I’ve been in business for 25 years on the sixteenth of March and sometimes it’s been really tough, in what has actually over 25 years now been a steadily upward trajectory with a little bit of an acceleration at the end here. It’s actually been lots and lots of up and downs and some of the downs have been really soul-destroying. But I’m writing this because I need people to know that it’s not always been easy – in fact, life isn’t easy, in fact for many years, probably the first 15 of this business I didn’t really love it nor did I love my job.
Sometimes – in fact in my case, it probably took me 20 years to absolutely love what I was doing and I had other priorities I was bringing up children, I had a life to live and the business was almost kind of I had to do it. But then through that blossoming through that is something that I so passionately enjoy and you know the whole entrepreneurship and business management and learning how to be a great CEO and all the rest of that one of the things I’m so passionate about now and I can genuinely say I love my job. But when you’re going through these ups and downs in business what is it that you need to hold onto in character traits in order to help you through. So I thought I’d share with you a few of mine – number one is persistence – I am by no means the brightest button in the box I know that. The one thing I do make up for is I’m incredibly tenacious – I will stick at something until I have exhausted all avenues.
The second thing I absolutely have is belief – I know that what we’re doing is worthwhile, I know it contributes to people’s lives and building their businesses and I know we’re going to achieve what we are going to achieve. The third thing is that we definitely have a plan that we follow every day, so this is not a destination that we don’t know how we’re getting there, so we’ve got a plan and we stick to that. The other thing is my attitude to myself – I am not too easy on myself – I do give myself a tough time if I don’t get up early, if I don’t work out, if I don’t walk my dog, if I don’t do my figures, if I don’t follow my routine. Because I think you have to be tough on yourself in order to achieve great things. Equally speaking the balance of that is that you don’t need to self-flagellate either you don’t need to be super hideous to the point whereby you are self-condemning for the things that you haven’t achieved. If I tell you in all the plans that I write maybe 3 fifths of them have been massively successful. So one has to deal with the 2 fifths of stuff that doesn’t necessarily go right, but if you apply the concept of attitude, persistence and belief to your plan than – I have absolutely no doubt that over the period of time, even though maybe you don’t even notice it, you’ll see that upward trajectory as well.
I hope that really helps.
Take care