Quick Guide V: How to Apply Mindfulness to Business Relationships

When you give a top performer a target to aim for, they look beyond the target. Top performers stretch themselves. They set a range of targets. The minimum being ‘success’ as defined by others. Success is their target but their purpose is to be the best, and often be seen to be the best. Top performers seek fulfilment through a sense of completeness that they have acknowledged and dealt with everything that is ‘incomplete’ in their approach to business - specifically business relationships.

The Journey to Completeness (a ‘10 out of 10’)
The journey to completeness is a step-by-step process. Each step has both intellectual and emotional content. Getting a top performer to raise their game from say a 7 out of 10 (which is the median score top performers give themselves) to a 10 out of 10 (where 10 is “perfect”) is a two-stage process.
1. Going from a 7 to an 8 out of 10 is a straight-forward and, by-and-large, an intellectual process. We can all work a little smarter. (If a coach can’t help you achieve a one point improvement in your effectiveness, find another coach!)
2. Going from an 8 to 9 to 10 is an emotional journey. The journey is filled with limiting (or disabling) beliefs ‘you’ (by ‘you’ I mean you, me, we, us) hold about yourself. If creating superior business relationships was purely an intellectual process (e.g. create the best business case and it will sell itself) then smart people, especially top performers, would already be there. The journey from 8 to 10 is an emotional journey that requires you to sit in and gauge the feeling of where you are right now, in the present moment. Specifically, you sense and deal with any fear that exists in you or the person with whom you’re forging a business relationship. Over time, you develop a more intuitive approach to business relationships, through mindfulness.

"Mindfulness means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment, and then sustaining that attention over time as best we can. In the process, we become more in touch with our life as it is unfolding." Jon Kabat-Zinn

Allow me to add my own business related definition.
"Mindfulness is responding in the present moment without reacting through anger, shame, hurt or (the most likely feeling) fear."
Instead it’s about having faith-in-self to use your intuition to respond with passion, curiosity to learn, composure, patience, compassion, harmony, and timing to complete whatever is incomplete in your approach to business relationships.
Responding to what or whom? Answer - to whatever ‘the future’ brings to you in the present moment. And one of the future’s gifts to you is everything that is incomplete in your approach to business relationships.
This booklet describes a mindful approach to building more harmonious business relationships, starting with yourself. They will be profitable. They have to be for business partners to be happy, do they not?