The Power of A "Can Do" Attitude

Running your own business can be the most exciting and thrilling experience you can ever imagine. It is a roller-coaster ride of emotion from fantastic highs to deepest lows married with the harsh reality that you will lose more than you win. The psychology of how you manage this personally and get yourself mentally prepared quickly to go again is a key element of the makeup of any leader. This is even more critical when you have a great team of people around you that you need to keep motivated and focused on the goal in hand. To be successful they have to believe in you and be willing to follow.

Seeing my vision becoming a reality, bringing together, building and maintaining a great team of people; "winning" new business and turning prospects into customers and then into advocates to me is the ultimate challenge. Achieving and maintaining excellence in customer service and providing a positive customer experience has and still is critical to any successful service industry - digital or face-to-face.

Equally all of this does not come without a lot of hard work and at times significant personal cost. The stresses and strains can take you to breaking point and back, but also you find yourself and the people who have come on the journey with you suddenly capable of things you couldn't previously imagined. You are constantly learning, not just in acquiring new business and commercial knowledge, but more importantly about one’s self. You just never stop learning.

Underpinning all of this is having a “can do” attitude. Your attitude to calculated risk taking becomes highly refined, and your of fear failure becomes immaterial as your outlook and approach to everything is "don't tell me 99 reasons out of a 100 why something cannot be done, but give me the 1 reason out of 100 why something can be done and just do it!". Whilst to be clear I am not advocating being reckless and being a complete maverick is a fast path to bankruptcy, success at all levels is a combination of a focused positive "can do" attitude and being able to look at any type of problem as a challenge and sometimes being highly creative in over-coming it.

So when in your next meeting (business or personal!) and someone says no or something cannot be done just remind them in 1963 President J.F Kennedy laid down the challenge that “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. On 20th July 1969 Apollo 11 (Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins) did just that with less technology and raw computing power that fuels your mobile phone we take for granted today.

You just have to want to do it and then make something positive happen!