Thinking Out of the Box

Petra, Jordan
Here in Spain, as in many other Western economies at this point in time, there is a whiff of recession, and it has been reaching with icy tentacles into the very fabric of the daily life of many individuals.

A client recently mentioned to me that he spends a good time every day researching the daily press, local, regional, and national, as well as international regarding this very - for his extensive business - worrisome topic. He is, therefore, logically worried, and even has mild anxiety attacks due to the manner in which this may affect all of his financial outcomes for the year.

I suggested that although being informed of the current situation of this crisis in the making is a good idea, it is however, not a good idea to give yourself such a top-heavy diet of this part of the news. The more you concentrate on the possible consequences of all of this, the more you become rigid, fearful, and may even draw this towards you.

A much more positive way of looking at the reality of the situation, would be to brainstorm with others - either executive staff in his company. or like-minded businesspersons - in order to come up with pro-active and creative ideas of using current assets (human and material) in order to channel them into cost-effective and new directions to bring in the possibility of different streams of income for the duration (and perhaps even beyond) of the current crisis.

Using what is already there, thinking of out-of-the-box ways of using it differently than the current way, requiring perhaps some re-training and some relatively inexpensive fine-tuning of current assets, re-framing current market needs in order to understand what the man on the street may want now, as opposed to what was wanted a year ago, is part of this process.

Refusing to allow yourself to be pulled down by outer circumstances (the news), realizing that if you feed yourself a steady diet of anything (bad news) you will become ill in some fashion (worry, anxiety), and understanding that you can re-group by re-thinking and re-framing, brainstorming and looking out of the box, you will move far more quickly down a more positive road in all senses of the word.