The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many business owners to temporarily close their doors, reduce operations, and re-think their strategy. But it also did more than that: It shook their confidence. Innovating a solution is hard when something wracks your business so deeply. That’s because as business owners, we start from a point of clarity and gain the confidence we need to put everything else in motion. The pandemic placed us back at square one. We lost clarity, and therefore we weren’t sure how to keep moving forward.
The good news is that it’s possible to find your momentum again. It just may take a bit of extra effort.
The Wheel of Momentum
Your business must have a sense of clarity before you can gain the confidence necessary to get things rolling. Each stage of the wheel feeds into the next, with your efforts ramping up as your business starts moving. Right now, many business owners aren’t clear on their circumstances. How can you make plans when you aren’t sure when the pandemic will end?
Thankfully, clarity doesn’t require precognition. You don’t need to know the future to know your business. When in doubt, ask yourself what your business is, rather than what it does. What is your brand story? What are your values? What do your customers care about? Gaining this clarity helps prepare you for transitioning out this stage of confusion.
Emerging Confidently
By working through the Wheel of Momentum, you can grow your confidence and begin working on developing your competencies. When recovering your business from COVID, you’ll likely find that you need to create some new competencies. Are there processes you can eliminate or streamline? Do you need to add or cut resources or team members?
Your emergent confidence can help guide your innovations as you set yourself up to move from the blue part of the Wheel into the red. Take time to brainstorm new strategies and garner feedback, but don’t let yourself lose sight of your business’s purpose and values. Therein lies the source of your confidence.
Wrapping Up
Now that we better understand the pandemic and its demands on our businesses, we can take a bit of a collective sigh. There remain challenges to deal with, but our core business identities haven’t changed. By taking the time to clarify your goals and values, you can start re-building confidence and moving into re-defining your competencies. You might start to feel a little better about the direction your business is going to go and how you’re going to develop your competencies to survive and thrive in the new normal.
