What do you do when things go pear-shaped?

Many of us have been feeling an abundance of challenges lately with the recession and with environmental and societal crises. There’s a lot that doesn’t feel safe about our world and it can be tempting to withdraw and struggle along quietly and alone, which in turn can increase our sense of isolation, despair or panic. All this, of course, on top of the usual challenges of being human.

Danielle Mills felt the impact of the recession on her business, BrightSpark Recruitment. After a brilliant initial two years, which she describes as “everything I thought it would be”, times got tough. She found that cash-flow became very difficult and she was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to pay her workers; she saw many others in her industry fall by the way and she would wake up with dread, wondering: “What do I have to face today?”

She is now breathing a tentative sigh of relief; work has dramatically picked up and she is celebrating her fifth year of self-employment. So what kept her going through what she describes as a “painful, awful time”?

Well, she made some classic business-savvy manoeuvres like watching trends in her industry and diversifying accordingly. She made her motto: “In the quietest time, make sure you’re shouting loudest”. She also kept a long-term perspective so that when the current day was hard, she thought forward to a time when it would be easier again.

But what struck me most about Danielle’s story is how human she allowed herself to be and how able she was to acknowledge that she was really struggling. She leant into her networks, both offline and online, and directly asked for help. She was able to say “This is massive and hard – anyone else feeling that?” and she received both empathy and practical advice. She surrounded herself with what she calls “realistically positive” comrades and as well as receiving help, she also looked for opportunities where she could help others. She was honest with her workers, explaining how difficult the situation was and not promising anything, and she went the extra distance with the companies on her books – reaching out and offering her expertise to help them. She invested a huge amount of time and energy, without immediate financial gain, in order to ease others’ situations and build relationships.

Underneath all of this is the foundation that she is passionate about what she does. She has been fiercely persistent and doggedly determined because she knows that her work helps people and brings them peace of mind. She gets immense satisfaction from the impact she has on people and says that while there are still “loads of challenges”, the benefits outweigh them.

No-one said that following our passion would be easy. Turbulence and turmoil are part of the course, even before you’ve thrown in the economic challenges and others around us. If we want to do what we love, we would be wise to develop our resilience and our unique approach to hard times. What do we want these struggles to mean? Perhaps they bring us closer to others. Perhaps they help us become more compassionate and understanding of others’ pain. Perhaps they reveal to us qualities we hadn’t realized we had. Perhaps they simply remind us that we are all human and we’re all in this together.

The World Needs Your Passion, So…

1) Where are you really struggling? What do you need to ask for help with? Who can you ask and how can you ask them? What would stop you from doing this?

2) What about the people around you who are struggling? How can you help them? What would stop you from doing this?

3) Scroll down and leave a comment on this blog post and let us know: Do you find it easier to ask for help or to offer it? How are you with admitting that you’re struggling? How easy do you find it to witness other people’s struggles?

What are you fearful about struggling with that would stop you from starting your own venture? In the Kickstart Your Venture workshop, we explore possible obstacles – both internal and external – that you and the other workshop participants have. Together, we then find ways for you to approach these so that they don’t stop you from creating the venture you’re passionate about. Find out more & book your place here > > >

Not around for the workshop or prefer one-to-one support? Find out how individual coaching can help you here > > >

Danielle was interviewed recently as part of my Inspirational 100 project. Find out more & get involved here > > >

© Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 2010

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Behind the scenes, my website is in revamp, automated systems are being put in place, and I’m growing a team – all of which will allow me to communicate my work more easily and give me more time to develop and deliver services I love.

And as I’ve been putting these new plans and procedures in place, my Saboteur has been having a field day. [Saboteur = that part of us which wants to keep things as they are, not rock the boat, and therefore sabotage any forward movement]. His stance is that change is a bad thing and he drags me down, telling me that these changes must mean that everything I’ve done before has failed, been wrong. He would love to convince me it’s all too much, to throw out the baby with the bath water. When he’s in charge, I feel wobbly, even despairing.

Thankfully, over the years I’ve become intimately acquainted with his strategies and when he allows me a moment to breathe, I can eventually shake him off and put ME back in control. Anyone else recognise that feeling? Just as you often feel clearer after a cold has passed, so too with the banishment of good old Sab.

I feel refreshed and stronger now, like something stagnant and toxic has been washed out of my system. Without the distorted vision he gives me, I can now see that it’s time for celebration. I am standing clearly in the acknowledgement that I run a rapidly-evolving business and it’s time to hire people and put robust systems in place for the next phase. I’ve seen too many amazing businesses fail because they weren’t functioning as businesses. They positioned themselves as community services and didn’t take that leap into solid professionalism.

Just as Obama’s inauguration speech focused on the dawning of responsible maturity, so too for me it is time to put off any childish, amateurish ways. You’ll soon see a cleaned up website, fully hosted under my own domain name; a request for you to opt-in to a new email list; automation of e-courses & digital product delivery; sexy incorporation of audio and video; and perhaps even a few new names and faces as the You Inspire Me team.

Yes – You Inspire Me just grew up.

The World Needs Your Passion, So…

1) What does YOUR Saboteur have to say about you making changes, growing up, evolving? How do you ensure you move forward anyway?

2) Inquiry: What do I need to give myself permission to do?

3) Action: Take the next step forward, noticing and bypassing your Saboteur’s efforts to stop you.

4) Share your comments on this blog post.

© Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 2009

* Kickstart Your Venture: A Community Workshop

Time to grow up? Time to get serious about your idea and take the next step towards turning it into reality? Find out more about this kickstart workshop: click here.

This is Global Entrepreneurship Week and to mark its start, I volunteered at the first day of Chain Reaction, an event which saw 700 people gather to explore how entrepreneurship can be a source of social good.

There was a variety of inspirational speakers including Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Sophi Tranchell of Divine Chocolate, and Eugenie Harvey of We Are What We Do. My greatest surprise of the day was the closing remarks made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. His focus was on the economy but not the all-too-familiar message of “this is just a downturn, we’ll be back to big, strong, lean and mean again soon” of which many politicians and business people are trying to persuade us. Instead, he acknowledged the economic crisis as one and the same as our resource crisis, emphasised the ‘climate change imperative’ and urged the importance of investing in renewable energy and agriculture. He described these times as experiencing the birth pangs intrinsic to us becoming a global community and as such that they alert us to the need for transition phases.

In many ways, the general thrust of the day was similar to the approach taken by Rob Hopkins, instigator of the Transition Town Movement – that we are entering transition years and that the innovation, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit which got us in to this situation can now be re-harnessed and directed towards finding solutions to the world’s needs.

As I left the conference and spotted in the newspaper that more City jobs are being cut, I had a vision of those thousands of people moving not from employment to unemployment, but to enterprise. A move away from complacent expectation that someone else will employ us as a cog in some wheel…. to a belief that we can have great ideas, gather with others to turn them into reality, and effect social change through doing so.

It feels like time to get excited. There’s the sense of a new model of business emerging. It’s not the old way where business is set up purely for the sake of profit with the directors perhaps developing a conscience later in life, creating philanthropic foundations to offset the damage their enterprise has done. The new model is that enterprise itself is a vehicle for answering society’s needs.

The win-win-win nature of this transaction continually inspires me. I spoke to two women at the conference who were feeling increasingly frustrated as the day went on. They were hearing about all these inspirational projects yet feeling that their own gifts were being wasted, their potential not fulfilled. I hear this so frequently when interviewing women for my Inspirational 100 project – the pain of that gap between what you could be doing, and what you are doing. One of the women started crying as she told me that in her previous decade of working life she felt that she had added no value. She knew that she could give, and that she WAS, more than that. It reiterated to me this great human need for personal fulfilment through fulfilling our own potential – and that one way of doing this is by fulfilling a need in the world through enterprise.

The World Needs Your Passion, So…

1) Inquiry: What is the most entrepreneurial thing I have ever done? What was it like to match my strengths/interests with a need in the world?

2) Inquiry: If starting a business were the only way to effect social change, what need would I want to meet and how could a business model serve that need?

3) If there were no time to waste and you were really needed right now, what would be your next action step? Get whatever support you need to make it.

© Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 2008

** You – The Entrepreneur **

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