Here’s 5 Quick Ways to Solve Business Challenges

When it comes to running your own business, your company becomes an extension of yourself. It doesn’t matter what the size of the company is, or even what the company is - it’s your ideas, your work, and your effort that has built the company from nothing into something. There are other influences, of course, including any employees and of course your customers and clients. But at the most basic of levels, your company is a part of you.

Now, there are an infinite number of ways for business problems and challenges to arise. Most of the time, they seem to come from outside of ourselves. Yet, if take a close look at both ourselves and our companies, we can find a correlation between the problems that arise professionally, finding that they will likely imitate a pattern of problems that arise in our personal lives.

So if we work with the presupposition that we are the ones who are the cause for what happens with our businesses, it stands to reason that we can also look to ourselves to find those solutions. Being at cause rather than effect is a powerful place to be. It means that no matter what is going on in your business, you are taking the initiative to improve things, and taking responsibility for where you are. It might be uncomfortable, but it’s the only way you will overcome this challenge anyway.

So let’s just own the problem and get onto the ways to solve things, shall we?

If the problem stems from a conflict, enter into negotiations

I don’t care if it’s just you, or an entire board of directors. A conflict is a conflict. And the best way to handle a conflict is to speak to both/all parties, and determine what each side needs in order to feel as though it is getting what it needs. But even if the conflict is between more than one person, let’s just pretend that the conflicts are all within you.

So bring the two sides out and have each side sit on each one of your hands. Ask each side separately what they want. Then start on one side and ask the following question,

“What’s the higher intention of wanting ‘X’?”

Continue asking that question over and over again until you have a hard time answering the question. Then ask it a few more times. Then move over to the other hand. Ask the same question of the other side.

You will inevitably find at some point that both sides are aiming for the same higher intention. At that point, ask both sides if they can integrate with each other and work together to move towards that same higher intention.

This is a great tool to use with any type of conflict - just keep asking that same question until both sides get to a point of agreement. Simple.

Identify the limiting decision that is causing the challenge

If you are telling me, yourself, or anyone else why you can’t do “X”. It’s because at some point along the way, you made a decision that “X” was true for you. Be honest with yourself, and give the first answer that comes to mind when you ask yourself the following question, “When did I decide THAT?”.

It could be when you were a child, it could be before you were born. If you are able to identify the time you made the decision and it was a traumatic event, I would recommend working with a skilled Time Line Therapist to release the decision. But if it was just a simple event, do the following:

In your imagination, go back to that moment and relive the time you made that decision - but do it now as an adult with all of the resources that you have with you today. If you were presented with the same situation as an adult, would you have made the same decision? Or would you be able to instead learn something from the situation and make a more empowering decision now?

This one will work some of the time - but is a more reliable solution when working with a trained Time Line Therapist (yep - that’s me).  It’s worth a shot if you want to try it on your own because ALL business challenges stem from a limiting decision of some sort.

Ask yourself a better question 

Perhaps you are just focusing on the wrong things. If you focus on a problem in a negative way, and ask yourself negative questions, you’ll inevitably get negative answers. It’s like a filing system. Ask a crappy question, and the brain has no choice but to go into the crappy file folder to get your answer for you.

Need some help coming up with better questions? I wrote a whole post all about them a few weeks ago. Have at it.

Ask for help

Ah, the power of the Mastermind. Maybe you just don’t know what to do to get yourself out of the mess you got yourself into. Find someone who has been through it, or has accomplished what you want to accomplish. Then get on the phone or into your email program and simply ask them for help.

What if you don’t know someone who has been through it? Then find a blogger who has. Bloggers are a helpful bunch. They may or may not be able to help, but it’s important that you ASK for help. It’s important for you to do whatever you can to study people more successful than you in a certain area and model their behavior, beliefs and actions.

Success is a simple recipe - all you need to do is ask for the ingredients, and imitate, imitate, imitate.

If none of these do the trick, and you are 100% committed to solving this challenge, tear the problem apart with the exercises in my Values Conflicts Series.  

I’m warning you now - the exercise is designed to get in-your-face honest about what’s really going on and it is NOT a comfortable process. But it WILL take you from where you are to where you want to go as long as you go through all 4 posts in the series.

If it brings up more than you bargained for, drop me a line. You wouldn’t be the only one that did that.

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All 5 of these processes will take you less than a day to complete - some less than 20 minutes. They will also work to get to the real root of your business challenge - whatever it may be. So when you are truly ready to solve your business challenges, look to yourself first.

All of the solutions to your business challenges are there within you already - these 5 processes are simply designed to help you find it there.  And like I mentioned earlier, if you want help with any of them, drop me a line. I’m here to help!