, we look at two extremes of behavior, the judgmental and those that are smarter and believe in continuously improving their skills. A judgmental mindset is akin to hitting the wall, where you believe there is nothing more to be done other than to accept it as it is.
Our mindset is fixed if we are limited to fixed traits that are difficult to change. Here, we try to portray ourselves as brilliant in what we do and focus on what we are good at while avoiding the actions that might expose our shortfalls. We need to challenge our limits by redefining our normal self-imposed limits. In essence, we are interrupting the normal and explore new targets to conquer.
Does mindset affect perception?
We believe that we are limited in our intelligence and physical capabilities and tend to shun challenging situations beyond our comfort zone. We hide behind our cocoons and always seek approval from others to protect our stake, and if things go wrong, we blame others. If perception is reality then it’s one of our own choosing.
A growth mindset believes that there is a potential for improvement if you work on challenging situations to get sharper and continually improve. The focus here is on the progress achieved from concerted efforts while cognizant of failure as a part of the learning process.
The endurance of marathoners punishing their bodies for more than two hours depicts a positive mindset. Attempts to run a marathon under the two-hour barrier have inspired the adage that ‘no human is limited.’ Similarly, the sky is the limit for those who excel in art, music and who relentlessly push themselves through practice. The oldest success quote still rings true today,” winners never quit.”
Our mindset
Whether fixed or flexible, our mindset affects our lives in the following ways:
Relationships: Our mindset defines how we treat others based on our mind frame of beliefs and values. A flexible mindset adapts well with different people and forms long-lasting relations while people of the other extreme struggle to keep up or fail to adapt. Furthermore, the kind of relationships we keep tells a lot about ourselves. Without an accommodative mindset, a person may become wild when challenged to expound on some intellectual inferences.
Learning: We control how learning occurs by aligning our minds to accept that we can improve and that intelligence is not limited to particular groups of genetically different people. You can do this if you believe that your brain is more intelligent than you think.
Health: A positive mindset responds well to physical and psychological behavior. If we focus only on the negative, we won’t improve our mental and physical tasks. With a laid-back mindset, we tend to forego a particular activity meant to improve our body and mind health.
Performing Tasks: If we focus on teamwork rather than an individual image, the company easily achieves its objectives. A positive mindset sees an opportunity in failure and works towards its perfection. We learn from mistakes, and a single mistake should not impede future success.
Teaching: Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in learning helps young children develop their mindsets. With a reward for good behavior or performance, we can improve their current abilities and encourage new skills with time. It is essential to set various goals and impart lessons along the way.
Your Final Take
Our mindset is not sealed at birth. Therefore we are not forever condemned to our perceived fate. Yes, it is possible to change and adapt our role models’ ideal mindsets. Here, the whole models in the early stages are parents and teachers. A child’s role model also affects their mindset orientation.
How then can mindset be changed? It is a process that starts at the early stages and involves several players. It begins with parents’ influence through encouragement rather than adopting a judgemental stance. Some hurting words may have a lifetime effect on the child. It is better to encourage a child throughout the learning process to achieve the desired effect.
On the other hand, teachers can break if their approach focuses on the weak vs. the bright mentality rather than showing them ways to improve their performance. We can train our brains to surpass our veiled focus and learn a step at a time by continually improving our abilities. A good teacher does not make comparisons based on the extremes but should realize that people’s orientations are different.
As for our business decisions, we must note that today’s decisions are the successes of tomorrow. A winning mindset develops from the back of one’s mind. Remember, certain unique traits are inherent in specific individuals and cannot be easily replicated.
By Bryan Greene