Whether or not you’ve been afflicted with the Covid-19 virus, it no doubt has still had an impact on everyone’s life.
For the longest time I felt that because I was living in a country where the government was proactive and it’s people were relatively responsible in taking the advice and instructions to stay at home during lockdown, that Covid-19 would be less of a threat to my lifestyle and livelihood. I felt that as long as I followed the rules, I could ride out this pandemic in good health and my business would only take a small hit.
As a person who conducts marketing courses I thought I should take my own advice and make sure that I stayed top-of-mind with my clients and so I busied myself with finding ways to stay out in front via social media and email marketing.
It was four months into my ‘busyness’ and coming up for air did I finally realize what had happened. I had been living with a false since of security. The idea of a small hit to my business was more like being hit by a meteorite. The business that I had worked so hard over the past 13 years had little to no new business.
At that moment when I came up for air, the gravity of acknowledging what happening to my business, my life, hit me hard. I was telling other people in my social posts how they had to embrace that the world as we once knew it was over and to make plans for getting on with it. Yet I wasn’t taking my own advice.
In the Kubler-Ross model of the five stages of grief, I was telling people that they needed to get out of the denial stage and move quickly into acceptance. Geez, who was I to preach.
When I finally had my aha moment, I realized that I had been spending 4 months in the denial stage and that I skipped over the anger and the bargaining stages and went strait to depression where I grieved the loss of my business and identity and where I stayed for about 4 weeks before moving into the acceptance stage.
I’ve accepted that the business model crafted in 2007 was no longer applicable in this covid-19 driven world. This world that is now having us work remotely and physically distanced from one another.
Acknowledging that things are going to be the same has helped me move out of the depression to a place of contemplation. I gave myself permission to just sit with what was happening and, on some days, do nothing that was business related.
One day I woke up with this feeling of calm and it was then that I knew I was ready to start anew.
And so begins my journey of building both a new business and re-imagining a new business model for my existing training and consulting business.
