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It is easy to get disillusioned, feel defeated or beat yourself up when things don’t go as planned when, in the face of obstacles, you need to do the exact opposite. You need to admit to your frustrations and negative emotions, be kind to yourself, re-group, and if necessary, change your strategy. You need to get practical, emotional, mental and/or spiritual support to keep you going and moving forward.

When you set out to achieve your goals, do you expect your path to be straightforward, and assume that by positive thinking you’ll avoid any setbacks? Or are you not expecting any setbacks? Setbacks can be a sign that you are moving forward. So rather than be put off by obstacles, you can accept them as part of the journey and learn how to deal with them. Taking the metaphor of a car on a journey, you can stay parked outside your house and not encounter any traffic jams, diversions or oil changes. But you won’t get very far sitting outside your house! Once you venture out there may be difficulties ahead, but you also might find yourself somewhere new and fantastic.

Change is inevitable for individuals, businesses, communities and nations. Your only choice is how you work with it – it’s as simple as that.

How does your mindset influence your approach to risk assessment? Your values, beliefs and attitudes construct a view of the world and your place in it, driving your decision-making and combining into what you describe as your mindset. You might assume that risk management is a logical activity. And, of course, some of it is but you ignore the influence of your values and emotions at your peril.

Going on training courses and gaining qualifications are only a small step in the world of actually becoming proficient at a task. A lot of what you actually learn at work is done through the day-to-day tasks you’re involved in.

Do you believe that the training courses you’ve done have been truly valuable? Do you use what you’ve learned in your everyday working life? Often people are dubious, if not negative, about the training they’ve done and the benefit to them. It is possible to make training stick, and have a lasting benefit.

Take a look at job descriptions in almost any organisation, and you’ll find they’re broad statements of areas of responsibility, or maybe lists of activities. Job descriptions like this are concerned with activity rather than output, and fuel the culture of ‘hard work’ and long hours. What you don’t see is a short, complete list of the results people are accountable for producing.

Understanding crisis management Every day in the papers we read about some ‘crisis’ or another. This is particularly true at the moment, with economic and global factors affecting almost every aspect of our lives. To understand how we react to a crisis, it’s useful to understand what goes on in your head. Your brain evolved in …

Do you think you’re open-minded in business – or are you stuck in a certain mindset? One thing about mindsets is that it’s easy to see them in others but very hard to see them in yourself. For sure, you have opinions (based on experience) and you have certain ways you think you should run your business. But you’re definitely not stuck in any mindsets. Or are you?

Do you and your colleagues have an ‘us’ and a ‘them’? Are you familiar with comments like: “nobody tells me anything”, or “they move the goalposts all the time”? Who are these people, and why and in what ways are they different from you? Who is ‘they’ in your organisation? ‘Sales’? ‘Marketing’? ‘the staff’?, ‘customers’? Do ‘they’ seem to be making your job harder to do?