When You Can’t See the Next Step

In your personal and business lives change will come. Product and service line expansions, increased sales, effective marketing strategies and improved relations with new and long-term clients are types of changes you may welcome. Lagging economies, lackluster product sales, employee relations issues and showers of speculative media attention are types of changes you, as a creative business leader, may try to avoid, but don’t always manage to steer clear of. 

There’s a bounty of articles, white papers, research documents and recorded interviews featuring creative business leaders (seasoned professionals operating small, mid-size and large organizations) discussing strategies you can take to manage through what is often perceived as the “downside of change.” However, not much exist on the process of managing a business when you can’t see the next step, when you have no clear idea what to do next. 

What If Writing Down Goals Doesn’t Work

Writing down goals, including listing the steps you’ll take to achieve those goals, might not help much here either because, remember, you have no idea what to do right now.  As creative business leader, Michael Hyatt, notes at International Leadership, perhaps just doing the “next right thing” is the best choice during times when you’re moving through stages of unknown, times when all of your ideas don’t seem to match the situation your business or personal life is facing.  

As noted at the forefront of Steve Pavlina’s “ The Courage to Live Consciously,” Helen Keller shared that:  

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable” 

Yet, it is security that you may long for, work so hard to grasp. It’s as though you forget that, for all of your efforts, for all of your groaning, begging, anxiousness and cursing, you can’t control each event, every happenstance, that occurs in your life. Perhaps you (like so many of us) watched your parents sweat their brows for security and not pull it off. Your parents’ parents likely wrestled life itself as well and discovered to control it was not their undertaking. Now you, like many of us, are giving it a go. It’s a common theme, a longing that at one time or another, may find you (each of us) at a crossroads.  

You’re in good company. We get angry when our plans don’t turn out exactly as we wanted. We work hard to amass wealth so we can feel safe, like we’ll make in through a rainy day just because we have money stocked away. Then a typhoon comes (e.g. medical bills, job shifts, economic downturns) and we feel forced back to square one, for which we get angry, beat our chest, the wind and anyone standing in our path. We blame the government, genes, our past, another person, ourselves, but do we dare take the next courageous step? 

Your Past Successes are Revealing Something Important

Friend, you made it this far. Something inside you knows the way. When you can’t see the next step it may be beneficial to list other times in your life when you felt you wouldn’t make it or wouldn’t survive. Perhaps you felt you’d never learn to ride a bike. Sounds simple if you’ve rode a bike plenty of times, but when you were a kid falling to the hard ground, scraping your knees until they bled, you may have felt as if you’d never master bike riding, but, despite fear, did you? If you served in the military you may have felt that you’d never get through the rigors and demands of boot camp. Did you? If you birthed a child, you may have felt like you’d never move beyond the pain and hold a newborn in your arms. But, did you?

Recall the first large meal you cooked (e.g. Thanksgiving, Christmas dinner). Did you start out thinking you’d ace the entire meal or were you afraid you’d burn the food? If you kept cooking, something tells me you’re pretty good in the kitchen.  

If you’re passionate about your business (remember Colonel Sanders, John H. Johnson, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Kay, etc.) and something deep inside your being tells you to keep moving forward, do just that when you can’t see the next step. At the end of your journey, the fact that you lived courageously and with passion may change more lives than you may ever know. After all, your success, your fearless living, your passionate advancing, is good for everyone. 

Get into Spiral online at:  https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000841/Spiral.html

Check out Long Walk Up online at:  https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000531/Long-Walk-Up.html 

Sources:

http://michaelhyatt.com/what-to-do-when-you-dont-know-what-to-do.html (Michael Hyatt: What To Do When You Don’t Know What to Do)

http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/courage-to-live-consciously.htm (Steve Pavlina: The Courage to Live Consciously)

http://www.kfc.com/about/colonel.asp (KFC: Colonel Harland Sanders)

http://www.colonelsanders.com/bio.asp (Colonel Harland Sanders)

http://www.madamcjwalker.com/bios/madam-c-j-walker (Madam C. J. Walker)

http://www.biography.com/articles/Mary-Kay-Ash-197044 (Biography: Mary Kay Ash)

http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=1047&category=mediaMakers (The History Makers: John H. Johnson Biography)