Your business mindset is maybe the most important asset in your business. It can help or hinder you, often without you knowing. It’s maybe the biggest elephant in the room in your business.

It’s easy to focus on the tangible things – getting more visitors to your website, converting more people into sales, that kind of thing.

But if your business mindset is knowingly or unknowingly conspiring against you, everything else you do will be less effective.

What can you do to change this?

Often in small business the only person we can turn to is ourself. Which is awkward at best and often near enough impossible.

That’s one reason that people decide to use a business coach or mentor:

It’s someone to turn to, someone who will chivvy you along, someone who actually supports your business vision.

And if that’s in your budget, it can make all the difference in your business.

Your next best option are books.

Lots of business leaders have written (or have had ghost written) books on business success. Sometimes they’re very good, sometimes they’re good enough, sometimes they only seem applicable to the person who wrote them. The Amazon reviews will help you sort the wheat from the chaff in that respect.

So long as you’re able to set aside the time to actually read most of the books you purchase rather than just the first few pages, they can be an excellent way to go.

There are even some free ebooks that fall into this category.

I bought a physical copy of Spiritual Marketing by Joe Vitale when it was first released and bought several friends a copy as well. It’s now available for free but don’t think that the price tag means it’s low quality – it’s one of the best books I’ve read. Or you can buy the printed version on Amazon if you still prefer real books.

Whether you read that or not, mindset is all important in business.

I’m normally optimistic – some would say over-optimistic.

Which is a good starting place although it can mean that I pursue things longer than I maybe should because I’m still convinced that they’re going to work even though all the evidence – and everyone else – says that I’m flogging a dead horse.

That comes back to having a coach again – they can provide a reality check that it’s sometimes difficult to do with a regular business mindset.

If you haven’t got a coach yet (and this page isn’t supposed to be a pitch for that, even if it seems that way!) then learn to question yourself.

Often the simple act of asking “why” several times in a row will get to the heart of the matter.

Try it…

Pick something that’s currently a stumbling block or isn’t going as well as you’d like.

And ask the seemingly simple one word question “Why?”

Then answer that to the best of your ability – out loud is good so long as there aren’t too many people around who will think you’ve gone crazy by talking to yourself (and you can get round that by putting on a headset and keeping a copy of Audacity open, that way they’ll think you’re creating a product!), on paper if you prefer although unless you’re fairly good at brainstorming it’s nowhere near as powerful in my opinion.

Chances are something else will crop up as you answer the initial question.

So take that new thing and ask “why?” again, this time on the new thing.

I find it usually takes between 3 and 7 iterations before I get to the root of the issue.

Then suddenly there’s a light bulb moment of “why didn’t I think of that in the first place”.

Go on – treat yourself – try it!

The other thing with a business mindset is that a lot of it is like an iceberg – it sits below the surface, influencing things but not making itself well enough known to show through in plain sight.

One way I’ve dealt with that over the years is with hypnosis. To the extent that I’ve actually taken various courses in both hypnosis and NLP to learn more about the subject and how to practice them.

But it’s not easy to hypnotise youself…

Hypnosis works by creating what’s essentially a guided day dream.

You may or may not notice a shift while you use it. But there will almost certainly be a shift – for the better.

You can visit a local hypnotist if you’ve got the spare time but good ones aren’t cheap and can be booked quite a way ahead.

The way I prefer to use hypnosis is with pre-recorded downloads. I can play them as often as I want to (I find daily for a week is a good compromise between time spent and results, then a refresher when I think I need it). And you’ve got a top class hypnosis session into the bargain.

If you’d like to explore that further, this bundle of 4 hypnosis mindset downloads is a good introduction to the subject/

Whichever route you go down, the important part of your business mindset is that you keep developing it.

Our mind needs exercise just like any other part of us.

If you let yourself fall into the trap of “oh, well” then that will be just that – a trap.

Set aside some time for this – Ideally daily – so that you can work on your business mindset. Whether it’s reading, a coaching call, a hypnosis track, or whatever other methods you decide to use.

Then notice the positive results that happen when you do that!

And feel free to put a comment below about what you’re doing to develop your business mindset.