Successful Auto Repair Shop Owners Focus on Opportunities

Focus on Opportunities by Rick White, President 180BIZ

As we're going through this holiday season, it's a weird time. If you're not careful, it's going to adversely affect your business and your sales. How will that happen? Well, a lot of people are getting up in the morning and saying, “What can't I do today? Who's going to make me do something else? I'm tired of …” We create questions first thing in the morning that creates our focus for the entire day. If you wake up in the morning and think, “What else can go wrong today?” stuff that you never thought could go wrong will go wrong.

The questions you ask create your focus. Your focus creates your intention and attention. And based on that you get a reality; you get results. So, focusing on what's going wrong puts you in a negative state. It puts you in a situation where you trip over opportunities because you're staring at the problems. I want you to hear that again. You will trip over opportunities because you're staring at the problems. Stop doing that! But how? You can do that by asking better questions.

Step back for just a second, please. Take a deep breath. Ah, just let everything go. Sometimes when we're feeling really stressed out, that's all we need to do is take a deep breath. You can feel so much of that stress leaving your body. When people get upset and tense, they tend to stop breathing.

So, what I want you to do is start asking questions like this. What am I thankful for? I'm thankful for my wife, Brenda, I'm thankful for each and every one of our seven children, two of them were out here yesterday and helped me all day long because I'm still recovering from my knee surgery. I am thankful my parents are still here. I am thankful that I got to see them for a little bit.  I've been keeping myself kind of sequestered. But I was able to see them at the beginning of the week. My dog Lucky was really sick on Friday. We brought him to the vet, and they think he has meningitis. They put them on some medicine. I talked to Brenda this morning, down in Virginia, and she said he's back to his old self again. Thankful for the doctor. I'm thankful for the medicine. I'm thankful that Lucky's getting better.

My point is that if you stop, take that deep cleansing breath and start to ask yourself thankful (grateful) questions, and ask, “What opportunities am I going to find today in life?” your day will be filled with opportunities, not problems.

You can look at your life through a magnifying glass or a telescope.  When you look in a magnifying glass, you are focused solely on you, your problems, your issues, everything that's wrong in your life. And when you do that, guess what it magnifies and gets bigger. Instead, I want you to look through a telescope, recognize there are people out there that don't have a job. They're worried about their next meal. They're worried about having a roof over their head for them and their kids.  Step back and look at your life and what is in it. And then I see what you can do to help other people. We're here to give hand-ups, not handouts.

A lot of this has to do with your business because when you're focused on the negative, when you're focused on everything that goes wrong, when you're focused on all the noise, all you see are your problems.  Your business will get smaller. It's will get slower. Your sales will go down. You will blame your customers and it's not their fault.  It's yours.

Start asking better questions every single morning.  Be intentional about the questions you ask yourself.

• What am I thankful for?
• What am I grateful for?
• How can I find more joy in my day?
• How can I make a difference in someone's life today?
• Where am I going to find more possibilities and opportunities today?

Those are questions to ask yourself. If you do that you’ll find that your holiday sales go up, up, up.  Stay focused on the right stuff. Ask questions intentionally.

I want to say thank you, God, bless, go make some money, and stay safe.