L before E except after A

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Shweta Jhajharia, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

They say that the only place where “Learn” does not come before “Earn” is in the dictionary. And correct “Action” is what is required for both learning and developing.

Goals and benchmarks allow you to see some aspects of the future. You don’t need to have the exact destination and path, but you do need to know where it is that you want to go. In other words, benchmarks will help you achieve your goals relating to the business.

So you have developed your business and it is running, now what?

How do you want to progress? Do you want to further add some products or services or do you want to invest in something new now?

Most entrepreneurs get into business for reasons that are not entirely evident to an outsider at first glance. The following three (3) reasons are among the most basic:
1) To make more MONEY and/or have more control over how they make it,
2) To have more TIME for themselves and be able to choose how to spend it,
3) To get CONTROL over their lives and their own destiny.

Very few small business owners are however fully able to realise these goals. What prevents them from achieving their Goals? Why haven’t they done anything about it? Why have they allowed themselves to accept mediocre results?

According to the Conscious Competence model, learning happens through four distinct stages:
Unconscious Incompetent – “I Don’t Know that I Don’t Know”
Conscious Incompetent – “I Know that I Don’t Know”
Conscious Competent – “I Know that I Know”
Unconscious Competent – “I Don’t Know that I Know”

We can use the example of learning to drive a car to exemplify how a person moves through these stages in almost every learning journey.

In the beginning, you do not even know all the things you need to know to be able to drive a car.

You have not yet been shown how little you know and how much you have to learn.

If you decide to learn driving, you begin to understand the controls on a car and realise that negotiating roads is much harder than you initially thought. More often than not, you fail to do well and feel some level of hopelessness and frustration on ever being able to learn.

Given time, feedback, and regular practice, you move from getting things mostly wrong to starting to get the hang of it. However, you do need to continue to be careful and fully aware while driving. In other words, the competence comes with effort.

With further practice, driving gradually becomes second nature to you and you do it without thinking – or while thinking about something else. You can now apply the rules habitually and unconsciously.

Often, as I speak to business owners, I find that while in the technical aspects of their business they are almost at unconscious competence, as far as running the “Business of Their Business” is concerned, they are Unconscious Incompetent.

They are unaware of the missed opportunities they have forfeited in the past, and more importantly, the massive results they could achieve NOW and in the future if only they knew what really was achievable and how it could be achieved.

These business owners have an obligation to themselves, their family, their employees and the communities they live in to do the very best that they can. They have a responsibility that is the cornerstone of our society.

Yet these same business owners are faced with the reality of simply surviving, paying their bills and hoping that there’s enough left over to keep going another day. That isn’t right!

As a Coach, I share in this obligation. I take very seriously the responsibility to be the very best I can be not only for my own business but also for my clients and prospective clients. Just as ‘Action’ is a critical step towards making a business successful, often the first step is recognition of the possibility of your business being somewhere significantly better than where it is today.

Develop a passion for learning and action. Success in life and business will follow.