Determine Your Mindset For Success

You might think your personal, internal experiences in life are too subjective to be useful. But these experiences are actually the best resources you have to come up with standards of measurement to evaluate your current and prospective relationships.

The most successful entrepreneurs transform their past experiences and their feelings about them into measurable criteria. They take seriously what they like and dislike, and these preferences become measurements for future use.

Transforming qualitative into quantitative.

We’re governed by certain external laws every day, including the economics of the marketplace. But it’s the “laws” we create out of our own experience that truly help to guide us. These laws are specific and unique to us.

By taking our likes and dislikes seriously, we can turn these qualitative experiences into quantitative standards of measurement.

The Mindset Scorecard.

I’ve created a scorecard model that anyone can use to determine right-fit clients, prospects, and team members based on these standards. For each four-column scorecard, I come up with eight mindset categories and then fill in a range of four mindsets for each category, from Failure in column 1 to Transformative in column 4.

To create your own, start by writing down your three best and three worst experiences in a given area (say, client relationships). By starting this way, your scorecard will be built upon your actual, specific experience. Based on your three best experiences, come up with eight statements that represent a mindset for success. These statements describe your right-fit client and will go in the fourth column of your scorecard.

For the first column, come up with eight statements that represent someone who is definitely not a right-fit based on your three worst client experiences. The two columns in the middle are for the mindsets that fall in between the best and worst.

Mindsets make our world.

You can repeat this process to make specific scorecards for all the relationships in your life, both business and personal. What you’ll likely find is that these “mindsets for success” you come up with not only represent your best relationships, they also represent you. Really, who you’re looking for is actually you!

We all want to work and spend time with like-minded people who share our values and mindsets. By making these things quantifiable through a scorecard, you’ll have a guaranteed method for determining who these like-minded people are—and aren’t. In this way, you can avoid investing time in team members, clients, and prospects who won’t work out in the long-term.

Add numbers to your scorecard columns (we use a scale of 1-12) and have prospective team members or clients score themselves. This will tell you right off the bat whether they share your mindset for success and will be an asset to your company or a client whom it will be mutually beneficial to work with.

The key to progress is identifying the mindsets that determine success.
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Increasing predictability.

By measuring people’s mindsets based on your specific good and bad experiences, you increase your chances of repeating good experiences and avoiding bad ones in the future.

The scorecard helps you communicate to others what your standards are for working with you. It also helps them see in which areas they could use some improvement. The desire to improve can be even more significant than where they fall on your scorecard. Someone who’s in column 2 but on their way to column 4 is a better fit for you than someone in column 3 who has no intention of changing their ways.

The key to progress is identifying the mindsets that determine success. Once you have these established, what previously seemed too abstract to be useful can become the measurable tools for ensuring the success of your future relationships.