With many months in advance, you organize your team to develop an event that has the potential to generate a good income for everyone involved, something like the business of the year. You dedicate a lot of resources, time, and money to it. Additionally, it generates high expectations because there is a number of people who envision benefiting from this event. However, this number is not enough for you to develop the event, and the date arrives. You don’t reach the goal, not even the break-even point. What to do?
Literally, pay the consequences by backing out? Pay the costs involved in a cancellation or proceed and face a significant loss by carrying out the event with the registered participants? Both decisions come with a high cost. Neither brings a benefit, but rather it’s about where you lose less financially, albeit it implies a high emotional cost due to everything involved in canceling an event, especially facing all those affected.
Does an experience like this sound familiar to you?
Having made the decision to back out, you have 2 options: One is to sink into frustration and shame, lamenting what happened and seeking blame for why it couldn’t be done. The other is to process the pain, feel the strong emotion of frustration and shame, but not stay in that state for long. Allow yourself to feel and think that you would have wanted to succeed. Accept the feeling of defeat for a moment, but then move out of that state by creating a new one, something like empowered shame or challenged frustration. You name it.
I chose the second option. At first, I felt deep sadness, but I sought to process it by relying on a community I belong to. And then I went swimming, drowning the feeling while seeking new meanings in the face of this “business failure.” Having given myself permission to feel everything I felt, a cluster of emotions difficult to enumerate here, this new state of shaking off the frustration and acting from a state of hope and learning emerged.
I define both states here:
Hope, because I realize all the resources I have, starting with my colleagues and team, who not only gave me words of encouragement but also their friendly hand to do something different. Recognizing everything we have accumulated, experience, learning, contacts, etc., and at the same time, appreciating the opportunities that arise.
Learning, by understanding how important it is to know how to communicate what you propose, understand the market at this moment, politically and economically. And seek greater resources that are available in the market today, such as digital data intelligence.
The important thing here is not what I will be achieving in the future, but the present. How I want to manage my life today and face all the challenges that being a businesswoman puts in my path in the business world.
Which state would you choose in the face of a similar experience? I leave it as an opportunity for reflection, noting that it is a choice.