The current economic climate tends to produce numerous professional and personal situations that leads us towards a state of discouragement, and this discouragement is precisely one of the main causes of our inability to escape from the situation in which we find ourselves.
The result of this negative climate resides in its influence over us, in which me settle into a complacency comparing our own situaton with those that are passing through harder times and thus conform ourselves with the fact that we are in at least a somewhat better position. In the worst cases, our despondency carries us into a downward spiral that can affect everything, even our health.
It is not a question of maintaining a permanent state of optimism but neither is it a question of being one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse of which unfortunately seem to abound in today’s environment. The macroeconomic situation may be outside of our control but not the microeconomic implications of which we are directly responsible and should be able to formulate an clear plan of action.
The first step is to know ourselves, whether it be on a personal or professional level – it is necessary to understand what are our virtues and defects, or in business terms, our strengths and weaknesses, in order to reinforce the former and minimize the latter – to continually concentrate our effort on recognizing how we can develop those strengths and use them to our advantage whether it be for a job interview or winning a new project or contract.
We all have problems but, with the exception of those that are health related, the solution lies in large part in our own hands, although to reach them we need to learn to accept sacrificies, whether those be in salary, changes in organizational function or responsiblities in the case of our professonal careers, and to do so we need, as I mentioned previously, we need to know ourselves to be able to establish to what level we are able and willing to make sacrifices.
For this task we need to be able to look inside ourselves and find the necessary strength to move forward which can stem from sources or varying nature; our families, our desire to progress, our survival instinct… they should form our motor, and at the same time our refuge, from which we find our inspiration to pick ourselves back up when we fall into that state of discouragement, because if we are not able to first support ourselves and self-motivate, then with dificulty we will find that support from our surroundings.
This is not an innate ability; it must be exercised, and only those that can to develop this talent will be the ones to overcome the dificulties presented in our day by day reality.
It is not an easy task, but our responsibility should propel us to try our best since we are not only motivated to help ourselves but also should be motivated to aid those arround us and this helping to achieve the goals that we set for ourselves.
Ignacio Bao
Chairman
Bao Partners / Signium International