The power of choice in a crisis
The business life is a rollercoaster. The only certainty is change. We know this. Customer habits change, economic climates change, staff change, contracts get lost. But what doesn't change is that you always have choice.
It can be easy sometimes to feel powerless in times where the business rollercoaster is hurtling down a steep track. You can choose to let your arms go up and scream the whole way down. You can choose not to scream but enjoy the feeling. You can choose to shut your eyes and pretend it isn't happening. Or you can enjoy the ride. Regardless of what is happening out there to our business, we can still make choices. You are never powerless in the business life. You always have choices, some ones you might like, others you might not.
I spoke recently to a client of mine who has made the choice to put her business venture on pause. She has chosen to pivot her approach to it and focus on a new country, but first she needs to do the leg work and get it sorted. She made that choice as she was experiencing the downward track of her rollercoaster journey. She chose not to scream, she chose to assess where she was and what she could do. She made a choice to slow it down. To entrepreneurs that is sometimes a hard choice to make, but we are still allowed to make it and sometimes it is a hard choice but the right choice.
We can choose to do nothing. We can choose to fall down the roller coaster track and see how things play out. Choosing to do nothing is an active choice. It is neither a good or bad thing to do nothing. But to those people who say, I am powerless to do anything, please know that is your decision to be powerless.
Just knowing we have choice and we do have power can sometimes change our whole attitude towards a rollercoaster down slope. Knowing that you are choosing to experience this, you are not choosing to stop, you are not choosing to do nothing, but you are choosing to give it a go and ride it can be very powerful feeling. It flips the attitude of "what will happen to my business next" to "what will I respond to what occurs in my business next".
I feel that there are lots of choices being made at the moment during this economic downturn. I have a lot of respect for everyone making choices easy or hard. If you find yourself feeling powerless at the moment, make some choices. Made some decisions. Change your attitude towards these events. It won't make the problems go away but it will help you cope better and put you back in the driver seat. The best place to be when things are going south.
Take Away's
Doing nothing is a choice: choosing to do nothing is an active act of choosing to do nothing.
How you respond is a choice: it is true we cannot control how things play out in business but we can choose how we respond.
Feeling powerless during a crisis can be reversed by making decisions about how things go down.