By: Stewart Brannen

We are all living it, carving out a livelihood and trying to make the best of our business and family relations – aren’t we?  I recently held a training program at Cleary University which was open to the public, and the title of the session was called “Training the Entrepreneurial Mind to Discover the Entrepreneurial Spirit.”

During the session, I built my presentation around the L.I.F.E. acronym (Learning, Improving, Focusing and Experiencing).  This was done to address a fundamental question we all should be asking as entrepreneurs: “How do we improve our entrepreneurial skills to maximize our chances of succeeding?”  Upon a closer look, the contents of L.I.F.E. help us frame this question into four areas worthy of exploration.

LEARNING can be viewed as the knowledge that is acquired by instruction or study.  So I ask you, the reader, this fundamental question, “How can you learn what you need to know?”  Are you drinking deeply from good books, are you spending time researching at the local library or on the World Wide Web?  Do you know what you don’t know?  Are you asking the “right” questions? If you are, that’s super, but the key to this process is knowing what sort of entrepreneurial skills, information or strategic relationships you need to develop to constantly improve the top line sales revenue of your business.  The point is simple: be proactive with your approach towards learning and you will find the answers.  This helps us transition from fixed mindsets to more creative approaches.  Just watch how you will begin to move away from isolating and analyzing ideas towards connecting ideas…simply through a proactive approach towards learning.

IMPROVING is the act of enhancing or making better in terms of quality, value or usefulness.  Whenever we want to make a difference, or make a product or service better, faster or cheaper, rarely is any success story built upon avoiding change.  Towards this point, as you venture your thoughts into how to improve things, stir your inner energies towards a greater sense of adapting to the unexpected.  At its core, adaptability requires a certain sense of zeal and limberness so that our flexible minds can apply their ingenuity to any given situation.  Our minds are powerful instruments of intelligence – so let’s use them in such a way that helps them spot the wrong questions instead of spotting the wrong answers. See the improved intelligence working already?

FOCUSING requires that we enter into a special kind of awareness, and that is much different from our everyday purview of things.  As we build our learning and improving skills, we will begin to recognize what is important to answering the next question: “How can we focus our entrepreneurial talents, energy and passion?”  If we prioritize, plan and follow through on what is important to “seeing” the end result, we will accomplish that which we focus upon.  Importantly, without a sense of focus, we entrepreneurs oftentimes drift from shore to shore without a sense of direction.  The ability to focus, on the other hand, helps us set our navigational compass and points us in the direction that we need to venture on to be successful.  Are you focused on your business goals?

EXPERIENCING is akin to testing, trying and feeling something in order to gain a sense of what it was like and as it relates to our own individual perceptions.  On this, while a key goal of entrepreneurship is towards achieving success, I often share with my students the important notion of wholeheartedly embracing failure.  From this perspective, if we can see failure as learning, instead of seeing failure as failure, we can come to experience a new level of awareness on our entrepreneurial journey.  In this short article, if you take a moment to reflect on the power of learning, improving and focusing, you will be well on your way to discovering your own and unique entrepreneurial spirit, and in a life-filled way.