Mutation is a tiny change that if it improves the species is passed on to the next generation, eventually becoming prevalent and pushing out the outmoded ability or standard or technology. Evolution in animals takes hundreds of generations to spread, so ten thousand years for humans and under a year for fruit flies. In tech it takes a few years to completely outmode the old and replace it with the better, faster, more resilient and powerful.
You as a human though can evolve your business daily. No, you won’t have the healing power of Wolverine, but every day you can break your old you, improve, and overnight you then heal from the wounds of the previous day and be better. This was actually the Norse idea of Heaven for the brave, Valhalla where the warriors of worth would fight and die every day, then rise up, heal, feast, and fight the next day better than they were before. We should adopt this evolutionary improvement approach to our businesses.
Chose one aspect of your business that will directly impact your output. It could be your attitude, your closing skills, the questions you ask in initial meetings with clients. Let’s focus on Introductions, as that ultimately is the primary driver of all other components of your Introduction Based Business.
If you honestly assess your ability to continuously gather high quality introductions to the individuals or organizations that you need to grow your business, you would probably agree that you have tremendous room for growth. That you could get a lot better, and that it won’t take a Herculean effort to start the process of improvement on a very short cycle. You could probably do something tiny today to get better tomorrow, such as:
- Running a list of potential names to feed your clients this week.
- Memorizing a new IQ (Introduction Question), such as “who is the most driven person you know?” so that it easily slips off your tongue like an actor repeating a line they have rehearsed for years.
- Writing out your introduction language.
- Practicing your response to commonly asked questions from clients, so that your responses are as ingrained as a Viking warrior’s battle responses.
- Having everything you need to call new potential clients prepped so you can grab your joe, sit down, and go.
Assume you chose to improve a process like having your phoning prepped. Day 1 should be easy to show improvement. Day 2 a little harder, because the easiest gains were made just by starting. Day 3 is a little more difficult as you have captured some of the easier issues. Keep at it though for an entire week, because the incremental gains on that last day are the most important.
Next week, chose something different to work on WHILE MAINTAINING the old discipline/improvement. Select a skill for this week, like practicing handling objections every day for five minutes in the morning. By the end of this week, that particular skill will be substantially improved.
Keep rotating between processes and skills you can practice, and even if some of the old skills lose a bit of their edge, the net effect is still constant improvement in critical areas for you to build and run your Introduction Based Business.
What will you notice in a month? That situations that would break you no longer scare you because you have practiced them a hundred times and so no longer fear the unknown, but rather welcome the challenge of an objection. That your mornings are more efficient, because you habitually prepare for your day and sit down ready to perform. That the daily growth is positively impacting your attitude, making you more effective in multiple areas of your daily activities. Your confidence is better than before, and you can start seeing it reflected in your production.
Now keep switching your daily improvement focus for a quarter, sometimes cycling back to previous skills. After one day of practice they are as sharp as ever, after three they are better than ever and at the end of that week they are beyond where you previously thought possible. Your processes are humming like a well-tuned machine, and your paychecks are consistently good to great.
Most importantly, at this point you have meta-awareness of your business. Not only do you understand it deeply, almost intuitively, but you are able to start thinking about all aspects of it and the whole on a much different level. You have an attitude of growth, a mindset of possibilities and excellence and a desire to improve and excel. Evolution is now in your DNA.
So take that first little step. Make that tiny incremental change. Start on that journey to excellence. So days it will be tough, you’ll get mentally bruised but you’ll heal and fight again the next day stronger and better. And better. And better. They won’t make comic books or movies about you probably, but your evolution could become the stuff of legend.
