Finding an Antidote to the Doom and Gloom
September 6, 2008 | General
Despite all the doom and gloom dished out daily in the media at the moment I believe that it is still very possible to find sources for encouragement and inspiration if you work with yourself to adopt a more positive outlook.
To be honest I feel much more affected by the miserable weather and the frustrations that my business is not as far ahead as I would have liked it to be by now than letting myself get depressed worrying about the state of the economy.
After all it is not something that is in my control - so what can I hope to achieve by spending every waking hour worrying about it. It is a cyclical occurrence that always follows a time of great growth and prosperity. It’s happening now and eventually it will pass - we hope that it will be sooner rather than later and without too many life threatening casualties - but it will pass .
It’s like being a sea in a fierce storm - all you can do is baton down the hatches, steer a steady course and wait for calmer times to return.
Don’t get me wrong I am most definitely affected and feeling the pinch of the current economic situation.
I have taken time to make sure that I am getting the best deal on my mortgage and all my insurances, secured the best energy deal, made my whole family more conscious of saving energy (they might put it a little more strongly than that!), thinking about unnecessary journeys in the car and generally being more careful in shopping around for the best deals. More than that what can I do?
Admittedly I am not as affected as those who have absolutely no hope of covering even their basic bills or may end up losing their house, but equally I am affected more than most who have not given up several tens of thousands of pounds by quitting their jobs within the last 15 months to pursue the dream of having their own business.
So am I now beginning to regret the decision to leave the regular wage and relative security of my job to start a business from home at this time?
No, empathically not.
In fact what has happened over the last year or so has only served to endorse my decision and I will tell you why.
1) Quite often when you have an idea for a business or, in fact anything, it all seems great at first but then as you begin to look at it more closely and work on it, problems and flaws start to emerge. You can easily find reasons for yourself why it wont work, get despondent and maybe even give up. In fact this is probably what happens in the majority of cases.
This has not happened to me though. Despite the monumental changes in the economy and public confidence that have taken place since I made my decision, I feel more positive than ever about the business opportunity, I just need to keep going to bring it to fruition.
2) The current economic situation would not have affected the way that I felt about my job and my future. I would still feel as unfulfilled and frustrated by the constraints it was having on my life, undoubtedly even more so by now.
3) If I hadn’t left when I did, I would have found it very hard to leave a year later. It was a hard decision to make financially in the first place but this year it would have impossible. Last year I was able to let my heart make a decision in unison with that of my head - this year my head would have been too strong in saying “Just give it a year or so until things settle back down again”.
My head would have been wrong.
4) I would have lost 15 months (and probably many years into the future) of being at home around my kids and of starting to build the foundations of a better quality of life for us all.
5) Having to reinvent myself somewhat, learning new skills and forcing myself to think totally different to how I used to, has energised and revitalised me from the rut I was starting to get stuck into.
6) I know enough now to know that I will never ever regret my decision. Even if things don’t work out as I intend them to and I have to go back and get a job at sometime in the future, at least I will know that I gave it a go. I may regret for some reason why I wasn’t able to make it work, but I will never sit there at 65 and say “Why did I spend 20 years in a job that I didn’t really like?”
“Why did I allow myself to waste 20 years of my life?”
There are always two ways of looking at any situation. I always believe that if you can maintain a positive and confident attitude then you can achieve anything that you want to, although I freely admit that I sometimes have to work hard at it.
Over the next few days I will share a few of the people and recent events that have given me inspiration and motivation to keep myself on the right track - starting with Kevin Pietersen, the new England Cricket captain.
