I’ve seen a negative mindset be the one and only thing that stops people from achieving success, and yet it’s one of the most difficult barriers to break. When going up against challenges, your mind has more power than you could ever imagine. Without even meaning to, a negative thought can sabotage your success on things like an interview, a workout, or even surviving a surgery. The question is, why do we give negative thoughts so much power and how can we rewire our brain to think differently?

Why Do We Give Negative Thoughts So Much Power?

Our bodies are trained from birth to be cautious of things that could hurt us, whether that is emotionally or physically. Because of this, we avoid change, we avoid risk, we avoid things that have a high chance of a negative outcome for fear of what will happen next. I’ve seen so many dreams go unfulfilled because of the fear to try—the fear to fail. If you never try, haven’t you already failed?

It’s time to stop letting fear paralyze you. With these three questions, you can rewire your brain to help you not only be a more confident individual but drive a style of business culture that is unparalleled to any other.

1. What Am I Going to Do Today to Be a Gifted Leader?

Everyone can be a boss but not everyone can be a leader. Inspire your team, help them grow, and celebrate their successes with them. The highest cause for turnover in almost every company (in any industry) is due to poor leadership, which is why it’s so important to be the boss you wish you had.

There are three key attributes that make up a leader. A leader must be selfless, consistent, and be willing to help others develop their skills. To understand if you are a true leader, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you utilize others’ strengths when assigning work?
• Do you acknowledge your own limitations?
• Do you encourage your team to speak up when they disagree?
• Are you sensitive to each of your team member’s feelings?
• Do you identify learning opportunities for your team regularly?
• Do you keep promises?

2. How Can I Relentlessly Be on The Hunt For Good Talent?

As a leader, it’s your job to be on the hunt for good talent—constantly. Every opportunity to network is a chance to not just build a relationship but to recruit a new client, employee candidate, or brand ambassador. To guide your business in the right direction, invest your time in finding people that not only have the desired skillset but have the right mentality to be a part of your business. By actively hunting, you’ll lessen the chance to be forced into a hiring decision that you aren’t confident in.

3. Are We Treating People Humanely?

As a business, it can be hard to meet everyone’s needs, wants, and preferred method of work lifestyle. The thing that should never come second is to treat your team humanely. You hired each of those individuals for a reason and they all play an integral role in your company, so treat them like it. If your employees are constantly stressed out on their drive to work for fear of mistreatment, bullying, disrespect, or down-right cruelty, you’re not going to be able to keep a strong team for any length of time. Life is hard enough already, simply coming to work should not contribute to that stress.

If you’re a victim of a negative mindset, it’s time to stop being a victim. Take control of your daily mindset because you alone are the only one able to control it. When asking yourself these three questions daily you train your mind to stop thinking selfishly and start thinking selflessly. When you add others into the equation, you are forced to consider more variables than just yourself. If you want more for yourself, your team, and your business reflect upon your mindset. Lead with the ambition to change the situation.

Creating a Movement

If you’re looking to train your leadership on becoming true selfless leaders, Keyser’s business advisory services can help. You will learn to notice the red flags that lead to a negative culture, how to rewire the brains of your critical team members, and personalized strategies that you can implement into your business.

In every facet of life, we can all agree that life is riddled with mistakes. Personal or professional mistakes, there’s no one person who hasn’t made one. Punishments should not be handed out as a result of mistakes within your business—and for good reason. Punishing employees for mistakes can lead to changes in work habits and behaviors that can be detrimental to your employee’s creative output. Here are three reasons not punishing mistakes can actually enhance your business:

1. Fearless Action is Driven By the Lack of Fear

For hiring managers, it’s always the goal to see their employees thrive, gain skills, and be able to master those skills. Unfortunately, not every learning path is smooth. If you want to train your team to act fearlessly, they need to fearless. Having an environment that allows them to speak their mind, try and fail, ask questions, and think outside the box will help them harness this fearless mentality. By giving your team an opportunity to try new ideas without the fear of punishment helps to drive more creative ideas, that after diligence, trial, and error result in highly effective, refined methods.

2. Mistakes Grow Your Brain

Failure can be defined as not accomplishing the goal. However, a failed attempt at one goal does not mean there is a lack of success elsewhere.  Like Thomas Edison said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. Employees will fail to achieve success 100 percent of the time, but the failure does not equate to wasted effort. Your employees will learn more from failure than success, not just about the process of what they are doing but about their personal character.

3. Say Goodbye to Sweeping “It” Under the Rug

What’s worse than a mistake? A mistake that you didn’t know about until it’s too late to fix. When employees are fearful of being punished for mistakes, they are less likely to be upfront about those mistakes, which can cause a minor problem to quickly become major. In many cases, if fear has been ingrained in the employee-supervisor relationship, the employee will do whatever they can to hide the problem or make it so the supervisor never had to know about the issue in the first place. If the problems go unresolved, they often can fester until the problem is so large that there is no way to save the situation.

While it seems counterintuitive to not punish mistakes, this methodology works. It’s important to note that lack of punishment does not mean lack of accountability. When something goes wrong, your employee needs to know that it has affected the business negatively. Together, you and your employee should devise a plan to make sure the problem doesn’t arise again. The way you, as a leader, handle moments like these with your employees are some of the most critical when it comes to employee retention and loyalty. It’s important to be firm with your expectations but not to crush the employee so that they never take a risk again.