Resilience
Welcome to Business Foundations for Mums. I just want to have a really short episode today for both of our sakes because as you can probably hear, I’ve not got the greatest voice at the moment. I’ve had a chest infection and I’ve had COVID over the last couple of weeks, and my voice is therefore struggling somewhat at the moment. So I will keep my voice rested by keeping it short, but I’m also aware that my voice won’t be sounding too great. So I’ll keep it short for your sake as well.
So in today’s episode, I want to talk about resilience. Resilience is all about getting knocked down, and then getting back up again. I hear a lot of positive talk, a lot of positive quotes all about getting back up again after a failure. But in reality, it’s really really hard to do that sometimes. So you may have heard the phrase “nothing worth doing is easy.” And actually that’s so true. There are many quotes, which are a variation on this theme as well. And if it was really easy to run a business, then everyone would do it. But because it’s not easy, we get much more of a sense of value of a sense of worth from actually having a business and it makes it really worthwhile for us to do that. And of course we will have days when we wonder whether it’s worth it, failures or mistakes within our business are how we learn, how we improve, how we figure out how not to do things, how we find out what doesn’t work. But there is only one person who can make the choice to get back up after being knocked down. And that person is you.
The difference between those businesses, and those individuals who succeed, and those who don’t, is resilience. It’s those who just don’t give up, however many times they get knocked down. The ones who keep getting back up are the ones who will last. And it may be that we do things differently, or we change tack, or we even change what our business does to something totally different. But it’s the resilience to keep on trying to keep on working to keep on getting back up and giving it another go. And that is what gets us to where we want to be.
Now when I say this, I absolutely don’t mean if something is absolutely not working, just keep on trying anyway, but what I am saying is that if something isn’t working, try something different rather than just giving up. So for many, it might be those around you, those closest to you. The ones who really care about you, who may be the ones who are encouraging you to give up.
Who here has been told that you should go and get a proper job? I don’t know whether you’ve heard that one. I certainly have. Well meaning family and friends might encourage you to give up. They’re trying to protect you from failure. They’re trying to protect you from getting hurt, but the reality is that you’re unlikely to succeed without having a number of failures under your belt. And they can’t always protect you. You need to learn, you need to grow, you need to make your own mistakes and failures and you probably will get hurt along the way.
I had a recent failure. So I recently launched a product and it made absolutely no sales, not even any interest, at all. And I don’t know if you remember the very first thing I said when I started talking about resilience was saying that there are loads of positive quotes, there’s loads of positive talk out there. But I see a lot of those kinds of quotes, a lot of those kinds of posts, because I engage in lots of places where those quotes are all around me. And I suppose you could say that I’ve curated my social media feed to be full of positivity by regularly engaging with all of the positive content that I see and having positivity and reminders to get back up all around me. That was what I really needed at that time, when I had just had that failure.
So at that time, I felt totally exhausted, totally deflated. So much work went into that launch, and it felt like it was all for nothing. And so I allowed myself a weekend to mope to feel sorry for myself. And then on Monday morning, I went back to the drawing board, and I decided what I was going to do next. What I was going to do differently, had a look at what had gone wrong, this time.
And I also wanted to take this opportunity to recommend an absolutely fantastic book that has really helped me with my understanding of resilience. And that is a book called Rising Strong by Brene Brown. It’s part of a series of three books that she’s written the first of which is the Gifts of Imperfection. And she describes that as “be you.” The second Daring Greatly is described as “be all in” and the third book, Rising Strong. is all about “full get up try again.” If you’re interested in reading any of those books, and I definitely recommend them all or anything by Brene Brown. I will make sure that the links are in the show notes.
So having resilience is all about knowing your why. The reason that you really want to make this business succeed, that you will succeed no matter what. That is what is going to get you to where you want to be.