This week, our Digital Pathfinders team hosted a workshop alongside Sam Hook, Business Confidence Coach and Owner of UniqueThinking, for organisations looking to get to grips with technology.

Our Digital Adoption Specialists, Nathan Rowland and Ben Mushen, and Sam Hook, self-appointed former technophobe, explored the importance of embracing technologies, how to develop a growth mindset and break down the barriers to adoption.

Why Should We Bother Embracing Technology?

Whilst we understand that sometimes it can be easier to ignore technology and continue with more traditional business methods, this is not something that we can recommend. Often, feeling left behind by tech can make things feel even more daunting than taking the little steps to move forward.

What Are Some of the Benefits?  

Increased Efficiency

Time is so important to small businesses and charities, so streamlining or automating processes can be really beneficial. Technology enables this increased efficiency, reducing manual efforts and time consumption.

Enhanced Communication

It has never been easier to stay in touch with your team or market to your target audience. Whether that is through emails, social media platforms, video calls or instant messaging platforms, communication is now faster, easier and more accessible.

Feeling Empowered

With smaller organisations, it is likely that you have to take on a number of roles, you might be project manager, marketeer and customer service all in the same day. By using AI chatbots, tools such as Canva or Calendly, you can feel empowered with the roles that you are juggling.

How Can We Feel More Positive About Embracing Technology?

Your mindset is your set of beliefs about the world and yourself. Human beings have around 60,000 thoughts per day, of these 80% of them are negative. By moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, allows you to move away from the ‘I can’t do it’, to ‘I can’t do it yet’. Developing this growth mindset means that your abilities will be unlimited with practice and effort, you will use failure as an opportunity to learn and grow and embraces challenges. Not only this, but it will help you to develop a positive outlook, feel more motivated, keep you curious and hopeful and creates more opportunities.  

Here are some tips for developing a growth Mindset:

Explore Free Trail Versions

By using free versions of technologies or software, it can get you thinking about how this might streamline your processes or make things easier for your organisation. Whether you then move forward with the technology or not is up to you, but at least giving it a go and trying something new is a positive outcome.

Reach out to Your Networks

There are tons of people on the internet that can help you with tech adoption. Think about joining a LinkedIn group for small businesses, go along to free events, or sign up to a newsletter with free technology tips. Don’t be afraid to talk to your friends and colleagues about technology and use the network around you.

Limit Negative Self-Talk

By limiting our negative self-talk to do with technology, then we are able to reframe our thoughts to feel generally more positive and motivated with learning about new technologies. Try balancing out negative thoughts with and or but.

This might look like:  

I am feeling left behind by tech.

I am feeling left behind by tech but I am going to do something about it!

Celebrate the Small Wins

Whether your goal is to create a social media account or to create an AI chatbot for your website, creating a step-by-step plan and celebrating at every stage can really help you to feel good about something that may have seen challenging before.

Final Thoughts

Embracing technology can be intimidating, but by breaking down your digital adoption into small steps, doing your research and reaching out to support organisations, like Digital Pathfinders, it might not seem as big a leap into the unknown.

We have some more upcoming events to help you get to grips with AI and marketing strategies. You can check them out on our website here.

You may also want to check out this upcoming event from the Hartree Centre North East Hub to understand the importance of data. Click here for more info.

If you would like to learn more about the Digital Pathfinders programme, or Unique Thinking, please feel free to reach out to the teams on the contact details below.  

Reach Digital Pathfinders on 0191 716 5085 or email hello@digitalpathfinders.uk.

Get in touch with Sam Hook from UniqueThinking on: sam@uniquethinking.co.uk