What you think is what you get

Here's an important lesson that continues to be validated by fellow entrepreneurs: "What you think is what you get." If you think you're small, you'll remain small. If you think you'll be poor forever, you will be poor forever. When we started the business, we thought we would only be getting small projects. But we applied "What you think is what you get" and started thinking and aiming for bigger clients. So far it's worked, and here's how we did it.

At first we started with the question, "When can we start getting big clients?"
But we realized that the question wasn't right. It meant doubting our wushu. Clearly, we knew that if we only put our minds to it, we would eventually get big clients.

So we used another principle in our company: "If you don't like the question, change it." In a workshop with our employees, we told them to visualize our fledgling company five years hence. This loosened us a bit. Some visualized running projects with top Makati companies. Some visualized bigger office space in a business district (we were running in a home office and meeting in donut shops). I threw in a vision of having projects in the US.

Then I asked them to make more specific questions. Some of them were:

• What should we do to get a project with a telecom company?
• What steps do we take to find offshore business in Asia? in the US?
• What indicators will trigger that we need bigger office space?

To sweeten the pot, we put timelines on our daydreams. After all, we Pinoys believe "Libre lang mangarap." ("Dreaming costs nothing"). We visualized getting an offshore client in the next year. The telco would probably take 3 to 5 years. Etc etc. Then we went on doing our daily grind.

Roughly a year after this exercise, we clinched our first US offshore project. A year after the US deal, we got a project involving an organization based in Asia and the US.

Encouraged, we started setting our sights for telecom companies. After about three attempts that fizzled off, we let that window close for a while. Just like trying to find a misplaced pen that you suddenly find when you stop looking, someone from a telco contacted us. The next thing we knew, we were developing software for that telco!

We started dreaming of becoming expert providers of IT tools for knowledge management and a couple of years ago, we found a partner organization of KM gurus.

Experts say that setting your mind on a goal has the power of giving you focus. What's more powerful is that unconscious focusing. You get the feeling that things start falling in place, when actually it is you working subconsciously on that goal you set.

So the next time you feel down, think WYTIWYG, be patient and watch what happens.