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Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

It’s Okay To Be Quiet

3 August 2020

WhatsApp. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. All full of words and pictures and constant contact with the wider world. Sometimes this is a force for good, as it prevents people from feeling isolated.

Other times it’s a barrage of noise, pushing at us and causing stress.

FOMO. Fear of missing out. A new-ish phenomen, driven by people sharing their wonderful lives and projecting constant happiness and cute pictures of their successful projects, children and pets.

FOMO can add to the distraction of social media and cause ordinary mortals to wonder what they’ve done wrong. How come they’ve not baked an amazing cake, taken idyllic pictures of smiling well behaved children, or been happily married to Mr DIY for a million years?

Clearly they must be under-performing at this thing called life. Letting the side down, by not eating chia seeds and drinking the latest green health juice.

There’s nothing wrong in celebrating success and I’m all for that, providing it’s genuine and well-earned.

What can be tiring is the incessant noise that is generated by apps and their pinging notifications, urging us to check out the latest post by Mrs Amazing and her 12 tap dancing children.

Social media is useful and promotes contact with people and I like that. People who over-share can be a nuisance and I wonder what their lives are really like?

This is a business blog, so what’s my point?

Well, to be successful in business we need to think clearly and we can’t do that if we are burning up our energy wondering how we can get our dog to do backflips, so that we can post the little rascal looking athletic. The world really doesn’t need to see that.

We need to find space and time to be quiet, so that we can process information and allow new thoughts and ideas to percolate.

FOMO can invade our business planning too. Oh no! We don’t own the newest, smartest car, so we must be a failure! No, we are not a failure and we don’t need to drive our business planning to achieve meaningless goals, based on a sense of deflated ego.

We can stick to first principles:

1. Are we generating enough cash to run our business?

2. What are the trends with our sales?

3. What do we need to change to keep on being successful?

4. Where is our ego getting in the way?

To answer these questions we can switch off the noise and retire to a shady spot to think about where our business is and where it needs to be.

We can be quiet and bring calm into our lives as a useful tool to increase our success in business.

If we judge ourselves against our perceptions of others we could fail to recognise that their car is rented, their kids resentful of pushy parents and those pictures of a cosy home life are wall papering over deeper cracks.

We can be quiet. We can be true to ourselves and we can can ignore the chattering masses and quietly get on with being successful …and happy!

Be quiet this week and see where it takes you. Switch off the piano playing cats and focus on what you want to achieve in business.

And of course, keep well.

Next week: The Bank Holiday Mistake