Until we’re able to question our thoughts, work on our ego, act consciously and understand what limits us, accept it and use it as an advantage. Until we achieve – as individuals or organizations – to master these fields, we can’t change the things that matter. Want to learn a critical core skill? Challenge your beliefs.
These are some of the strategies you can use to challenge your beliefs and the way you think:
Small in large
Today ideas travel at the speed of light, the same happens with connections between people, communities, events, businesses, etc. We seek to please as many people as possible, but the opportunity isn’t to create a large audience composed of numbers and not people. The opening is to build a small community of people with whom we can interact, a community with a purpose. The value is in the people who trust you, in the people who think like you, who understand you and support you. The rest is entirely irrelevant. Such communities are created based on trust, do what we say and say what we do, fulfill our intentions and act according to the values of that community.
Attention is the key
In a world where there seems to be less time, you don’t need more possibilities; you need more attention. For seven years, attention spam has been getting shorter every day. Whereas the demand for attention grows nonstop and increasingly faster. It has even become an economy, since customers, the public, spectators, readers or consumers demand the “return of attention” that corresponds to them. If there is no return, they will leave, and we will become less relevant (or worse, totally irrelevant, until we are invisible). Challenge your thinking, because you are wasting the attention of the people who listen to you. You’re losing confidence and focus at every moment.
Modify the marketing approach
Challenging your beliefs means admitting that many of our efforts are going to pursue markets for products and services that we then sell to our customers. Wrong strategy, when people trust you when you have gained their attention when you are valuable to them. Then it is time to develop products or services that they need. Instead of creating “things” that somebody may buy someday. If we change the optics and focus energies on their needs, desires, expectations, and interests, and not on ours, the benefit and the result will be positive. This is why, when you challenge your beliefs, you change the way to see the world, in a very positive manner.
Create your own “product”
A common misconception is to produce content to generate activity on social networks. When I review my social platforms once a week and look at content for a few minutes, what I see is companies and people trying hard to generate content that they like. It’s a waste of time and effort. Instead, generate your product/service. Develop a story around it and begin to communicate it. That will give, in the short or long run, much better results than sharing your weekends, work trips, quotes from famous people or content from others who are always creating their own “products.” When I talk about products, I talk about projects, of course, based on passions, activities, hobbies. Don’t act to be famous, liked or accepted, act to fulfill purposes, cause positive impact and pretend to be real.
What are you changing?
Consider this question very seriously, whether you have a podcast, a Youtube channel, a restaurant, a shoe store or a strategic consultancy. One way or another, your work has to change something in people. Change buying habits, lifestyle, communication, traveling, eating, interacting. If you’re not evolving even little things, you’re not doing the work that you have come to do.
Live in bewilderment
If everyone loves you, you live in a deceptive world. If nobody questions you, most people are lying to you, or you’re doing mediocre work. Our thinking must reinterpret the meaning of discomfort, bewilderment, uncertainty, restlessness, tension and exchange it for its antonyms. We must understand that to dominate these assets will give us the peace and freedom that we want, going the usual way will only lead us to the hecatomb. Find people who disagree with you, people who criticize you and return you to vulnerability. If you don’t work in the margins, it’s that you’re playing safe, and it sure is risky.
Forget the numbers
The analytics, the statistics, the visitors to your blog, the podcast downloads, the followers on Instagram and Twitter. The fans that you’ve gained. What is the use of having negative numbers? Of not knowing who downloads the podcast? Of not knowing how many of your fans are customers? Understand if those who buy you follow you on social networks? I think all of these are numbers that look good in the eyes of people who admire our greatness. I know too many people with amounts ten times higher than you and me, and they barely make it to the end of the month. Challenging our thinking is to surround yourself with few people and that these people value what you value. Imagine every day you impact a person you later know, 365 impacts and people a year, more than enough, don’t you think?
Challenge your beliefs
It’s unlikely that you can reinvent yourself if you don’t understand the world in which you live in. There are those who live with hopes that everything fits together. Then there are others (the disrupters, the agents of change, the nonconformists), who are changing everything, challenging their thinking and thereby challenging the system. Changing the things that matter.
Don’t you think it’s time to challenge your beliefs, trust and invest in yourself and reinvent yourself?