The Most Powerful Addiction You Can Ever Imagine.
As entrepreneurs, we utilize different resources to achieve business goals – money, connections, talents, skills. However, there is one above all others, that you would never expect to be mentioned as a resource useful in business. With its unique nature: unlimited, instantly accessible, equal to everyone, always with you, independent of anything, multiplies when you start using it. Love.
What is love anyway?
As much as it's magical and powerful, there’s one serious obstacle that prevents us from using it frequently: love is a very abstract term with no specific form we can imagine so our brain cannot access it effortlessly (unless its a habit).
Its been a subject of countless poems, songs, quotes – yet still most of us associate it with a man-woman relationship, therefore, don’t use it in business, collaboration, team-building and general „life approach”.
Let’s break it down into colors
Imagine love as a stream of white light. If you point it to the prism it breaks down into colors, right?
If the prism is your perception of love, let the colors be the particular emotions (or energy states if you like) that are easy to turn into behaviors therefore practical and applicable in our everyday life:
- Joy: do you know how to bring it to other people? Yes its enough if you smile :)
- Kindness: it's as simple as listening to others and responding to them with respect to their opinions and feelings.
- Gratitude: our brain usually focuses on what is missing between reality and image that you create. Why not appreciating what you already have and achieved by saying „Thank you” to whoever you believe contributed to these outcomes?
- Care: there’s this movie for kids on youtube where all these little humans sing so profound, yet very simple, words: „caring is sharing”. Best of what you can do to take good care of someone is to share with him some piece of your time and attention.
- Acceptance: I do want to challenge you a little bit here – make a 7 days commitment to remove any kind of judgments. In practice, it means to stop using „I think…”, „I like/dislike…”, „In my opinion…” etc. I know it’s hard but I promise it’s worth it – simply accept things as they are (share with me your thoughts afterward on how did it feel to realize how much of unconscious judgments are we making every day).
Is it worth to get addicted?
Addiction usually associates with drugs or alcohol. I used this word only to grab your attention by slightly controversial title – what I really meant is habitual creating love in all aspects of life. But reading this article you might be thinking „how does it relate to my business results?”. It does – severely.
- Team management & leadership – there is no better way to earn the respect of your team than treating them with love. Do you want engagement, loyalty, hard work & full commitment to your project? Show them some „love-prism” components.
- Satisfied customers referring you to their friends – growing by referrals is the most effective and natural growth strategy however reserved only for honest entrepreneurs that always put quality over quantity. Train your team to behave with love in mind towards your customers – I guarantee this one practice alone will drive you additional revenue.
- Outstanding company culture driving talents to your company – business is about people, the more talented individuals you can get on the board, the more chances of winning. Let love be a foundation of your company culture and you are already halfway there. Yes, I know it may sound silly and you may think „how should I sell to my engineering team that I want love to be the core of our company culture – we work in IT business, not health care”. That’s why I broke it down into more actionable, behavior-driven states of mind that will be easily understood and apply. By the way, when we were extracting our company core values back then a few years ago, we asked our people about their private core values they live up to – guess what? Most of the team members indicated love as one of them.
Do you want to host more love in your business & private life? You need to produce it. How? By all the colorful behaviors you can think of that support joy, kindness, gratitude, care & acceptance.
P.S. Please do let me know how did it go with the “7-day-no-judgments” experiment ;)
