Problems in Your Business? Three Things to Remember
This is adapted from my book Why You Skipped Your Workout.
If you are searching for the solution to a problem in your business, you are already turning the tide in your favour. So often we hide from problems until we MUST tackle them, so if you are proactively tackling problems you have had three major wins:
You identified a problem
You looked directly at it
You decided to make a change
While there is a pit in your stomach and a heaviness to seeing a climb ahead out of a problem spot, your willingness to look at the problem is significant and worth celebrating. While it can be easy to look at all of the things that are going wrong, there will be ways to leverage your strengths to make the climb easier.
SWOT Exercise
SWOT is a useful tool for looking at a situation, business, or project. It involves looking at:
Your Strengths
Your Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
You can do this if you are in a place for an objective lens and want to look at the situation in balance.
If you are needing a confidence boost, try this instead:
1. List all of the positive steps you have taken in your business so far.
Wins can be easy to overlook, so here are some examples: starting again after a break, asking for help, trying something new, taking time away to reset, achieving a goal, having a goal, showing up, being open to new ways of thinking or doing in your business.
Remember, you get to choose your wins and no positive step is too small to make the cut.
2. List any actions you have taken that made those positive steps possible.
This could include asking for help, cleaning your desk, looking after your sleep, knowing yourself well enough to balance stress and rest, studying or working to gain the knowledge and experience that let you start your business in the first place. Each of these actions was BY you FOR you. By focusing on your agency and the actions and decisions YOU have made to get here, you put yourself back in the driving seat!
So, you may be in a tough spot right now, but you’re closer to getting out of it that, you know!
