None of us will get out of this alive.
There, I said it. No amount of anxiety, propriety, performance, joy nor lassitude will save us. How did we get here? Where are we going? These are questions many of us are asking. Some of us don’t even have the luxury to ask and must simply survive. You’re in business so let’s add that layer of complexity to the mix. How do we focus and sustain under these current conditions?
During a recent lunch with a colleague, I recounted a crisis that I lived through. It was a situation that I rarely speak about, but it reminded me that resilience is about flexibility and courage - muscles we can all exercise a little more. In that scenario, I was in the middle of a hurricane trying to survive with a family of neighbors whose home had already been blown away. The roof was already blowing off my home when we had to choose between staying in my bedroom – the last room in the house where the roof was lifting for takeoff or leaving for the refuge of vehicles parked outside in the storm. Did I mention there were small children and a baby? We decided to leave and sat in my (rag top) jeep in hopes that the debris blowing around us did not hit our vehicle. As I sat and watched, the palm trees whipped violently back and forth at the mercy of the 160 mph winds in the night. As I prayed for our safety, I watched and waited. There was nothing else we could do. At one point there was peace, calm and quiet and I thought it was over- we had survived- only to find that the eye of the hurricane had passed over. The storm raged on until morning, and we survived.
The recent months have felt similar in some ways - violent storm notwithstanding – but there seems to be a degree of chaos to which we must all bear witness or weather personally. My survival story was instructional. I learned that there are things we have control over and some things we do not. If we are to survive, we must be able to determine between the two and act accordingly. I draw from that experience to examine the courage required to persevere, to recover and rebuild under the most daunting circumstances. That is no small feat and I sense that those skills will be required of us as well.
As business owners we are faced with uncertainty frequently. Financial volatility, inflation, leading and lagging indicators are all shaking up the status quo for a reason. The prognosticators and oracles commanding our collective attention can only speculate and base predictions on regressive data. Some may ring true, and some may yield surprising results. Your business will need to continuously adapt and be flexible in this time so we should all take a lesson from the palm trees and learn to sway with the winds of change.
In our businesses we can continue to build for the value to others that we create. We can choose to check out if we have convinced ourselves that there’s nobody, not one person out there, who will benefit from what we bring, but somehow, that might be difficult to know.
What I do know is that there is a shift happening and something new is in the birth canal. While we may not have complete clarity of what that might be, what we may be experiencing are those contractions required for the actual birth to be successful. I’m here for it. We should all bring it. Let’s do what we came here to do.
None of us will get out of this alive. Leave nothing on the table.