It’s interesting when clients, colleagues or friends say they wish they had engaged a business coach & mentor earlier or sought help and support from a source they identified when they needed it, they would have saved themselves a great deal of time and possibly money.
We know the saying, ‘prevention is better than cure’ but how much do we practice this?
Boiling this down, the question really is how proactive or reactive are you?
How much do you plan for the unexpected?
Have you identified potential issues, blocks, risks, challenges and created a plan of action?
And of course if not, why not?
There are a lot of reasons why we don’t do what we know we should do when we need to do them, instead of procrastinating or avoiding them until we end up in dire situations or reap the consequences of putting something off that was urgent ages ago because we thought (or hoped) it would go away. And of course it never does, it’s called burying your head in the sand. And when we do this, we know deep down it’s there but can’t face dealing with whatever it is for different reasons.
I often say I would rather be the fence at the top of the cliff than the ambulance at the bottom and am sure that for most business owners we would rather seek help sooner rather than later but often we just want to try and work things out on our own first at least.
Trying to work out when is the best time, whom to contact, and how someone might be able to help can be the hard questions to answer, as well as trying to carry on doing what we are doing. Without taking that ‘time out’ to make those positive changes we know we won’t be able to improve what we do and how we do it.
To prevent is to avoid; prevention is a deterrent or a restraint.
We have insurance policies to protect us from what might happen to help us when we really need it. If we looked at our business or our life or even a situation we are faced with and considered what potential obstacles or issues we expect or anticipate, then identify the steps we might take to avoid or prevent or mitigate the worst-case scenarios from happening, think how prepared we might be.
Being proactive and planning and considering what we might prevent may save us having consequences to deal with further down the track.
If you want to focus on prevention rather than the cure, take time out to consider how you might do this, as you would if you were taking a car journey in extreme weather i.e. what measures would you take to avoid something bad happening.
You can be your own insurance policy for your business, or personal life.
Prevention IS better than the cure.
Subscribe to Success Factor Wednesday Wake-Up: www.successfactor.co.nz
#successfactor