Every challenge may seem like the greatest at the time! Gwen Rhys advises keeping a ‘brag book’, or running CV, to remind you of the solutions you’ve found.
“People often ask me what is the greatest challenge that I’ve ever faced.
It’s just about the toughest question there is to answer, because every time you’re faced with a challenge, it seems the greatest, and every time you’ve overcome it you’ve forgotten that it was ever a challenge in the first place.
It’s one of the reasons why I encourage younger people that I mentor to keep either a running CV or a kind of ‘brag book’ so that you remember those challenges. You jot down the steps that you took to overcome them, so that when somebody does ask you that question, you remember it and you’ve got a pathway that can help them go through it as well.
But I think the most difficult challenge that I’ve had relatively recently was with the business that I now lead. I was very busy, it was very exciting, it was relatively new, and I was on total adrenaline.
Introducing new things all the time, saying yes to just about everybody and suddenly I looked at the numbers and what I saw was really not a happy place. I was faced potentially with having to wind the business up.
So I battened down the hatches; I retrenched a lot, I said no to many things; I cut the staff that was nice to have, not essential to have.
I became a different person for a while, which I didn’t actually like very much. It wasn’t really me.
But within 12 months I had turned what was a huge loss into a small profit, and have built on that profit every four years, and have innovated, and am back to being my old self.
So I say ‘yes’ now much more than I say ‘no’.”
This is an abridged transcript of the video lesson – watch the video for the full story!
