Thinking Creatively to Grow Your Business.
Perhaps words you’ve never heard in a business context before and for those of you who like to hustle and work 24/7, this might just be a ‘bit out there’ for you. Probably well worth a read through. Thinking creatively is key.
Building a high growth, world-class business is pretty time-consuming. Not only is it the time you are working on and in your business. But it’s also the time you spend thinking about it, no matter where you are and no matter what you’re doing.
We’ve talked in this blog about entrepreneurialism being close to a vocation. When you’re totally committed to something, it tends to become an obsession.
Time for a time out. Time for a little creative thinking.
All work and no play makes you very dull indeed. Your friends, family and loved ones are likely to drift off as you become totally obsessed with the marvellous widget you are creating.
We’ve Been There
How do we know? We’ve all done it. The partners of Tricres have a collection of divorces behind them and one or two near misses with a nervous breakdown. Not to mention some pretty impressive therapy bills under their belts, so you’re in good company.
We’re saving you from the mistakes we made in getting to where we are today and we have all discovered the joys, benefits and sheer bliss of meditating. Our CEO, Rebecca meditates every day for 30 minutes and has done for about five months. Which is lovely and good for her – you might be thinking through gritted teeth and a wry smile.
She fits it in either early in the morning or last thing at night or even on long train journeys and has an app to help her. Otherwise she finds it hard to relax – don’t we all. Details of the app are at the end of the blog.
Thinking Creatively?
What possible benefit can that have in growing the world’s most successful business coaching, training and consulting business you might wonder. Here’s the most recent and tangible example:
The Tricres learning platform launches next week and we hadn’t come up with any engaging ads for our forthcoming marketing campaign. We’d spoken about them, we’ve organised where we’ll advertise and what our budget is, but we hadn’t come up with anything concrete to actually post. Now, we know our client base is savvy, smart and on it. But you’re definitely not psychic, so we need something you can read, watch and look at to tell you about the Netflix for business owners like you that we’ve created.
In a Premier Inn somewhere in London, Rebecca had about an hour to spare. Instead of checking her emails or continuing to write the courses she’s been creating, she decided to meditate. As usual, she fell asleep after about twenty minutes and can’t remember most of what was said in the session. But since she knows it’s all going in on the unconscious level, she’s learnt to let go of that stuff a long time ago.
So, for an hour, our CEO was seemingly unproductive, snoozing and maybe even snoring her way through an hour of a busy day, about ten days before launch.
This might sound crazy, commercially stupid and downright lazy to some of you and others might be wondering what happened next…
What Happened Next?
She woke up and immediately wrote out about twenty ways to attract subscribers to our learning platform. None of which she’d been consciously aware of before she meditated/slept. They came out from the tips of her fingers onto the screen of her iPad in less than two minutes. All but two of them were spot on (Lauren in marketing loved 18 out of 20). She also finished writing the course she’d been working on and was wide awake and alert for the event she was heading to that evening.
Would she have come up with those ideas so easily and effortlessly without the meditating? We doubt it. Maybe she would eventually, but they would have sounded forced or less engaging.
Was that hour productive? Yes. It was possibly as productive as the previous four hours spent writing courses on the train to London. Rebecca was thinking creatively.
We must detach ourselves from the myth born out of the industrial revolution that productivity = length of time spent on doing something. In manufacturing or a factory/production setting, this is true, although regular breaks are vital to maintaining productivity. You can be incredibly productive for two minutes and solve a seemingly intractable problem that people have been working on for months. Why?
Einstein had the answer ‘no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’. Meditating is a shift in your levels of consciousness. You can therefore solve problems you didn’t even realise were a problem in a meditative state. You can be more creative, energised, engaged and relaxed by meditating for even a short time every day.
So, for you hustlers out there, stop, chill and download a meditation app. Use it every day and you’ll get further faster and in a happier frame of mind than you ever thought was possible.
Rebecca uses Holistrio.
