By Dan
Kennedy
WE’RE going
to talk about the inner game of building your business. I believe that the
inner game is simply all-important.
“The inner game” is a new term for a classic idea
explained many different times, many different ways by virtually every success
educator, and even philosophers.
In the book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill reveals the secret using the words,
“thoughts are things”. Denis Waitley has worked with U.S. astronauts and
Olympic athletes on their inner games.
Author Tim Gallwey explores the ideas
of his books, The Inner Game of Golf,
The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Selling.
Interestingly, there is a never-ending connection
between the inner game in sport and the inner game in business, allowing
experts like Waitley, Gallwey, ex-quarterback Fran Tarkenton and golfer Arnold
Palmer, among others, to step back and forth between expounding on success
techniques in the athletic and business worlds.
In all cases, these people speak much more about
attitudes than aptitudes for a good reason. Surveys, studies and research
consistently reaffirm that 85% of your success will depend on attitudinal
factors, 15% on aptitude. Yet in your formal education and in most continuing
education, the emphasis is on the opposite—15% on attitude, 85% on aptitude.
Certainly technical knowledge and skills are
important. In your profession, you must deliver excellence based on your
staying up to date in techniques, products, materials and ideas.
However, such excellence alone will never build a
successful, growing, profitable business. The excellence that will is an excellence
created and sustained in your own mind. This is the most difficult, least
tangible aspect of building your business that we’ll ever talk about, but it is
also probably the most important.
Yeah, but what is it? So what is the inner game?
The way I see it, the inner game can be broken down into four major components:
