I am beyond excited for August’s theme of embracing challenge, because it is one that is so relevant in our line of work. As planners and small business owners, there’s not day that goes by where we don’t face challenges. They can be both minor, like traffic making us late to a client meeting, and major, like a vendor dropping the ball hours before an event. And, depending on our headspace and the week we’ve had, the way we deal with either type can be completely unpredictable.
I love Roosevelt’s quote, then, because it reminds us what challenges are all about—growth. It’s those crucial last-minute executive decisions and relentless late-night pow-wows that shape us into successful business owners—not the easy office days. We learn to manage our reactions by living through times when we didn’t. We learn to channel our best business self by making it through the repercussions of past poor business decisions. We learn to manage clients—oftentimes—through pure trial and error. Through challenging times, our intuition becomes sharper, our skills, more savvy, our reactions, better managed.
Over the years as a planner, I’ve learned to stop looking at challenges and unexpected occurrences like a hard blow that I have to wear, and more like a welcome wave—a forceful relentless, wave, sure, but one that helps push me in the direction I need to go. One that I can’t waste anytime fighting and, instead, must learn to ride. Embracing challenge—rather than simply bracing for challenge—is the only way we become our best, most successful selves.
So, cheers, Aisle Planners, to an August full of embracing challenge, and, most importantly, the endless growth that comes along with that!
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