In my last article, "The New Wealth Mindset for Conscious Entrepreneurs," I discussed how your mindset determines the business opportunities you are able to see. Your mindset is founded on what you believe to be true about yourself, your business, and the world. We explored nine beliefs that empower you to see the world as full of expansive business opportunities that your company can leverage to make a powerful positive difference.
In this article, we'll look at three types of consciousness that enable you to hone in on the best business opportunities for your company - the ones that will best leverage the value your business provides to your customers into larger profits.. These three types of consciousness are awareness consciousness, visionary consciousness, and social consciousness. Each of these is a powerful lens through which you can evaluate opportunities.
You have 3 Types of Consciousness
Let's begin with awareness consciousness. This first type of consciousness helps you awaken to what is true now, what changes you want to make, and how best to achieve them. How many of your business decisions come from reactions based on fear rather than well-reasoned decisions based on accurately observing your business, your customers, and market conditions? Awareness consciousness helps you see "what is," so you can make sound choices rather than getting caught up in knee-jerk reactions.
Such reactions result from getting lost in the mundane details and momentary events in your business rather than becoming aware of more important factors. Awareness consciousness helps you answer your important questions. These include: What systems do you need; who will make the best team members; what values and rules will best serve your people and your business growth? What are your customer's big issues, problems, needs, and desires? How can you best meet those concerns?
For example, Southwest Airline's mission is to make traveling an enjoyable experience for their customers. How did they become aware of what that would mean to their customers? They surveyed travelers to discover their pet peeves--baggage and flight change fees, customer service rudeness, and high fares--and addressed all of them. As a result, they have tremendous customer loyalty and 41 consecutive years of profitability.
Turn Awareness Into Profits
In fact, their business is based on "a triple bottom line approach that takes into account the carrier's performance and productivity, the importance of its people and the communities it serves, and its commitment to efficiency and the planet." Now that's a sustainable business model.
Next is visionary consciousness. This second type of consciousness allows you to tap into higher states of intuition and become aware of expanded possibilities. These include ways you can innovate and develop new products. Utilize this type of consciousness to connect with a bigger mind--in which you access levels of information in the universal field of consciousness.
From Visionary Consciousness to Innovation
Now, if that sounds "out there" to you, consider that all great innovations in history have come from those who are willing to let go of perceived limits and expand into what "might be." Visionary consciousness asks the question "What If?" When you ask "What if?", then follow it with "How might that happen?", and enlist others in your visionary exercise, you never know what can come into being.
Think of some of the greatest innovations and achievements in the past 100 years alone--movies, radios, TV, the Internet, air travel, space travel, personal computers, cellphones, lasers, MRIs, genetic sequencing, alternative energy technologies. . . All of these began as an idea in visionary consciousness and led to many people collaborating together to create a new reality.
Which brings us to social consciousness. This third type of consciousness helps you understand the needs of others and our society, including the communities in which we live, the places where we work, and our natural environment. In our increasingly socially-conscious world, some of our best business opportunities come from providing solutions to the great problems of our times.
In turn, the solutions to the bigger social problems meet the needs of others, communities, societies, and the whole planet. Indeed, at some level, every action and innovation has a global effect--affecting everyone everywhere. How? Every thought, action, and change sends out ripples that affect the whole of humanity - the entirety of our planet.
Unfortunately, many of our innovations and products have not taken this "global effect" into account--and we live with unintended consequences such as inequalities, suffering, and pollution that affect us all. Because of those consequences, a new conscious entrepreneur is arising who is more socially concerned and aware.
Become a social change-agent
The social entrepreneur combines a profit motive with a desire to solve social issues such as reducing pollution, providing clean air and water, promoting the economic well-being of the impoverished, and promoting healthier lifestyles. These entrepreneurs are social change agents who seek to make the world a better place through the activities of their businesses.
By seeking to solve the bigger social problems of our time, you will begin to see more opportunities that you might not have seen without looking through the lens of social consciousness.
For example, you could ask "How can our company educate the youth of our community through our business? How can we partner with charities? How can we make our production process more efficient and more eco-friendly? How can we adapt what we do to address the greater needs of our planet?"
All of this requires that you expand your consciousness to take in what is happening in the larger communities and the world outside of your business. This can lead to you to seeing the best business opportunities that not only expand your business, but at the same time, improve our world.
Imagine Your Possibilities
So, what would happen if you used awareness consciousness in your business to identify the needs of your customers, to see how well you are meeting those needs, and to see what changes you need to make?
What would happen if you used visionary consciousness to ask "what if" and expand beyond "what is right now" to see what "might be" and how your company can be a part of that?
And, what if you used social consciousness to understand the impact of your business operations on others, society, and the whole planet, so you use your operations to make the world a better place?
By combining all three types of consciousness, you will discover countless business opportunities that would help your business expand and thrive beyond your wildest dreams. I'd love to hear how your company is doing that. Please leave a comment below.
Follow J V Crum III on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jvcrum
Connect on LinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/in/jvcrum/