The most successful and happy business owners display resilience.
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty; toughness.
Resilience is your business’s ability to spring back into shape after an unexpected impact; elasticity.
Resilience gives you and your business the ability to spring forward and adapt to changing conditions while continuing to be true to your core mission and values.
Here are the 4 things you can do to make your business more resilient so you can take advantage of new opportunities, and still be prepared for the next disruption:
1) Think Differently.
You won’t be able to solve tomorrow’s problems with today’s solutions. Take a hard look at what happened, why, and have the courage to treat the root cause – not the symptom.
Stay aware of what is going on around you – inside your business, with your people, your customers, suppliers, and in your local and regional markets. Find other ways to solve the problems your clients bring (or should bring) to you. Identify new problems they may have as a result of market changes – and solve those too.
Challenge your assumptions and question the information you’re getting. It is very easy to get locked into a set of ‘facts’ that support your worldview – especially with how we are consuming news these days. Challenge the initial, and instinctual negative reactions to adversity. Is it a problem, or an opportunity?
2) Stay Pragmatically Positive
A negative mindset is contagious – and if you are negative and pessimistic about a situation then you’re likely to be proven right. This just perpetuates the negative cycle – which seems to be the default state these days. You’ll need to interrupt the negativity habit if you’re going to build your resilience. You still have to see reality – and that might be negative – then you need to decide how to respond.
Virtually every situation is temporary – you can be positive about that. You have also overcome obstacles before. Use those experiences to bolster your confidence. Give yourself a moment to recall prior challenges, how they felt when they happened and what it was like to have gotten to the other side – and what you learned along the way. When you muster the courage to accept the brutal facts without assigning blame or judgment you free yourself to focus on finding solutions. When you adopt a positive pragmatic approach you will see better results.
3) Get Up. Again. Again. Again, and Again.
Anthony Robbins asks a very powerful question: How many chances did you give your child to learn to walk? When did you tell them to just give up?
Of course, you would never expect a child to give up on learning to walk. Nor should you give up on what is important to you and your business.
Falling down is not a failure. Failure is refusing to get up. You will get knocked down again over and over again. Get up. Keep going. Learn and adapt.
4) Create a Circle of Safety for yourself and your people.
Uncertainty triggers your primal fear response, just as if you were physically threatened. This freeze, fight or flee reflex will keep you from being resilient and responsive. You break this cycle and create space to find solutions when you foster a circle of safety for yourself and your people. This kind of safety doesn’t come from controlling the outside world. You have to create it through your leadership, by responding purposefully rather than reacting instinctively to the world around you.
In the book Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek explains how to create this kind of circle – and why it matters. I’ve found that when you and your people feel safe and connected to one another, and to your purpose – what you do and why you do it – you will find more power to be resilient.
What would it be like to know that you were fully supported by those around you, that you shared a clear and common purpose, and that together you were ready to face and overcome any obstacles ahead?
Don’t wait for resilience to happen. Decide to create it. Start today.
What is one thing you can do today to build your own resilience?
-Doug
p.s.
If you’d like to know how to jumpstart your own resilience in your particular situation just reach out and let’s talk.