When is the last time you thought about how professional innovation impacts What You Do as a Business Person of Worth?
Professional innovation impacts the quality of collaboration with colleagues and customers. Do you consider yourself to be a professional innovator? Or do you “see” yourself as an order-taker?
With so much of What You Do being routinized, process-bound and scripted, where’s the wiggle room for professional innovation, eh?
Except, if you are not committed to bringing more than your professional best into the workplace each day, you let your colleagues down. Also, if you are not dedicated to injecting more than your professional best into serving clients, you will not win their trust.
Ultimately, if you are content and comfortable living in professional complacency, you let yourself down.
Why? First, your professionally Innovative Self is a far, far better version of You than your complacent self. Then, professional innovation catalyzes you to become more engaged in sharing ideas with workplace colleagues and team members. Also, when professional innovation infuses workforce engagement, the impact on customer acquisition and retention is palpable – and measurable.
Everyone gets to the finish line together and they cannot wait to engage and collaborate with each other, again.
Now, some of you reading this blog post are constrained by self-doubt and what I like to call “too-too” syndrome.
You know what I am talking about. You have this constant sound track running through your brain that tells you: “I am too stupid, uneducated, unfit, unprivileged” and the rest of all that self-limiting blah, blah, blah.
Seriously, folks. The biggest distance you need to traverse to get yourself focused on professional innovation is one millimeter. Yup, only one tiny little millimeter. Except that distance seems Herculean to traverse, doesn’t it? It’s like making the leap to warp speed and journeying down a personal wormhole.
A major leap of personal faith is involved when seeking professional innovation.
Yes, you are heading towards previously uncharted waters. Plus, you have no idea about what defines you and what gives you strength. Ok, you tried this before and got burned. Others rejected you; you failed. Am I getting all this self-limiting talk right, folks? Isn’t that what you are thinking right now, as you read these words?
Wait. There’s more. I’m just getting started here, just like you do when you beat yourself up, mentally.
Then, you continuously compare yourself to how everyone else around you is getting along. In your mind, you are shackled by an unfair score-keeping system because you are playing on someone else’s gameboard and using their – not your own – method of scoring. Finally, you just give up and figure it is all out of your control, anyway.
Oh, no it isn’t. And it never was, either.
Professional innovation revolves around understanding the moment or moments that define you.
How do you bring these moments “into the moment”? Also, how do you bring these moments into everything you do, even though they seem minor, unimportant and inconsequential?
When you are fully invested in professional innovation, you strive to become better and better. Because customers expect their experiences of you, your team and your organization to become better and better over time.
In addition, when you leverage collaboration for professional innovation, you catalyze not only you, but everyone around you, to become more innovative, as well. Yes, it’s time to believe that you will have that great of an impact on colleagues and customers.
Except that in the present moment, this impact lies dormant, undiscovered and unfulfilled. Until now.
Targeting professional innovation catalyzes “what” you already have and liberates it into the light of day.
I’m not talking about continuously reinventing yourself. You’ve already tried that. All that continuous professional shape-shifting just doesn’t feel right, does it? Also, it’s exhausting. You feel disingenuous. You implicitly know you are letting yourself down. Then, your mindset degenerates into being addicted to a continuous cycle of self-doubt.
Alternatively, how about embarking on a journey resulting in personal and professional liberation from what is holding you back from moving yourself forward as a Business Person of Worth?
Friends, I’m talking about One Millimeter Mindset™ as a platform to catalyze personal and professional innovation. After all, when you bring innovation into all you do, each day, you make the world a far better place. And the way I see it, we need all hands on deck, right now.
Have I piqued your interest? Would you like to find out how to inject professional innovation into yourself, your teams and your company? Click on this link and let’s collaborate.
Babette Ten Haken is a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker. She serves organizations as a strategist, coach and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer success for customer retention.
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