The Effects of Scotomas on Your Business
Some years back I attended some training in personal development conducted by Lou Tice of The Pacific Institute. Lou started me on a completly new journey in life. Following the two weeks of training I no longer looked at things the same way. One of the most interesting and important things I learnt was the concept of scotomas. A scotoma is a visual impairment that results in a permanent blank or excessively blurred spot in your vision. The point of his presentation this day was if you have a scotoma, and you look at a scene in front of you a part of it would be hidden from sight. Applied to life, if we choose to ignore something that needs attention, then eventually we fail to see it. It is in “a mental blind spot”. Typically people have many of these, the size and severity varies, most importantly we are unaware that they exist.
What sort of things can be in our scotomas?
- A cracked tile on the entry to our shop,
- An extension cord tapped to the floor as a temporary fix that is still there two years later,
- Filing in a box in the back room,
- Anything we would prefer to just ignore.
You get the idea. Now there are a few ways of addressing the issue, but often the best is to bring in a new set of eyes. If you have developed your scotomas well enough you will never see it until someone changes your point of view. Once you look at the situation from their point of view you will say to yourself “Oh, now I can see …..”. The challenge then is not to become offended or defensive at the discovery as we all have scotomas! The answer is to deal with the hidden item, remove the problem.
Our business branding process regularly unveils or reveals some hidden items during our image capture stage. These often are sending the wrong branding image to your customers, and in fact in the worst case may be the no-buy decision factor. Remember the old adage, “what you can’t see won’t hurt you” well unfortunately it is not true. In the case of your business and customers it really can have an impact!