Quantum Thinking in Business
Bottom Line Up Front: Success isn't about better strategies or market analysis. It's about which opportunities our minds are able to identify and select from the infinite potentiality of our quantum field - aka our own possibilities and potential realities. When we understand how our mental programming determines what we perceive as possible, we can expand beyond invisible limitations and access opportunities that were always there.
We spend so much time analyzing markets, refining strategies, and predicting trends. What if the biggest factor in business success isn't out there in the market at all? What if it's in how our mind patterns influence and direct which opportunities we can actually see? And which ones we miss entirely thanks to those very same patterns.
We've All Been There
The competitor who sees an opportunity we completely missed. The strategy that looked perfect on paper but somehow didn’t take off as expected. The team that should have succeeded but didn't, while another team with fewer resources soared.
We analyze what went wrong. We adjust our strategies. We try harder.
But what if we're looking in the wrong place?
How Our Minds Really Work
Our unconscious minds process about 11 million bits of information every second. Our conscious minds? Our unconscious mind selectively feeds our consciousness with around 126 bits. That's roughly 0.001% of what's actually available to us in our quantum field.
Think about what that means. In every moment, countless business possibilities exist in our field of awareness. But we only consciously “see” a tiny fraction… what our unconscious selects to send along our personal processing pipeline.
What determines which fraction we get consciously? Our mental programming - the patterns, beliefs, and expectations we've learned from to create these programs over years. Our foundational patterns were created before we ever entered business.
The Quantum Connection
Here's where it gets interesting. Quantum physics shows us that reality exists as infinite possibilities until one is observed and selected, which is how the quantum field manifests.
The same principle applies to how we perceive our businesses. Multiple possibilities exist in every situation. Our consciousness - shaped by our programming - observes, or selects, the most expected possibility, the one we'll actually experience.
This isn't mystical thinking. It's how our minds process the overwhelming amount of information available to us every second. And it’s key to how we can expand our vision, thinking, brainstorming and more.
Real Business Impact
Take the fitness industry during recent years. Peloton might come to mind. Some companies could only see "everyone will exercise at home forever." Others saw hybrid models emerging. Same market data, completely different selections of what was possible. And completely different results.
Or consider how different executives can look at the same opportunity and see completely different realities:
One sees unsustainable costs
Another sees innovation and opportunity
A third sees implementation challenges
A fourth sees competitive advantage
They're not just having different opinions. Their mental programming is literally selecting different realities from the same situation. Because their minds are patterned to expect, see and then experience just what their patterns suggest.
The Patterns That Hold Us Back
We all have programming that shapes what we can see and select:
The Success Ceiling: Ever notice how some businesses that are concerned about being too static continue to hit the same revenue level again and again? Different years, different strategies, same ceiling. That's often programming at work - an unconscious belief about what's possible, or the learned expectation that “it’s just the way our market is. We’ve proven it time and again.” Can you say self-fulfilling prophecy on a team scale?
The Client Pattern: Attracting the same type of challenging clients repeatedly? That's not bad luck. That's consistent selection based on what our programming expects. “We had those three pain in the butt customers, but we had so much revenue from them. We need more.” Uh huh. Wonder what the profit was?
The Competition Story: Always facing the same competitive challenges? Our minds might be selecting familiar battles rather than seeing new opportunities. I had a client who’d played a game of leap frog with the same competitor for years. They even told me they expected to see them surpass them the next year because that was “the way it had always been.” Hmmm.
Shifting Our Selection
The good news? Once we understand patterns and how they drive our perceptions, we can begin to shift what we select. Here's how:
Notice the Patterns: Start tracking what shows up repeatedly in your business. These patterns reveal your current selection mechanism. Then, start defining the patterns you want and pay attention to them. Patterns are created by attention density - e.g., the amount of time and the amount of energy in your attention. Paying attention to a new pattern, in this case our business succeeding, is how we can begin to replace or update an old one that’s not serving us.
Question Your Assumptions: When you think "we can't because..." or "that never works..." - you're catching your programming in action. What if that limitation only exists in your current selection? Here’s the flipside of that. When you go to do research on an assumption you’ve made - do you research to prove yourself right or prove yourself wrong? Humans are designed to believe we are right, so most likely you prove yourself right. Try the opposite - search fo info to prove you’re wrong. You’ll end up with better research, find ideas to improve your baseline along the way, and if you’re wrong, save yourself a lot of grief.
Expand What You See: We can't select possibilities we can't perceive. Sometimes we need fresh perspectives to show us what we've been missing. I always suggest clients look beyond their darned competitors - who are stuck in similar patterns in many cases. Seek out and really learn from other markets, then find what’s working there that can work for you. Talk to leaders like yourself outside your industry and market.
Pay Attention Differently: What we focus on expands. If we're constantly looking at problems, we'll select more problems from the available possibilities. Shift attention to opportunities, and different options become visible. This works in our personal lives too Believe me. I was so sick for so long, thinking I was dying. My attention came to be heavily focused on “I feel like hell.” When I had a struggle stepping back into health, I realized I expected to feel like hell. That was a decade old pattern I created. I changed the expedition and what I paid attention to in my thoughts and guess what…. I woke up feeling pretty sassy! Still do.
A Practical Example
I launched a kickass software for a smaller company that rocketed from unknown to “the next generation leader in big data.” What the investors and I didn’t know was that there had been all kinds of issues under the hood in the previous offering.
The exes who’d been there, the sales team and others knew about the issues, they’d been burned by them. So had the customer base. Deeply. Translation: They were programmed to expect issues with that new product.
The next generation solution was amazing. The challenge? Everyone expected it to be buggy, have issues and be a royal Pain in the Derrier.
The first few installs had challenges that were strange to say the least. I was chatting with one of the architects one day and he mentioned all the past issues. First I’d heard of it. Turns out, the install issues we were beginning to see heavily mirrored the previous release.
All the execs got together to discuss it, and I learned about the pattern that was between that release and acceptance. We brought in a few highly respected field team members and asked them about all the issues they expected. Then we had them try to repeat those issues with the new release…. With the developers right next to them to lend a hand.
Can you guess the rest? You got it. The developers didn’t have the previous field experiences so they just put the software through its paces. The field guys learned that the new product was solid, had all kinds of value, and they shifted. They then went back into the field and, well, lets say the quantum field in that company make a huge shift.
That software tripled their revenue, 5xd their bottom line and the rest is, well, continuing history.
The Bottom Line
This isn't about positive thinking or visualization. It's about understanding how our minds actually work.
Every nanosecond is part of a quantum field that contains limitless business possibilities. Our experience, aka programming, determines which ones we can see and select.
When we recognize that our mental patterns are selecting our business reality, identify them, then focus our attention on our vision of success, everything shifts.
We stop fighting against invisible barriers and start expanding what we can see and envision.