Many owners think resilience means gritting their teeth and carrying on. That only takes you so far. By the third bad quarter, it is wearing thin.
In more than two decades of advising CEOs and family business owners, and also optimizing their businesses, I have noticed a pattern. Those who last are no tougher or smarter. The difference lies in what they do in the hours after a setback. Their habits require no special talent, and anyone can learn them.
What really decides who makes it?
Determination is what counts most. Talent and intelligence cannot replace it, nor can a thorough understanding of what went wrong.
You can know exactly why you failed and still be stuck a year later. Analysis can feel like progress while nothing changes. Every industry has brilliant people who walked away and less gifted people who kept at it. The latter ended up owning the businesses.
Your first commitment, then, is to stay in the game. That is the strategy around which you work out the tactics.
An owner facing trouble will often tell you: ‘I need to understand what happened.’ Ask someone who recovered how they did it and you may hear: ‘On Monday morning, I got up and started making calls.’
One waits for an explanation before acting. The other acts, and the explanation comes too late to matter. Decide to persevere on a good day, so you need not make that decision again on a bad one.
Why are you surprised by the punch?
A boxer prepared to take a hit withstands the first punch. Expecting to get through untouched leaves them in trouble.
Business works much the same way. Still, plenty of owners assume the year will follow the budget, then take the first unexpected event as evidence that their entire plan was mistaken.
Building something worthwhile involves setbacks as a matter of course. What gets less attention is how the distractions multiply as you approach a major goal. A crucial employee resigns. A customer walks away. Someone in the family challenges your plans just when you can least afford the interruption.
An expected setback is something to deal with. An unexpected one can feel like a judgment on the whole venture. Prepare your successors too: the punches will come, signaling that the goal is getting closer.
What do you do in the first five minutes?
Start your recovery with your body. Pause, let your breath out slowly, then get up and move. If possible, have a laugh at the drama your mind is creating. Follow that with one small action that moves you forward.
Rehearse this on quiet days. When business starts throwing punches, there will be little time to work out the sequence.
Think of lying awake at three in the morning, turning a worry over and over. Staying still and dwelling on it makes the feeling grow. If you can intensify a feeling, you can also improve it. How you feel affects your decisions, so change your state before choosing what to do.
Watch what you do next. Cutting back your ambition to spare yourself another disappointment can be an expensive response. Take disappointment as a reason to increase your efforts, and ask yourself: ‘What option am I missing?’
Keep working towards the same destination, however often you have to find a different way there.
A tender you did not win closes one door; it does not invalidate your growth target. Find another opening. A hire who did not work out calls for a different hiring approach next time, not the abandonment of your management team. Leave the goal in place and rewrite the part of the plan that needs changing.
Where are you looking?
Your car gives you a small rear-view mirror and a much larger windshield. Treat the past accordingly: look back long enough to learn, then turn your attention ahead. Bringing up last year’s loss at every meeting is much like trying to drive while staring into the mirror.
Look back for evidence, too. Deliberately recall your first major client, a crisis you survived or a year when everyone expected you to fail. You have managed things that once seemed impossible. You have faced hard times before and will face them again.
Be careful whose opinions you take on board. Ambitious plans draw people who forecast disaster as reliably as a weather reporter who predicts nothing but hurricanes. Ask whether the person has accomplished what you are attempting. If they have not, thank them and get on with it.
Doubts are harder to handle when they come from people you love. A spouse, parent or sibling in a family business may mean well: ‘We only want what is best for you.’ Listen respectfully. Wanting you safe, though, does not mean they can see the future you are working towards.
Can you switch off?
Driven owners often struggle most with switching off. Stress can keep you going for a time, but eventually it drains you and your business feels the effects.
Readiness and tension cannot coexist. Owners who endure feel drawn towards their goal without being strained by it. They regularly renew their energy by thinking about that goal and what it means for those they love. When it is time to stop working, they give themselves permission to stop completely.
Imagine a balloon losing air on its way to a target. Stress creates the leak. Owners often push harder, making it worse. The answer is to put air back in. Replenishing yourself takes minutes each day; it need not wait for a sabbatical.
For a family business, there is another reason to take this seriously. Your successors are watching how you cope with pressure. If running the company seems to mean being exhausted all the time, they may understandably want nothing to do with it.
Calm sustains your drive for decades. Midnight, jaw clenched, is hardly when you make your best decisions. Your competitors would love you to choose that moment.
Knowledge takeaways
Resilience combines determination with the ability to recover; enduring pain is not enough.
The setback itself is seldom what breaks someone. What follows in their own mind does the damage.
Draw deliberately on your previous successes. They provide your strongest evidence of what you can do.
Persistence fueled by stress eventually falters. Persistence sustained by calm builds over time.
Guard your destination against the doubts of those who love you as carefully as against anyone else’s doubts.
Take one step now: list the three hardest things you have overcome and put that list where you can find it when the next bad day comes.
Your five to thrive
1. Decide to stay. Determination beats talent and analysis. Make ‘I am not quitting’ a decision, not a mood.
2. Expect the punch. Assume setbacks will come, most of all near the goal, and prepare your team and successors for them.
3. Rehearse your reset. Stop, breathe out, move, laugh, take one step. Practice it before you need it.
4. Keep the goal, change the route. When disappointed, do more and ask: ‘What option am I missing?’