We can certainly agree that the year 2020 made for a very unstable world—and one vital way to stabilize it once again is to create the future.
When people are trying to cope with an unstable environment, it is quite easy to get hung up in the past. In our recent past, at the very beginning of this year, things were actually going pretty well. The economy was rolling nicely along, many companies were looking forward to their most successful year ever, and optimism was at an all-time high.
It happened rather suddenly. We heard that a virus had escaped China and was making its way throughout the world. Most of us probably thought that some would get sick and we might even lose some to death—but what nobody saw coming was that the entire world just shut down. That there was a global quarantine. People were not allowed to leave their houses. Society, in many ways, just ceased to be.
The business world fell into confusion as employees could no longer report to offices. If they were to survive, organizations had to rapidly figure out how to operate remotely. If employees were to retain their jobs, they needed to adjust their lives to be able to work from home.
Some businesses that relied on customers being physically present—such as salons, restaurants, shops, and music venues—had to go on indefinite hiatus.
While all this was going on, most of us clung to that bright hope that had been there at the beginning of the year, thinking that we would only have to wait out the pandemic for a few weeks or, at most, a couple of months.
But very unfortunately that has not happened, here we are the better part of a year later, and reversion to “normal” seems a distant dream.
Well, it is time to pull ourselves out of the past, nice as that past might have been. Like all past times, it has gone forever. We make our future. The only way we are going to have a future, bright or otherwise, is if we make one.
So, part of refocusing to create stability—our theme this month—must be to focus, once again, on the future.
One of the best ways to demonstrate that focus on the real world is to deliver absolutely everything that you promised to customers throughout 2020. Find everything that you promised to clients—things that you were supposed to do—and commit to every one of them. Then actually complete and deliver all of them.
It is very hard to create a future when you have got overdue or even just pending delivery of products or services hanging over your head. Your attention cannot help but be held back in the past.
Complete all outstanding delivery as soon as you can. Let’s drag as little of 2020 into 2021 as possible!
