It has been said that every cloud has a silver lining, or one or my personal favourites, adversity is opportunity in work clothes! This was recently bought home to me when I faced an adverse situation of my own.
I am an entrepreneur, and as such, I build networks and create partnerships with other Business people for mutual benefit. Before going into any business venture, it is important to rigorously screen the people you’re going to be working with to ensure they share the same morals, values and integrity as yourself. I hold very high standards of integrity for myself and I want to ensure that the people I work with are also of the highest levels of integrity.
Unfortunately, no matter how diligent you may be, you can never really know what is in a person’s heart. And unfortunately, sometimes some bad eggs do slip through the cracks. This was the situation that I recently found myself in when someone who I had entered into a partnership with turned out, let’s just say, to not share my fondness for integrity.
I won’t go into the details here, but let’s just say this was a BAD guy, who did some really BAD things. Obviously, I was shocked and horrified when I discovered just what type of person this guy really was, but then you can’t allow yourself to be stopped in your tracks by this setback, and you certainly cannot allow yourself to be brought down to their level. If I had of retaliated in some way, it would not have served me. There is an old saying that to hold a grudge is like holding a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at someone. Even if you succeed, it’s going to burn you too! So, what did I do? Well obviously I had an obligation to society to inform the authorities so that they can intervene and stop this from happening again, but beyond that I have a duty to myself and all those I serve to put this behind me and move on.
To hold a grudge is like holding a hot coal with the intention of throwing it at someone.
And what I found from moving on is that I had relied upon this partnership probably more than I should have, and as a result it limited the scope of what I could achieve. In the short time since discovering the truth about this guy, I’ve been forced to seek out new partnerships and new opportunities and what I discovered is that there a numerous opportunities out there that are far more lucrative than what I previously had.
As a result, what I’ve found is that I previously had too narrow a focus and it was restricting my growth. Since seeking out new opportunities, I have found myself looking into areas that I had previously avoided because they were outside of my scope. But when I actually took the time to really stop and examine these opportunities in full, I discovered that I really had the perfect skill set to really exploit the potential of what these opportunities could offer. I was previously blind to this, and had it not been for this “setback” I probably never would have seen them.
In hindsight, I see this “setback” for what it truly was, an opportunity in work clothes. As I begin to explore the potential of the new connections that I am making, I’m actually more excited than I think I ever have been before about the future.
These new opportunities, that I never would have come across any other way, have opened up new possibilities and as I plot out the next 6 months, I see myself achieving things that just a few weeks ago I never would have thought possible.
So this is my story, my question for you is twofold. Firstly, how do you respond to adversity? Do you act in negativity, hate, retaliation, all the things that ultimately only burn YOU? Or do you rise above the situation and see it as an opportunity in work clothes?
My second question is, what opportunities are out there for you that you may have never considered before? Quite often we may find, as I did, that we are perfectly suited for things that we have just never considered before because they were just outside of what we’ve done before?
I have learned and benefited form this whole situation, now I want to encourage you to do the same!
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