Planting Bananas and Picking Cucumbers

As seen in APeeling in November 2020

Are you planting Bananas & expecting to pick Cucumbers? In my experience life is all about cause and effect, do you remember learning at school that every action has an equal and opposite reaction? Call it what you like, cause and effect, sow and reap, action & reaction one thing is for sure we are all currently getting the results of the action we have taken in the past. So I’m sure that you, like me, will agree that if we want something different we need to do something different!

As a psychologist I am always looking at the Behaviour of my clients, and come to that, at a lot of the people that attend ABC Networks and what I see is people getting a poor result and then moaning about it… How crazy is that?

Psychologists are constantly trying to prove or disprove theories and a theory that I have knocking about in my head at the moment is this… Small business owners that are currently not generating enough money and would like to, fall into one of two categories…

1 – They don’t know what to do to.

Or

2 – They know what to do but don’t do it.

If they don’t know what to do then that’s easy to fix; find out what you need to learn and then Do It Now!

The second group is somewhat harder to solve as they really do need to ask themselves why it is that they are not taking action on the knowledge that they have. For instance, do they really want what it is they say they want?

I speak to lots of small business owners and I’m amazed at how many people seem to have a different view of the sow and reap theory, for example they go networking don’t engage with people, they don’t get any business and then say that networking doesn’t work. They then try a different networking group, don’t engage again and funny thing is they don’t get any business again. Is this group 1 or 2?

This behaviour isn’t just restricted to networking events either, it happens in other areas of their business. A business owner I met recently was telling me about his current cash flow issues and how he gets ahead for a bit and then the same thing happens. I asked him what his systems were for collecting money from his clients and he said he hasn’t got time to put any systems in place because he is always chasing sales so he would have enough cash to pay his bills… Is this group 1 or 2?

One thing for sure is that it is absolute madness, to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result, it’s just like planting bananas and expecting to pick cucumbers! It doesn’t work…

If you are happy with the result you are getting, that’s great. If not and you want a different result, then do something different and if that doesn’t work do something different and if that doesn’t work do something different! Are you getting the picture?

First of all you need to know exactly what result it is that you want and then you need to measure every day what has worked and what hasn’t. Every day I ask myself have I moved towards my target or away from it. If I’ve moved towards it, great, I’ll do more of what I did. If I’ve moved away from it, I’ll change what I did, it’s really quite simple.

It doesn’t matter what we do in life we can’t plant bananas and pick cucumbers.

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Ash Lawrence is the Flip Flop Psycho who helps people change the ‘Cause’ of their results! To learn more - www.ashlawrence.co.uk or abcnetworks.co.uk