Business Success

Requires Self-Belief

Business success, for us to create the success that we want to experience. We first need to have belief in ourselves and then our business.

Our Business Mirrors Us

If we don’t have belief in ourselves, our business, or our team doesn’t have belief in our business or products. It can show up through body language, how we speak, our marketing material, the time taken to complete tasks, and a myriad of other possibilities. This can form a disconnect that your clients and potential clients can pick up on.

Clients may not even be consciously aware of the lack of belief which is occurring. Just as animals when they are given a choice of what to eat, will regularly choose the better option of what to eat. Clients too will intuitively choose a business with a higher level of self-belief over a business with a lower level of self-belief.

In order to succeed,

we must first believe that we can.

Nikos Kazantzakis.

The good news is this can all be changed, and it can actually lead to improving what your business offers, increasing confidence within your business, and the performance of your business. If you think of low self-belief as a form of internal feedback, then you can then objectively start to look at this feedback and use it to help work out what requires change.

One of the easiest ways this can be done originates from Lean Manufacturing. The term Lean Manufacturing encompasses a number of process improvement methods that the Japanese car manufacturers discovered and have systematically built upon since the 1950s.

Lean Manufacturing has been so successful it has steadily increased the quality and reliability of Japanese manufactured cars. This resulted in Japan’s rise from an insignificant car manufacturing country to one of the most significant car manufacturing countries and has continued as a leading manufacturer for decades.

Five Why Questions

The Five Whys is one of the processes from Lean Manufacturing that can help to uncover the cause of low self-belief and an infinite number of other possible issues. On the face of it, the Five Whys appears to be a deceptively simple process.

However, if the Five Whys is used and the questions are answered honestly and freely, it can lead to profound and unexpected opportunities, that gets to the very core of an issue. The question is asked Why did X occur. Then for the answer again ask the question Why did this occur until the question Why has been asked and answered 5 times or you have reached the point that there are no new answers showing up.

If when the question Why is asked there is more than one answer write all the answers down and complete the same process for each answer. An issue is rarely a result of one single cause by completing the Five Whys process for each answer, it enables comprehensive solutions to be put in place, that resolves the issue and can also sometimes unexpectedly solve other potential issues.

To help clarify the steps involved for the Five Whys please see the example below.

Why did the shipment not get picked up on Friday?
Answer because the booking was made late.

Why was the booking made late?
Because the packing machine broke down?

Why did the packing machine break down?
Because it had not been serviced for 2 years.

Why did the packing machine not get serviced for 2 years?
Because we don’t have any way of knowing when machinery needs to be serviced.

Why don’t we have any record of when machinery needs to be serviced?
Because when we switched over to the new app, the app didn’t allow us to record our service history and create notifications so we know when servicing is due.

After you’ve identified the core issue, you and your team can really have some fun brainstorming ideas to solve the problem. Experience has shown me that any idea no matter how crazy, should be warmly accepted for consideration.

The one seemingly crazy idea may just be what is required that leads to someone having a spark of inspiration and coming up with an elegantly simple solution. I’ve even found that by combining two ideas that on the face of it each seemed crazy, but when combined created a rational and very workable solution, that resolved the issue.

If you are looking to get things running smoothly in your business and are not sure where to start.