Are you a good noticer? You won’t notice business opportunities if you aren’t good at noticing. If you spend more time noticing what’s happening in the external world or if you spend more time with the thoughts rattling around in your brain, you are probably missing a lot. We need to develop the discipline to do both. Maybe you study your surroundings like you were taught in college to study a painting. That puts you ahead of many people, and yet, you likely miss a lot that could help you notice more business opportunities.
Noticing clearly and communicating effectively seem like obvious, straightforward skills, yet our psychology seems to suggest that we’re prone to make a lot of mistakes. Why is that? Let’s start with an experiment.
Choose a colleague, client, friend, spouse, person-in-case-of, or neighbor. Close your eyes and try to recall the last time you saw that person. What were they were wearing? What was their emotional tenor? Can you recall their tone of voice, body language, and what they said and did? Perhaps you “saw” them on Zoom. What was hidden from view?
If you aren’t good a noticing what is in front of you, you’re going to miss the next, best opportunity that comes your way. It probably will not appear like an opportunity at first glance. It may seem like too much effort, not right for you, or not interesting. If you want to notice more, you’ll need to change your habits and learn new behaviors. Changing old habits and forming new ones is never easy. Put these 5 tips on a Post-It or Smartphone Note, in your calendar, or do this with a buddy for mutual accountability “check ins” until they become new habits.
1. Stop and Notice.
Notice, using every sense available. See, hear, feel, smell, taste, and the others. What others? We have a sense of space and time, movement and position. How about noticing how awake and alert you feel or how tense or relaxed your muscles are? Add in expanding your awareness of emotions in yourself and others. There’s a lot to notice and most of us notice little.
Practice expanding your perception of what “is.” Maybe start with the room you are in. List what you notice and what you remember noticing with your eyes closed. Practice regularly, until you notice more.
One of my trainings is problem-solving for leaders. It starts with noticing one’s internal context. I ask people to notice feelings in their body and expand awareness of emotions. It takes practice and an expanding vocabulary for your emotions. If the only words for emotions you know are anger, happiness, joy, love, and sadness, you may not feel contentment, pride, excitement, peace, satisfaction, or compassion. If you don’t know what compassion feels like, you may miss out on a business opportunity to empathize with a prospective client. Also, it’s easy to have your cognitive, analytical thinking skills hijacked if you aren’t noticing when you’re feeling anxious.
2. Notice the “big picture” in addition to the details.
The patterns, relationships, concepts, and connections that we call the “big picture” in contrast the details are less noticeable to some people than to others. Perception tendencies or preferences, like communication defaults and preferences are part of being human. Maybe you pay attention to the strength and style of a handshake, the tenor of a voice, the scent of a person and a room. But, do you also look for patterns and relationships? The connections between people, people and resources, or people and power? Culture and power dynamics show up in patterns of behavior, not in the employee handbook. Do you notice who gets attention and who seems invisible in a group? Maybe there’s a business opportunity hidden there.
3. Be curious.
Think like a journalist, psychologist, anthropologist, artist and so on. Our ability to be curious, depends on our history of experiences and what we know. Everyone has binoculars and microscopes in addition to blindspots. Leadership of oneself and others requires a big dose of curiosity – the desire to be open and keep learning. Experts in innovation point to the combination of curiosity and hard work as the catalyst for experimentation, innovation, and intentional change. Changing up routines, acting spontaneously, shaking up your thinking is how to find new connections and opportunities. It’s how to notice gaps to fill with your expertise and effort. It’s how to notice the human side of problems. These are the ingredients for finding new business opportunities.
4. Avoid assumptions.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you know the answer or have collected all the data that matter. Innovation intelligence and noticing more means testing your assumptions and reaching conclusions much more slowly. It doesn’t mean hesitating to reach a decision when the data is incomplete or ambiguous. The nature of complexity is that systems often have incomplete and ambiguous information. Living with a lot of complexity should not stop us from making decisions and experimenting to find solutions to problems. It does mean developing a heightened awareness of your unconscious assumptions. Everyone has them. It does mean knowing the difference between perception and data on the one hand and judgments, assumptions, and conclusions on the other. Suspend your judgment until the time is right to make a decision.
5. Change intentionally.
If you are stuck and not finding more business opportunities, it’s time to change what you are doing, how you are doing it, and when you are doing whatever you are doing. Let’s say you are right-hand dominant. In that case, you prefer to write with your right hand. With practice, you could learn to use your left hand, but it would take time, more concentration, and the early results wouldn’t be as good as with your right hand. It’s the same situation with intentional change. Do you prefer to notice and collect data or reach conclusions? Do you prefer to notice the details or the big picture? Do you prefer curiosity or making decisions? If you have ever explored your personality using the MBTI, then you know that expanding what you notice, how you make sense of what you notice, and the way you decide and act are preferences that have become habits. We can change our habits, expand into new habits, or replace old ones with new and better habits. If you are not getting the business opportunities you want, it’s time to change.
