When you want to attract more ideal clients and dominate your market, the key factor that will determine success from failure is not strategy or ideas – it’s having the the right authority mindset and psychology.
5 Keys to the Authority Mindset
Here are five keys to developing the authority mindset to help you become the authority in your market:
- Purpose: You need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve.
- Passion: It will help if you are doing something that combines your strengths and your interests.
- Pride and Confidence: You need to be ready to promote yourself and your business.
- Proactivity: It’s no use just having ideas, you need to take action.
- Personal Development: You shouldn’t try to be good at everything so you should focus on being the best possible at what’s most important.
Purpose
Imagine turning up at an airport and trying to buy a ticket without knowing your destination.
This may seem a bit crazy but it’s actually the way most people run their lives and their businesses. And that’s a key reason so many don’t achieve the business success they should.
So, to improve your authority mindset, it’s important to take some time to decide what you want the future to look like.
- Define Your Outcome: You need a clear vision of what you want to achieve. This is like the picture on the front of the box when you are doing a puzzle. It gives you clarity on where you are heading and this will help drive you towards achieving it. To have a clear vision, think about how you want your life and your business to look in three to five years and sum it up in a sentence or two.
- Set your Objectives: When you have a clear vision, you need to identify specific objectives – goals or milestones – on the way to achieving it. Make your objectives exciting enough to motivate you. To help you identify objectives, look at your vision and ask yourself what you need to achieve this year (or month) to be on course to reach them.
Picturing Success
The visual element of the authority mindset is important because many people waste a lot of time worrying about what might go wrong. If they put the same energy into picturing success, they would get much better results.
In his book Psycho-cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz talks about sports people running successful outcomes through their mind many times before the event. You can do the same in any area.
It may seem a little crazy but rehearsing positive outcomes in your mind before you undertake tasks will improve your results.
Maltz also points out the importance of self-image. People with a success mindset believe in themselves.
Many unsuccessful people have a poor self-image because they base it on what they believe others think – without any evidence of what people really do think. This self-image prevents many people from achieving the success they are capable of – yet it’s based on perception not on reality.
Passion
It’s been said that if you do what you love the money will follow. Indeed at least one book has been written about this. It would be great if that applied to everyone. Working in a field you enjoy makes it easier to work hard and get great results. However, developing the authority mindset is not just about doing what you love.
In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins highlights that many of the most successful businesses have a clear understanding of what he calls their Hedgehog Concept. The Hedgehog Concept comes from understanding the intersection between three circles:
- What can you be best in the world at?
- What drives your economic engine?
- What are you deeply passionate about?
To understand the concept, imagine that you are doing work to which you are ideally suited, which pays you very good money and which you love to do.
For some people that may seem an impossible dream but it simply requires some self-analysis to help you discover where you can achieve the best overlap between passion, profits and personal skills.
Pride
Many people don’t achieve the results they could in business because they don’t have a success mindset that makes them willing to push themselves forward and highlight their own expertise.
It’s as though they are waiting for someone to come along and give them permission to say they are an expert.
The fact is there are no expert police and, with obvious exceptions in certain professional fields, you have to set out your own expertise.
You need to see yourself as an expert that offers solutions that other people will value.
In his book Winning through Intimidation, Robert Ringer talks about the “Leap Frog Theory”. This says you have to be willing to tell people you have specific knowledge and skills. When you do this, you can easily “leap over” the people in the middle who also have this expertise but are hesitant to talk about it.
Too many people are waiting for that “one more thing” they think they need to know before they can claim to be an expert. The trouble is most business owners are so close to what they do that they don’t realize how much they already know. The challenge is to make the leap and claim your position as the expert.
You’ll often find that your clients and contacts rate your expertise more highly than you do yourself.
Proactivity
One of the main characteristics of an authority mindset is a willingness to take action.
However, the biggest blocks on success are the following evils:
- Passivity: Reacting to events
- Procrastination: Putting off doing something you should do now
- Perfectionism: Just needing “a few more changes” to get it right
One of the keys to a success mindset is being able to decide quickly what to do with new information and taking immediate action. At the very least, it’s a good idea to identify a step you can take within the next 24 hours to start making things happen. If you decide to wait, you’ll find that someone else is taking action.
They won’t be any better than you but they’ll be one step ahead of you when it comes to making money and establishing a reputation.
Personal Development
People with an authority mindset don’t try to be good at everything. But they do seek to master a few important skills that give them an advantage. You need to decide what specific skills you want to master and then stay focused on them so that you become a recognized expert in them.
You should always seek to improve in these areas. So it’s important to spend time enhancing your skills and investing in yourself so that you maintain your expertise. But don’t try to become a master or everything. It won’t work.
To achieve your full potential and build your success mindset, find other people who can fill in the gaps in areas where you don’t have the skills or desire. That’s why it’s important to consider outsourcing certain tasks and to look for partnerships to help build your business.