There are times in your life when you will hit a crisis point. When things are bad… Really bad. So bad in fact that it feels like the walls are caving in on you and there is no way out. You are in a pressure cooker, life seems impossible and you feel like you are about to implode with the pressure of it all!
As leaders we generally have to take a lot of risks in our lives to get us where we want to be, so we can find ourselves in these crisis point situations more than most people, which is why we also need to know how to get out of these situations as quickly and easily as possible to get us back on track and moving forward in life again.
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I know what it is like, I’ve been through many crisis points in my own life, some are have been so monumental that I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to survive.
One of those times when I thought life was over was when I was just 26 years old and my husband and I found ourselves in $250,000 of bad debt. That is not debt associated with any property or any asset, it was purely bad debt… Quarter of a million dollars in pure bad debt! I’m not going to go into how we got into that much debt, it is quite the story, but some of it was our own stupidity and some of it was out of our control.
To make things worse, our first child had not long graced the world, so we had a 6 month old baby at the time when we were staring down the barrel of this monumental financial crisis. I was also not working at the time to look after our son, and our son wasn’t sleeping virtually at all… He would only sleep a few hours in every 24 hour period.
So we were massively sleep deprived, depressed, stressed out to the max and facing financial crisis with the debt that we had found ourselves in. We really had found ourselves in a place that seemed impossible to get out of and the walls were caving in on us.
It made sense to declare bankruptcy, but we didn’t. We knew that if we did declare bankruptcy then our dreams of creating an amazing business and life for ourselves were as good as dead. Truthfully, we couldn’t see how we were ever going to create that dream at that point considering the huge mess we were in, but we knew we didn’t want to kill that dream by closing the doors of our business.
I’m pleased to say that I am here today, I’m alive, we survived and we got ourselves out of that massive financial crisis point even though at the time it felt absolutely IMPOSSIBLE. I’ve been through so many other crisis points in my life as well.
So here are some powerful tips that might help you in your time of crisis, whether you are going through a crisis right now or when you hit one in the future….
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#1 You Have Choices
No matter what is happening around you, no matter how much crap you have gotten yourself into, you always have choices about how you can react to a situation. I chose to react to that financial crisis with a determined outlook to fix it and so I looked at the choices that I had and took action to move forward.
#2 Get Rid of Narrow Thinking
It is easy when you are stressed and in a crisis point to go into narrow and limited thinking. You can’t see any solution to your situation and it feels like it is impossible to get out. The only way that I got out of that crisis (and many others) was by opening up my thinking and seeing more possibilities.
Opportunities are everywhere, possibilities are everywhere, and so in these times it is extremely important to open up your thinking and see that there are many solutions to your crisis, you just need to be open minded and willing to see them.
#3 What are the lessons?
In any crisis, there are valuable life lessons that you can take from the situation and learn from them. One of the lessons during my financial crisis was to be real with my finances and know where I was at on a regular basis and not put my head in the sand and ignore my finances which was part of the reason it got so bad in the first place. A crisis point can have heaps of value for you in your life if you choose to see it that way and use it to ask yourself “What are the lessons in this situation for me?”
#4 Take Responsibility
Hitting a crisis point is not always our fault, we can find ourselves there from circumstances that are out of our control, but we can always take responsibility for our own lives. Choose to take responsibility for your situation and your part in it, then decide that you do want to fix it and take the actions that you need to do to make it happen. Even small steps in the right direction add up over time to solve what seems like the impossible. That is how I got out of my financial crisis… Small steps in the right direction, it didn’t get solved overnight!
Ultimately in any situation in your life or business, it comes down to your Inner Game that will either get you through or see you crash and burn. So consciously work on your inner game (your internal world like your thoughts, habits, beliefs, mindset that is creating your external world) in order to create the life that you want and get you out of any undesirable situations that you find yourself in.
About
Kim Baird is an award winning author, inspirational speaker, transformational coach and entrepreneur. Kim has helped thousands of people to transform their lives and their businesses for the better. She has a passion for living life and absolutely loves helping others to do the same; helping them to consciously create the life that they truly desire. Find out more at http://www.kim-baird.com/
