We all know that this simple method is the way to do better in life. So why is it so very difficult to put into practice?

The answer is that we lose much of our potential through having a limited mind-set. This means we limit ourselves, both in realizing how much we can achieve and what we can do to achieve it. We are often not aware of it, but it happens to us as individuals and it happens to groups or organizations.

Consider how often an organization achieves bigger and better things following a change in the leadership or with new person on the job. Are the newcomers really that much better or smarter than those they replace? Or is it that they bring a new attitude, a new perspective, a new mind-set? Imagine the power we could release if we could achieve these changes in mind-set and perspective without the need for changing people. To do this we need to be able to adopt new mind-set, new ideas of what are possible, and to make a fresh start. This is what ‘mind openers’ can help us do. They can help us realize how well we can do.

Some of your mind-sets may be quite deeply ingrained. Descriptions of them can range from a

Unfortunately, our culture dictates this self-defeating spiral. Teachers ask questions. Pupils give answers. Pupils contest with each other to get the right answer first: ‘Hands up, who has the answer.’ Pupils are fast to correct another who has got the wrong answer and so show how clever they are. Their collective brain -power will eventually get the right answer to the teacher’s question.

Consider an organization in which the level of profits is too low.

What happens? Because of the history and mind-sets, this concept will be rejected: ‘it simply can’t be done’, Don’t be stupid’, ‘It’s impractical’, etc.

Moreover, when you address what better ways’ the organization can be find to reach this stretching goal, each will probably be rejected on the grounds that it won’t work with the mind-sets as follows:

• "We cannot reduce the cost of the products, because that will reduce quality and we’ll lose sales and so lose more profit than we will gain."
• "We cannot increase the price because that will also lose sales and lose us more than we gain."
• "We cannot reduce the marketing expense because that will also lose sales and lose us more profit than we gain."
• "If we increase marketing support, we don’t think we can get more sales because the market is flat, so profit will go down because of the extra cost."
• "We cannot reduce the cost of our sales force, because that will mean fewer people, fewer calls on customers, fewer sales and so less profit."
• "We cannot reduce our over head cost because people will get de-motivated."

Net, the organization has—unknowingly---limited mind-sets that reject the notion of ‘doubling the profits in two years’ and reject every new way suggested of achieving it.

On the other hand, there could be very different answers and results if you could find a way of opening up the minds to the possibility of achieving the goal and if you could get a collective mind-set that focuses all the intelligence and energy of the organization on how it might be done. Then:

• With a new mind-set, the organization may find that products are over-engineered and a change in product--to one of lower cost--might well not be noticeable or improvement to customers. Indeed, by eliminating cost in some aspects of low importance, it might be possible to fund an improvement in an aspect of higher importance, whilst still reducing overall cost.

If this concept isn’t applicable to all the products, it might still be applicable to some. (It’s worth looking into).

• With a different mind-set, the organization may find that the products are not price-sensitive, that price increases cannot be taken. If this is not applicable to all the products, it may still be applicable to some products, some sizes or some variants--at least some of the time.

• With a different mind-set, the organization may find that not all of the marketing expense is very effective at driving sales. You could identify the least effective 20 per cent, and take 10 per cent to improve profit and invest 10 per cent to reinforce the marketing activities that are driving the business. Then marketing costs would go down and improve profits that way, and sales would up and so improve an additional way.

• With a different mind-set, the organization may find that by eliminating all the sales calls that bring only very small returns for the effort and refocusing some of the time against more calls on higher potential customers, both the costs of the sales force could go down and the volume of sales go up. Again, improves profit two ways.
• With a different mind-set, the organization may find that sales of some products are not profitable. By eliminating them, profit goes up. Likewise, some variants may be less profitable than others, by eliminating them, customers move to the remaining variants which are profitable.

• With a different mind-set, the organization may find that by reducing overhead costs and concentrating only on the most important projects, the organization may be more effective, not less, by reducing management layers the organization may find it becomes even more effective, at lower cost.

The change here is not in the intelligence or skill of individuals or the organization. The change is in the mind-set. Closed minds have been opened to the possibility of achieving a stretching object. Minds have been focused on how to find a better way rather on how to defend a restrictive point of view .

Without major changes, the mind-sets of an organization tend to be those that preserve a status quo or bring fairly incremental improvement. ‘It has always been like this’. ‘Yes, we want to do well and we are doing well’, There is often no trigger to make a radical change in mind-set that would bring a step-change in performance.

Imagine the power, however, if we could use mind openers to switch ourselves and other individuals from applying our brains in a limited way to applying them in a mind-opening way’ on each situation where we would really gain from a change. Imagine how good it would be if we could do this our working lives without needing a ‘new person’ at the top the or moving for a ‘fresh start’. Imagine the power of simply opening our minds and changing our mind-sets.

As with teachers and pupils, bosses and organizations, so it is with how we run our own brains: give the brain the wrong prejudice to work on and it can come up mind becomes closed to any other approach.

The problem is that often we don’t know this is happening and that gradually we are adopting limiting mind-sets that are restricting our potential.

What we need are ‘mind openers’. We sometimes get this experience by chance, and we say;

‘I never thought it possible, it opened my mind.’