Are You Missing Out On Big Opportunities Because Your Focus Is In The Wrong Place?

The following video is a very interesting example by a very clever psychologist named Richard Wiseman of how our our focus determines what we experience as reality Watch the video carefully and see if you can tell how the trick was done?





If you watched the video and were focusing on the "colour changing card trick" you may have missed all the changes in the environment; the background; the table cover and even Richard Wiseman's and his assistant's shirt. Now if you are like me you probably missed ALL of those huge changes. The lesson here is that what you focus on you experience as reality. If you focus in on lack you will only find lack in your world. And you will ignore all the possibilities and opportunities around you. Not only that the energy you give out through your body language and interactions with others will repel big opportunities while attracting the ones that cause you grief.

When working with clients I have found the same principle at work. For many of them they all use the tactic of reducing fees or prices in order to get the business. However doing this just reduces them to becoming a commodity. If all that differentiates them is price then the contract will always go to the lowest bidder Dropping your fees or trying to undercut the competition is a tactic where nobody wins since you end up doing work with little or no profit.

You will also tend to look for smaller opportunies and not notice the bigger ones around you all the time. Just like in the video you will be oblivious to the larger opportunties around you and will miss out.

Another thing to consider is that by dropping your fees and undercutting your competitors you tend to attract "bargain hunters" who will mostly never value what you do for them, constantly complain and cause you huge amounts of grief. And of course you will need more of them because your profit margins will be so low.

On the otherhand there are what I call "premium buyers" in most industries where price is not the main factor. In fact although you may not believe it price is very rarely the main factor when somebody makes a decision. We usually go for the best "value". So the key to bigger contracts or opportunities is to focus on articulating your value and positioning your marketing sales presentations to attract premium buyers.

In order to do this you need to shift your focus from trying to sell small contracts and undercuting the competition to selling bigger high value contracts. You need to make a shift in focus in the type of client you are looking for.

A good example was one of my coaching clients who runs a small IT firm. When I first started to work with jonathon he was focusing on selling support contracts at £20 a pc per month to small businesses. Within a few weeks he was pitching to contracts worth £25,000 to £40,000 per year. Within six weeks he had secured his biggest contract to date - "three times bigger than anything before and just as easy to fufill".

When I asked him how he had done it? He told me that all of a sudden bigger clients started to show an interest in him and he got phone calls asking to pitch. He was amazed at how effortlessly it all seemed. The real truth was that these clients were around him all the time and by shifting his focus and working on his mindset he started to see the opportunities around him. And he also attracted them where as before repelled them in favour of the "bargain hunters".