I don’t know about you, but I am glad to say good-bye to 2022. It was a rough year for me, one which fortunately ended on the up and up. So yes, 2023, welcome.
You know those aphorisms we hear throughout our careers which eventually seem so cliché that we ignore them? I’m unignoring this one: Celebrate the small things. I've leaned that I need to tier my goals, allow time and space to celebrate the wins and practice expecting that pushing myself involves failure. This is about grit.
Something you may not know about me is that I have had opportunities to present a workshop on resilience that I have developed. It is something I have researched, practiced and been told by others that I possess. But I am not special in this regard: it is not an inborn talent. The ability to practice and develop resilience is something we all have access to, both for ourselves as people and to apply to businesses we run (and probably lots more places!). We tend to not think about it until life brings us hardships that require us to figure out how to bounce back. One of the things I always say in this workshop is that sooner or later,...
If you live long enough, sooner or later you face a major blow, whether it is a single event or a prolonged condition. Whether the trauma is in the past, present or future, the ability to bounce back is what resilience is all about. Sometimes people think of resilience as something you either have or you don’t have. The good news is that it can be cultivated and reinforced at any time. The ideas apply to a person, a community or an organization. Though in a different context, I long ago heard the advice, "make everything count twice." That phrase has stuck with me ever since. However, it has morphed into a new meaning for me, from a message of...