I know that! These three words are an absolute killer to successful self-development

You know when someone asks for your help and you try and teach them a new way of doing something and they say: “Oh, but I've been doing it another way for years so I’ll keep doing it.”

The natural question is “How’s that working out for you?”

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Similarly, if you're happy with the way you're doing things and you're not getting the results that you want, it's only logical that you should change your approach so that you get better results.

The key is to be open to learning new things. The worst thing you can do in any self-development work for yourself is to say: “I know that”. These three words are an absolute killer to successful self-development because once you say: “I know that”, you close your mind to learning new things.

And worse still, if you say: “I know that” but then you're not actually applying it, it doesn't matter if you if you know it or not if you're not putting it into practice. You may as well not know it.

Stay open to new ideas and new suggestions and be sure that you don't close yourself off and you don't just follow the norm just because everybody else does.

Let me give you example of what I mean.

There’s a newly married couple. The wife is preparing Sunday dinner, a leg of lamb. Her husband sees her chop off the end of the joint and put it in the roasting tray. Since there is room in the tray for the whole joint, he asks her why she chopped off the end. She said that’s the way her mum’s always done it. So next time they were visiting his in-laws for Sunday dinner, the husband asked his mother-in-law why she chopped off the end of the joint. She told him it would fit in her small tray if she didn’t.

So, you can see there that following steps blindly without knowing why also doesn’t make sense. So, keep an open mind to looking at things differently and learning new ways of doing things. They may work better for you.

Instead of doing something just because somebody said that's the way it should be done, or it’s always been done, consider doing something that actually works better for your business and that delivers better results.

Look at the rules being followed and question whether they still apply. Or should you be making new rules.

Flip the thinking.