Your Business Has Gravity That You Need to Escape

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Imagine floating in space high above the Earth. You’re physically safe, wrapped in your space suit and tethered to your ship, so nothing to worry you there. All your attention is focused on what you see before you – our beautiful planet.

In silence, as you gaze upon the planet that is our home, the glorious colours, the expanses of water, the swirls of cloud formations, how do you feel? I imagine you would feel calm, relaxed, at peace and your mind free of the hustle and bustle that is your life down on the planet.

You see weather patterns, land masses and where the planet is dark you see towns and cities lit up and you see connections within and to other towns and cities.

With your mind free from the detail of everyday life you see the big picture and not the small detail.

But you know that whilst you gaze down upon our world, it is constantly pulling on you trying to drag you back to its surface, back down to the noise and the small detail.

Your business does the same; it possesses a gravity, a pull, from which it is so hard to escape. It holds you in its embrace and presents you with only the small detail.

It is hard to escape the pull of your business, to escape the daily demands it places on you. But escape it you must. For only by looking down on it from up high can you truly look at and understand your business and plan where you’re going to take it and how. If you read my last post I started talking about how you need to start preparing for next year, which brings us to your first and possibly biggest challenge – your ability to step away from your business (to escape its gravity well) in order to see the big picture and create the kind of strategy that will propel it to the next level.

If you did read my last post, did you follow my advice and schedule your strategic planning time in your calendar? If you didn’t – and assuming you agreed that it is a worthwhile exercise – is it because you were too busy?

Being too busy in your business – not escaping its pull – is one of the biggest reasons a strategy doesn’t get created, doesn’t get implemented and why a business doesn’t move forward as planned.

You need to escape the pull of your business and with practice you can.

Set aside a period each week like a Friday afternoon and spend the time doing something that isn’t an everyday task but a strategic action that will benefit your business.

This could involve learning something new like a new marketing tactic or reviewing how well an aspect of your business is performing and finding ways to improve it.

Turn this weekly practice, where you step away from your business for a few hours, into a weekly habit. Make it a norm so that not doing it becomes a rare occasion.

Not only will your business benefit from you looking down at it each week but as you approach the end of the year and need to plan for the next one you’re far more likely to do it, far more likely to stay on course and hence far more likely to achieve your goals.

I talk more about how some of the laws of physics impacts your business in an article you can find in my library of free resource. It’s a bit of a qwirky article but I think well worth a read.