3 Counterintuitive Things That Can Help Your Business

Everyone can think of some of the more obvious professional success techniques that might help to boost the performance of a business. Things like setting KPIs, for example, or improving your website’s SEO.

As you are a human being, however, your performance, creativity, and motivation in the office will have a lot to do with things that are happening outside the office. In other words, the success of your business, and of your professional life as a whole, can largely depend on things that don’t at first glance seem connected to “work” at all.

Here is a handful of counterintuitive things that can help improve your business, while simultaneously having a positive effect on the other areas of your life, too.

Paying more attention to your personal presentation

For better or for worse, the way you present yourself will have an impact on your life, on various different levels.

On the one hand, dressing professionally if you are in a customer-facing role can certainly improve the impression people have of your business, and can drive up engagement and help you to be more successful, professionally.

But even if you are working from home and don’t necessarily need to present yourself directly to your customers very much, paying more attention to your personal presentation can have all sorts of psychological benefits for you, yourself.

If, for example, you’ve always been insecure about your teeth, getting a set of braces fitted might significantly boost your confidence and make you more likely to be outgoing and positive in your everyday interactions.

Or, to give another example, dressing “formally” can put you in a more professional mindset and compel you to take yourself and your work more seriously, even if your home office is just a corner of your living room.

Getting more physical exercise

People will frequently go to great lengths to try and make themselves sharper, smarter, and more insightful. That’s a big part of the reason why various “brain training” programs and services are so popular.

In fact, though, there is little evidence that these brain training tools really do much. What is known to directly impact your mental performance – as well as your mood – is getting regular physical exercise.

Among other things, regular physical exercise is associated with greater willpower, heightened cognitive performance, and a significantly greater sense of overall well-being.

So, if you want to feel better and perform better in every dimension of your life, consider hitting the treadmill.

Having interesting hobbies outside of work

According to the book “Range” by David Epstein, many of the most successful and creative people out there are those who have a broad range of interests and experiences, including a variety of different hobbies that they find interesting.

Among other things, it seems that staying mentally active in this way, and having an array of hobbies, helps to make the mind more elastic somehow, and increases the odds that you will make connections and draw insights from different areas of your everyday experience.

So, fill your life with a variety of hobbies and activities that genuinely interest and motivate you. Aside from just making life more interesting, those hobbies may also make you better at your day job.

You might also like to read:

• Dazzle your colleagues at your next presentation
• Improve your online store performance in 4 simple steps
• Turn your hobby into a career that’s a money making machine
• Why monitoring your business’s performance can drive it on to success
• Are You Paying Enough Attention To These Parts Of Your Business?