Check Your Mirrors
Pulling out of a parking garage downtown the other day drove home a truth for me: we all have blind spots, and that’s often where our problems like to hide.
Whether we’re dealing with a PSL-wielding, e-scooterist speeding down a city sidewalk, or a spinach and walnut salad at lunchtime, using the mirrors we have available to us can help us see what we would otherwise miss.
When it’s food in our teeth, the consequences are minimal. But hitting a pedestrian because we didn’t check all the mirrors available to us can be catastrophic.
Mirrors offer us a view from a different perspective than our current one, and a lot of what they reflect to us depends on how we’re oriented to them.
If we get up close to a mirror, we can get a really good look at ourselves. If we’re positioned at a distance and oblique (at an angle) to a mirror, we can see what’s coming around a blind corner.
So how does this relate to business?
People are also mirrors, and we need to look to the right people, in the right position, at the right time, to get the feedback we need.
When we find that we’re approaching a blind corner in our business journey, it’s best to look to those people who are out ahead of us with a clear view of where we’re coming from and a real awareness of what we can’t see coming.
That’s generally not the people closest to us or the business.
If you’re approaching a blind corner in your business journey, looking for an outside perspective to provide expertise and insights can make all the difference.
To demonstrate how this shows up, I’ll share a pattern we’ve seen among business owners. They often have challenges related to their software not working well for them and/or thoughts that they need new software. Sometimes, they really do need a new software tool–but more often than not, what they actually need to do is define their processes.
With defined processes in place, they can:
See which software features are needed (and thus determine if what they already have will work for them)
Have a roadmap to follow for setting up a software tool
Receive support and guidance from the software company’s support team
Receive support and guidance from a software setup consultant
And the bonus is that they can also start documenting their processes and preparing to delegate them once they’re defined. 🤩
The next time you're feeling frustrated with some aspect of your business, pause and ask yourself: Am I looking at this from the right angle? Sometimes, the solution isn't in front of us—it's in adjusting our position and checking a different mirror. And sometimes, it's in asking someone positioned differently to tell us what they see.