It Isn't What Happens That Matters

[tconnor]

Business Management Tips #262
It Isn't What Happens That Matters

I would like to ask you a serious question. Is your life, career or business turning out the way you thought it would? Is it better? Is it worse? Is everything you planned happening on schedule? Have you been thrown a few curves by life? If your answer to the last question, was no, you either just landed here from some other planet, or you are the world’s worst liar.

Every business has stuff happen that they don’t want, didn’t plan for, or believe shouldn’t have happened to them, but someone else. Life gives each of us opportunities to grow, stretch, learn, and overcome. No one escapes adversity, problems, pain, grief, failure or disappointment. The only way to avoid these is to keep yourself locked in the closet from the day you are born until your last day.

Happy people realize that what matters in life is not the stuff they get from life, but how they handle it, what they do with it or about it, and that whatever it is, it is an opportunity for better self-understanding, increased awareness, or greater wisdom.

No one likes all of this negative stuff. Happy people don’t like it any more than unhappy people do. The difference is that happy people positively manage this stuff while, unhappy people try and hide from it, avoid it, make excuses, blame others, you name it, and they will try it.

To quote Napoleon Hill in his classic best seller, Think and Grow Rich, “Every adversity, every problem, every failure and every heartache carries within it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.”

If you are dealing with management challenges today why not ask yourself the following.

1. What is your typical reaction to a problem or challenge?
2. Do you tend to look for the learning or do you focus on the problem?
3. Do you see failure and problems as negative or positive?
4. Are you dealing with recurring problems?
5. Do you spend enough time in careful planning to help reduce unwanted challenges?
6. Can you maintain your positive and enthusiastic outlook in the middle of adversity?
7. Do your employees see a “different you” while you struggle in the middle of an issue?
8. Does your ego get in the way of admitting your role or responsibility for problems, failures or challenges?
9. Do problems and challenges give you a great deal of stress that can prevent you from seeing issues clearly?
10. Is your solution to problems or issues to throw more money or people at them to solve them?

These are just a few to get you started.