Hi, this is Mo your business development expert and author of “The Snowball System”. Have you ever wondered about what the right mindset is for business development? How do you keep your head in the game and thinking about things the right way? Well, in this video, I’m gonna explain the right mindset and I’ll explain how I use it at the end of the video very specifically. And this is part one of a two part series where we’ll talk about mindset in this video. And then in the next video, we’ll talk about really practically, how do you do this week over week?

First mindset. I was in a car. I was taking the house car from the hotel I was at. Great place up on the upper east side in New York. And I was driving to my client a couple Mondays ago for a leadership session we were doing. And the driver and I had this super interesting conversation. Turns out he’s a mountain climber. And once a year he picks an extremely high peak in the world and he flies there and he climbs that peak for charity purposes. He picks the charity each year.

And I just had so much fun learning from him. And as he talked about the first time he climbed a major summit, it was Mount Fuji in Japan, he almost quit. And here’s what happened. He had trained for it. He was in better shape than he needed to be to summit Mount Fuji. He was about halfway up and the entire time he was climbing this mountain, he was focused on the peak.

He took each step as he did. As he went, he kept focusing on the peak, the goal that he had in mind, and it just didn’t feel like he was getting anywhere. About halfway up the mountain, he sat down almost started crying and he was gonna quit. He just didn’t feel like he was getting anywhere. His legs are sore. He’s not making any progress. Another hiker walking along, sits down, sits next to him, says, “Hey, are you okay?” They thought maybe he turned his ankle or something. And as he talked about his approach with this new friend of his, he talked about what he was doing, focusing on the summit, being really clear about his goal and continuing his journey up the mountain.

And the guy that he’s talked to says, “Oh, no, you’re doing it all wrong.” He goes, “if you keep looking at the summit all the time, you’ll never feel like you’re making any progress. It just takes too long to get there. What you really need to do is focus on each step, focus on not falling down and making each step as you go. And then every couple minutes, turn around, look back, reflect on how far you’ve come. The project you’ve made. You only wanna look at the summit like once an hour. It’s at that interval that you actually see yourself making progress and you’re enjoying each step of the way. As you turn in every couple minutes, look back and reflect on how far you’ve come.”

It blew him away. He started doing that and he just said it completely changed his perspective. He scampered up Mount Fuji, finished the climb, did a great job. Felt great about it. And succeeded. And now he’s summited something like 20 peaks, some of the largest peaks in the world. Boy, did I learn something from that.

There’s such a great parallel with business development. If you’re always focused on how many dollars, how many projects, sort of the big goal. If you’re always focused on that all the time, you’ll quit because it seems insurmountable. You have a setback, a meeting gets canceled, a pitch that you prepared well for you didn’t win.

You know, things happen along the way. Those are those little stumbles along the trail. And if you’re always focused on, “Oh my gosh, I’m not gonna hit my goal, or it’s not going as fast as I want or whatever, you’ll want to quit. Instead if you’re always focused on incremental progress, taking the next right step, every once in a while looking back, focusing on how far you’ve come, you’ll keep your focus.

Keep focusing on the incremental improvements in the little progresses, and you’ll do great. So in the next video, I’ll actually share exactly how I do that week over week. It’s pretty interesting. And our clients have just found tremendous success in approaching it this way. And I’m gonna get super practical in the next video to talk about how we do that.

So I hope you enjoyed this one. Focus on the next step. Every once in a while, look back, reflect on how far you’ve come and you’ll actually really enjoy business development, as opposed to the crushing feeling you can have of always looking at the long term goal and not feeling like you’re making progress.

If you like this video, please share it with others. That’s how people find out about us. Thank you for watching. Well, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for watching. For more content like this, check out my most recent video and be sure to like them so other people can find out about us, but make sure you subscribe. That’s how you’ll be automatically alerted to the great content that we put out.

And if you want access to a comprehensive system for business development, then just buy my book. “The Snowball System” at Amazon. The link is in the description below. Thanks again.