better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

What Are You Discounting?

4 February 2013

This post isn’t about cutting your prices….no…it’s about a slice of the Transactional Analysis cake that is jolly useful. Well, I think so. You may disagree!

Pause. Listen. What can you hear? A ticking clock? A noisy child? The sounds of a neighbour working in their garden?

We often block and filter inputs to our senses. If we didn’t then of course we’d overload our circuits and meltdown. However, we’re also brilliant at filtering out potentially useful stimuli that don’t fit our view of the world.

How many people have filtered out a crying baby for a minute, because to acknowledge the noise means to get up and sort out that smelly nappy?

How many people have yawned in the car and carried on driving, unaware how sleepy they really are?

We all ‘Discount’ things….which means that out of awareness we ignore or distort things to keep our world as we want it. (The capital D is there to show it’s a concept and not just me being chatty).

• •What do we do….?
• •We ignore people.
• •We ignore ourselves.
• •We pretend it’s warm enough when it isn’t.
• •We pretend our friendship is a good one and forget the times when we were let down.
• •We close our eyes to reality and take a step forwards anyway.

We all do it. It’s human nature. The smart humans are the ones who grind their teeth and curse that the ‘thing’ isn’t going their way. And who then make a decision that benefits them, instead of ploughing on regardless.

The smart humans mine their frustrations. They write them down, look at them and do something to make a change for the better.

This week take an hour to think about what’s frustrating you in your business. What keeps you awake at night? Who can you talk to about this? What options can you generate? How can you get back to sleep?

Instead of Discounting – we can ‘Account’ for the things that annoy us and we can sort them out. We can be resourceful and we can invest our energy in progress!

So, happy Accounting this week! Enjoy your cake!