Three strategies to build the inner strength of your business

Management

Sponsored by Dale Carnegie

Take command of your people, performance and profits

Dale Carnegie Training is touring the country to share insights and wisdom from over 100 years of supporting organisations across the world

Your biggest potential obstacle as an entrepreneur is you. If you start to doubt your abilities, worry without cause and fail to take necessary risks, you see yourself not as someone who can positively influence your destiny, but as a victim of circumstance.

But you can grow your inner strength by cultivating a strong mindset, choosing the right thoughts, and building courage and confidence from within. You can build the inner strength of your business and move it in the direction of success.

Thinking the right thoughts

Keeping a positive mindset sounds simple, but it can be difficult, particularly when circumstances are challenging. The process begins with you, as the leader, overcoming your own discouraging thoughts and shifting how you think. Once you choose the right thoughts for yourself, it becomes easier to shift your team’s thinking in the right direction.

Start by using negative thoughts as an early warning system. Whether they are coming from you or your team, negative thoughts can serve you well – alerting you to a problem that will only escalate if left unattended. Negative thoughts have a way of gaining control and affecting decisions. When negative thoughts gain control, pull your team together and replace them with positive ones, then develop the necessary solutions to move forward.

Reframing your thoughts and those of your team members can open up greater possibilities for success. Doing so pushes you and your team in a new, positive, more productive direction. And the good news is, the more you do it the better you become at it. In his groundbreaking 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie stresses the importance of a positive attitude. There have been times in my life when I have been ill with over-worrying, then I realised I had to shake myself of those thoughts.

It’s nicely summed up this way in Take Command: Find Your Inner Strength, Build Enduring Relationships, and Live the Life You Want: “It occurred to me, ‘What if I flipped this? Instead of dwelling on the pandemic and the things I can’t control, why don’t I focus on the things I can?’ And then the eureka moment hit me: “If every action has an opposite and equal reaction, then with great crisis, there must be incredible opportunity. So, where is it here?”

Cultivate a powerful, optimistic mindset

Carol Dweck, noted psychologist and author of Mindset, describes two types of mindsets – growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. A fixed mindset believes personalities, intelligence levels and abilities cannot be changed. In other words, you are born with it or you aren’t.

A growth mindset, on the other hand, believes personality, intelligence and ability are changeable and can be shaped by learning, experience and hard work. Cultivating a powerful optimistic growth mindset in your business is key to increasing its inner strength. Your mindset has a profound impact on your life and business. In fact, research confirms those with a growth mindset have more motivation and experience greater success.

Cultivating a strong optimistic growth mindset, however, requires time and space to reflect and pay attention to your thoughts and how they affect you and your team. It can require asking tough questions to discern what is hindering your progress as well as what is moving you forward. Focus on your insights and plan your direction for growth each day. Developing a growth-oriented routine builds a strong, healthy and optimistic mindset. With your growth mindset, you know your direction and perspective, making it much easier to lead your business on the pathway to success.

Build courage and confidence

As you face challenges in your business, building your courage and confidence is crucial. An easy way to begin is to face each challenge head-on, breaking it down into manageable pieces which can be accomplished to deliver small wins, which you can then build upon and turn into big wins for your business. Each small win in your business increases your team members’ self-efficacy (ability to act and achieve) and self-worth (the feeling of being good enough). With self-worth and self-efficacy comes a greater sense of confidence.

If you or members of your team are struggling with courage and confidence, try this exercise: talk to yourselves the same way you would speak to someone you love and respect. Curbing negative self-talk creates an environment where everyone feels it’s okay to offer up new ideas, take chances and even make mistakes.

When self-doubt arises, recall strengths, consider solutions, emphasise the positive and make the changes needed to address the reason for the doubt – real or imagined. For example, if lack of confidence is linked to lack of knowledge, learn as much as you can. The more you and your team learn, the more you each believe in yourself and the more your confidence grows. With courage and a strong sense of confidence, you and your team can have each other’s backs no matter what arises. As confidence grows, abilities grow and success follows.

You have the ability to grow your inner strength by choosing positive thoughts, cultivating a strong optimistic growth mindset and developing your courage and confidence. As you foster your own inner strength, you build the inner strength of your team and your business and move both towards success.

There will always be opportunities for improvement in yourself and across your business. If you want to learn more about harnessing your power and becoming more productive, then you should explore Take Command: A Dale Carnegie Book.

This theme of taking command has been the central focus of Dale Carnegie’s UK roadshows this year. With several dates and locations still available, we sincerely hope that this will be an opportunity for business leaders to come together to share thoughts and ideas, and discuss key drivers to promote the understanding of what it takes to improve business performance.

By taking part, you can:

Reveal a time-tested methodology to increase business performance
Discover what a take command culture looks and feels like
Learn key behaviours that drive personal responsibility and performance change
Explore current business challenges
Connect and hear from likeminded senior leaders
Create and plan simple effective actions to drive performance change.
Hear contemporary success strategies from Dale Carnegie’s new bestseller Take Command

Here’s just some of the overwhelmingly positive feedback from attendees at our previous roadshows held this year:

“I thoroughly enjoyed this event and learnt a lot.” – Managing Director

“Super-enjoyable, great interaction opportunities, excellent delivery and interesting table discussions – highly valuable.” – Head of Learning & Development

At Dale Carnegie we’ve helped thousands of organisations and millions of individuals take command of their businesses, careers and futures through our unique training and coaching programs delivered in over 30 languages across 80 countries. We witness them apply the proven tools, expertise and support of Dale Carnegie and watch the effects ripple out – from individual breakthroughs, transformed relationships and radically changed team performance to measurable results, organisational impact and reshaped communities.

Book your place at one of our next roadshows today

Andy Collings, Chief Executive UK, Dale Carnegie