I saw this quote today and it really made me think about how well we prepare ourselves to handle the inevitable challenges of a home businesses:
“You don’t ascend to the level of your assumptions, you tumble to the level of your preparation.” Think concerning that. How do treats mean to you in your business?
When faced with a challenge, what’s your default instinct? Do you tend to have a knee-jerk reaction or spontaneously erupt with an inappropriate response? Do you have a thoughtful measured response, or do you throw up your hands and give up? Perhaps you graduated from the School of Hard Knocks and have managed to corral your beginner’s exuberance and channel it into constructive problem-solving.
Unfortunately, many people who lack experience, training and confidence tend to fall into the reactive mode when faced with difficult situation or challenge. For sure, I can think of a few times when I was new to marketing that I wish I would have handled some things differently. In other words, I resorted to older, less-than-mature habits that didn’t serve me well. “I fell to the level of my training.” But live and learn. Experience can be a great teacher, but training and preparing will help you groove new default patterns when things get difficult!
Quell the Tide
If you expect to be taken seriously in business and portray yourself confidently as a problem solver it means being honest with yourself and understanding your tendencies under duress. How do you train yourself to handle challenges with grace and resolve? It all starts with your internal dialogue.
At any given time, we’re faced with daily challenges. Everything from minor bumps in the road to all out catastrophes. The internet is littered with motivational memes, positive affirmations and the like, all aimed at encouraging us to look at things in a positive light or to put a positive spin on an otherwise not-so-pleasant problem.
Well, I’m all for putting one foot in front of the other and full steam ahead…don’t get me wrong. But is it really as simple as a little positive pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps self-talk? Yes, frequently it does boil down to self-talk. In all but the most serious situations, a cooler head will prevail IF you’ve established a practice of using an inner dialogue that moves you into problem-solving action vs. reacting in a panic. That’s more likely to happen if you’ve trained yourself over time to think and respond logically and proactively using the facts before you – a tall order for some folks!
You can bet the little conversations you have with yourself when things aren’t so rough will surely reemerge when they are! That’s why it’s so important to establish the right kind of self-talk – to prepare you to handle smaller difficulties and challenges in a methodical, proactive way, so that it becomes your norm. Teach yourself to analyze each problem individually. Come up with two or more viable options and choose the one that makes the most sense to you at the time.
In the end, you may learn that it wasn’t the best option, but you’ll learn valuable information that will serve you the next time. Plus you will build a little confidence that you can stack on top of the next challenge. Don’t berate yourself for making wrong decisions. What you gain from pushing through will be invaluable and bring you not just closer to your goal but prepare you for the next one.
