When you have to pull a rabbit out of a hat

All of us know that feeling of utter confusion that often accompanies difficult situations.

It can be quite paralysing, stopping you from thinking clearly. Sometimes that feeling of being trapped is real and sometimes it is a state of mind.  It's that sense of what else can I do to get myself out of this mess I am in? I have tried everything I know to do and still, nothing has shifted.

Once you have reached this point other things come into play that compounds the frozen state. Things like a fear of failure, fear of losing face or losing all that you own, a fear of letting people down or of letting yourself down. You start wondering if you should ever have done this in the first place.

Suddenly your wish list has increased from magician, rabbit and hat to magician, rabbit, hat, fog buster, Valium, a stiff drink and someone to talk you off the ledge!

When you run your own business the buck stops with you. You may have people who work for you, and you may have a management team but at the end of the day it is your responsibility to keep the business afloat. So what do you do when the only way out you can think of requires a rabbit, a hat and a magician?

Here are three suggestions on what you can do to bring a new perspective on a recalcitrant problem.

Firstly grab a blank piece of paper and start brainstorming all the issues that are plaguing you or contributing to the current situation. Don't filter this, just let your mind run wild and write down everything that pops into it even if it is seemingly unrelated. Give yourself some time to do this and once the initial flood has subsided, review what you have written and see if anything else occurs to you. Make sure this includes feelings, situations, circumstances, things you have and things you wish you had. EVERYTHING!

Grab 3 more blank sheets and head them up business, personal and in my head. Go back over the initial list and relocate them to these sheets.

Now review these and determine if in fact there is only one problem or if there are a few related or unrelated issues. Sometimes when we feel we are in an unsolvable situation we are in fact facing a number of concurrent problems that have blurred into one. It's as if we are in the centre of a perfect storm that threatens to overwhelm us.

Ok now that you have your lists this is what to do next.

Start with the “what's in my head” list and turn each thought into a statement. Then work your way through the list reading each one out loud and ask yourself if it is true? And then if it does happen will I die? Death not imminent? Great, that means you have something to work with!

I'll show you how this works. Say I had written on my list that if my business collapses I will be an idiot. The question I write down from that is; am I an idiot? The answer to that 99% of the time will be a resounding no. Even if you have done something which in hindsight is really stupid that does not make you stupid. It makes you human. If you have a pattern of bad decisions then you have a weakness in that area and therefore something to work on and improve in but it does not make you universally stupid.

The second question is if you have made a stupid decision are you going to die from it? Again the answer to this will generally be no. It is easy to imagine things are a catastrophe when really what they are is a giant pain in the butt that we wished had not happened. Anyhow, once you have worked through that list I would be very surprised if you have not got very little left to deal with there.

You see it is really easy to get bogged down and sabotaged by negative self talk.  The reality is that if you are an entrepreneur then the faster you can embrace failure or the thought of failure or even the thought that you may not be as successful as you hoped then the sooner you can get on with building your business.  Embarrassment and shame are limiting beliefs that lead you nowhere.