Having just returned from my first holiday since before COVID-19, I am feeling at my most hopeful. We all need moments away to reflect, recuperate and rejoice in the simple things.
I found this sign during one of my morning walks in the beautiful seaside town of Whitstable. It feels like a metaphor for business owners. For all the budding entrepreneurs out there, hope is one of the most important skills you need to develop.
It is more than an emotion. In business, hope is the skill you need to help you figure out how you get from A to B. How to keep going when you feel like giving up.
The beliefs that keep me hopeful:
- You always have the ability to change your life and it is never too late to do so.
- There are good things in the future, you just need to make them happen.
- There are many ways to achieve personal and professional goals.
- There will be challenges along the way, this is to be expected and planned for.
- You don’t give up when it gets tough, you ask for help and you keep going.
Hope is important as part of your company’s culture too. It helps towards lower levels of absenteeism, higher productivity and importantly, greater levels of employee happiness and health.
Business leaders need to be skilled in three things: hope, trust, and compassion. This is particularly important following COVID-19.
Here’s a couple of ways that the Gingerhead’s have kept hopeful:
- Create and sustain excitement about the future. Paint a compelling vision for where you want to be and what you want to achieve.
- Re-affirm – or set new goals when the circumstances demand it. Sometimes your original vision doesn’t quite work out. Having a Plan B is not failing.
- Work as a team to knock down any obstacles to achieving your goals and don’t allow new ones to build up. Discuss specific challenges that you face together, find ways to overcome them together.
For Gingerhead, we have now made it through the tough first five years of a new business. It is time to create one that we can be proud of, to define our own terms of success, and to enjoy every day that we work together.
A final point, hope is inspiring. It is June 2021, and we are starting to make cheerful plans again. Time to capitalise on the spirit of the moment and restore hope, to dream big, and to support each other into a happier future.