Hi guys,
Today I want to rant on behalf of all of those people who get told they’re doing too much, they’re spread too thin and all of the like.
These are challenges or objections I keep coming up against as I speak to people about all that I’m working on.
Having a lion’s mentality and grit and growth mindset is what will help you continue to drive forward.
And for those who are also receiving this feedback OR you’re just looking to level up your own growth mindset – I want to run through some of my thinking in this area.
Ironically – as I write this – I know it’s been an appalling week for my wake-up time and my general routine which has tested the ‘lion’ within me for sure.
I’ve just got off a 30-minute call with my SEO team about our forthcoming PR strategies and tactics.
So much for not checking WhatsApp and for doing the other items on my agenda.
However, if I still get my 25 pushups done and I still book in an ultramarathon it’ll end up being a solid day!
So – with all of this in mind – what does it mean to have a lion’s mentality and a grit and growth mindset.
Table of Contents
What Do I Mean By Lion’s Mentality
I’m of course going to discuss this in further detail below – but lion’s are Apex predators who stand tall in popular culture alongside the tiger.
And with the lion’s mane and the manner in which they purvey their dominion – it’s the feeling of dominance, power and absolute mental clarity it gives you that I want to communicate in today’s blog.
And what about the grit and growth mindset?
This is what I see as being the ‘in-the-weed’s’ part of the Lion’s mentality. To successfully become a lion in your own life – you need to have grit.
A gritty mindset, a lion’s mindset, means you’re prepared to walk in and amongst the weeds to help bring home the flowers. And having a growth mindset means that with each day you toil amongst the weeds – the stinging nettles, the barbs and other traps will be dangers you’ll face, fall upon, stand up, overcome the next day, and ultimately come out stronger than ever before.
To become the lion, you must have grit and go for growth.
So now let’s get into the ‘weed’s of what this all really means:
Having an indomitable will to progress
This is a central tenet of success. Above all, you need to have the desire to want to get better. To have a better everything than you did yesterday.
Progress for the sake of progress is almost intrinsic.
You might not REALLY know WHY you want it – but you know you want it.
It’s part of your nature.
Seeing setbacks as progress
Every time you fail, you go cold for a moment whilst you manage the fleeting feeling of loss. That’s your grit – dealing with it.
But ultimately your growth mindset will let you see setbacks for all of the education they give you.
These last 3-months we’ve suffered tremendous setbacks with the way we’ve handled our lead generation clients.
What’s been incredible is that we’ve only got better as a consequence of it.
- My lead-generation team’s skills have evolved (you reassess your approach when you don’t generate the leads you were hoping to).
- We’ve instituted additional feedback loops with weekly calls with clients (we didn’t do this before)
- We have weekly reporting in combination with this
- Our data mining continues to progress with the use of several other platforms
- Our head of lead generation is beginning to take calls solo – without me involved
- We’re run a lot more in-depth competitor analysis to identify how to improve our own sales funnel and make our documentation more robust
- We’re upping the technical knowledge of our sales team
- We’re making significant content-led pushes on the websites with blogs going out every day in the month of April
All of this activity has been spurred on by our setbacks and failure.
We weren’t making anywhere near as much progress when we were doing well.
In fact, if I think back to 6-months ago – it was a completely different world in terms of where we were in respect of team, tactics and general approach
Understanding that growth is founded upon failure
This is critical to growth and gritty mindset – and truly is at the core of everything I’ve discussed above. You learn nothing from success and everything from the way you fail. It is not a straightforward journey – and the path is fraught with difficulty.As I look to build Pearl Lemon Properties – it’s going to be a similar journey with many problems along the way – and I expect the next 1-2 years to be challenging as we seek to build out the business from the ground up.
However, I’ve failed already many many times and that is setting me up in terms of expectations for the future.
Practice Extreme Ownership
This is critical when it comes to having a lion’s mindset.
You must take care of your pride (i.e your family, your team and everyone else you deem to care about) – no matter what.
And the way this happens is by taking ownership of absolutely everything that happens.
It is your responsibility to make everything better.
It is your fault if anything goes wrong.
It is your fault if those around you fail.
Practising this mindset will make all of those people around you rise.
No one else is going to take responsibility for your future (and often their own) – so put the blame on yourself.
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Be prepared to sacrifice yourself
Having a lion’s mindset (or rather a lioness) is about understanding that the success of those around you can come as a consequence of your own ‘needs’.
Your ‘needs’ come second, and their success comes first.
In my instance – it’s the success of Pearl Lemon that drives everything else.
Pearl Lemon is the company I’m aggressively working to grow and scale. Pearl Lemon’s success will ultimately lead to the success of everything else around it.
It’s like the old adage – make sure you take care of the king in your life (Pearl Lemon) and the queen (Strawberry) – and the rest will take care of itself.
Simply put – make sure the money keeps coming in, and the money keeps growing, and make sure your partner is taken care of – and the rest will absolutely take care of itself.
Listen to advice but only the parts that help with your direction
I take advice all the time – making sure to ignore the things I don’t agree with or where the reward isn’t worth in the input, and then try and distribute these learnings across the team.
Where you identify people who know more than you and have good insights – try and take on board what they say and integrate it into the way you approach your work
Operate with extreme decisiveness
The only way to make rapid progress is to have a close to zero gap between thinking and doing.
Once you think something is a good idea – you should just immediately do it.
7 out of 10 times it’ll have been the right decision. Naysayers around you will point out the 3 things that went wrong and it’ll stick in their mind.
But the 7 represent a much great victory.
The example is those 8 things that happened as a result of all of the issues we faced. So much progress came from it that losing a couple of corporate clients was 100% worth it.
So taking massive action and trying not to ‘think’ about it too much – will get you far farther down the road than deliberation will. This demonstrates both grit and growth.
The lion makes you unafraid to deal with the grit, and your mindset grows as you go through all of the chaos that ensues from extreme action.
Focus on your journey, keep the vision
Along the way – there’ll be many reasons to slow down. Many reasons to give up. Many ‘reasons’ for waking up late, for not getting something done, for this and for this.
But you must keep to your journey – even if some days are slower than others.
This is because of the vision you have.
It may well be the case that I’ll never understand your vision.
And if I don’t – well that’s ok.
It’s YOUR vision and YOUR journey and for YOU to walk alone and successfully walk it so…and that is what the lion’s mindset is all about.
Here are some other habits that I believe champions adopt
- Wake up early (not 730am like me – that’s terrible – gotta be pre-6am)
- Take cold showers (I don’t do this – I need to do this)
- Read for 1 hour a day (I used to do this – need to work on it)
Final Thoughts
I hope you enjoyed my rant about how to have a lion mentality!
I’ve slipped the last couple of days and I’m not happy with where I’ve landed so I’m trying to correct that through discussing this with you as much as I’m telling myself.
I need to get back on this journey to success.
