Experimental Mindset Part 1: How to Unlock the Power of Curiosity
Episode 757: Show Notes
What does an experimental mindset mean? How can you foster one in yourself and your team? That’s what we’re talking about today. Both Emylee and Abagail experience a constant push and pull that comes with mixing intuition with analysis. We see so many business owners that stay in the planning and research phase for so long that they never take action in one direction or the other. That’s so frustrating to see! That’s what sparked this training.
Everything in your business is evolving. That includes your goals, what it takes to get there, and the headspace you need to be in to get there. We can say all day that business isn’t linear, but you’re not going to understand that until you’ve lived it! When businesses meet a challenge, they usually fail and give up entirely or succeed and seek a new challenge because they believe the journey should be harder. That’s really hard to watch. We want to arm you with some thoughts and ideas that equip you to live in that experimental space that sees failure as information. We want to equip you to take the steps that allow you to incrementally move towards your goals.
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What You Need to Let Go of to Achieve Exponential Growth
Once you’ve become aware that you want things to change, you need to adopt this mantra; “I will let go of the addiction to timeline, urgency, and speed.”That’s what this all comes down to. The pressure you feel is self-imposed. The standards and goals you have set for yourself don’t mean anything unless you have truly dug deep and figured out what they mean to you. Truly, what’s on the other side of letting go of timeline, urgency, and speed is exponential growth.
Maybe you need to stop enforcing an arbitrary timeline that is self-enforced. You have to disassociate the wins and losses with your personal self-worth. While it can feel good when things are going great, that’s really dangerous when things are not working in your favor. It’s unrealistic for a business to make the same amount of money every month and to always be in a season of growth.
How to Interpret Data with Feelings in Mind
Our ultimate goal for you is that you never rely just on facts or only on feelings to make decisions. You can make data sing different songs. We didn’t believe you could do that with data until we saw how different people can interpret the facts. The meaning is the part that is up for interpretation. We want you to get focused on asking yourself what you need to know rather than whether or not the facts are telling you the story you want to hear.
Facts and feelings should filter in and out of one another. A lot of us live in one or the other innately, so it can be easy to fixate on one over the other. How does it actually feel and what is the data actually telling you? In many ways, 2020 helped us to focus more on both in order to find what we really want. Is urgency and timeline still your guiding light? How does your overall goal for your life affect your pace? Ask yourself how your future self would feel about the decisions you are making today.
Perfecting the Art of Having an Experimental Mindset
Sometimes urgency is required. You don’t always have to assume that going quickly is bad if you can pose the question of how your future self would feel about the choice you are making today. Are you making the choice that is ethically right for you? There are so many things we would’ve done differently as business owners today, but we don’t regret them! That is also the art of choosing to have an experimental mindset. You would only do things differently today because of the lessons you learned through experimentation.
If everything is an experiment and not a mistake, then you can only learn. You can’t have regrets. Every decision you make in your business has a consequence that you then have to live with. The consequences can be exponentially positive or negative, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a reality that you will then build because of it. No matter what choice you make, you can be confident in your ability to craft a reality that feels good to you, and serves others. Imagine being fully untethered from a fixed idea of how things need to look in order to feel those feelings.
Reflecting on the Past to Plan for the Future in Alignment with Your Journey
Nine out of ten times, you’re chasing a feeling rather than a tangible reality. There are a whole lot of ways to achieve a feeling, and we think that’s amazing. That is why we’re all on such different paths, despite the fact that we are all chasing similar experiences. There will be highs and lows from every decision that you make. We are just committed to riding the highs and lows of the consequences of our decisions. This philosophy is true for business and for life. There are no actual regrets that happen at the end of life. Ultimately, everything is a decision, and the consequences are because of that decision.
The set of decisions you have made up until now has made you who you are today. You can make a different set of decisions from today that’s going to set you on a totally different path. You can think all day long about how things would have been if you had chosen differently, but you’re here! Instead of reflecting so much, we want you to use this as a learning opportunity to decide how to move forward.
What can you do today to take action and set yourself up for the future? There’s no right or wrong, there’s only experimentation and choosing how to move forward. We’d love to hear about your challenges, goals, and plan to move forward. Set up a time to chat with Abagail today!
Quote This
If you let go of the addiction to timeline, urgency and speed; truly, what opens up for you on the other side is exponential growth.
Highlights
What You Need to Let Go of to Achieve Exponential Growth [0:12:58]
How to Interpret Data with Feelings in Mind [0:18:59]
Perfecting the Art of Having an Experimental Mindset [0:23:31]
Reflecting on the Past to Plan for the Future in Alignment with Your Journey [0:28:45]
Today’s Guest:
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
The Strategy Hour Podcast is a twice weekly show hosted by Abagail Pumphrey and Emylee Williams, the founders of Boss Project. Join us for semi-ranty biz conversations for service providers looking to ethically grow their agency businesses. Episodes cover everything from lead generation to leadership mindset to team culture and beyond.
Key Topics:
Business planning, Decision-making, Alignment, Growth, Mindset
