We’re right you know! You don’t have to prove anything.
We all have people in our lives that have helped us, taught us, mentored us.
It’s a part of what we do as a team here at The Timely Entrepreneur Resource and Research Centre, and yet, we are always saying to new entrepreneurs and seasoned business owners that we truly are not doing more, than offering another perspective or creating and highlighting other possibilities for you and your business.
But truth be told, life is our true teacher, offering us experiences and all sorts of situations that bring out our capabilities, our resilience, and our vulnerabilities when we fall apart, and our strengths when we have no choice but to pick ourselves up and put pieces back to peace.
There’s a lot of what meditators call “spiritual bypassing” going around at the moment. We’re sure you’ve seen and heard comments about Mother Nature punishing us for being so negligent, or “the Earth is healing itself while we are on lockdown” and “This virus is the Universe correcting us.”
In the Vedic worldview, the universe doesn’t punish and reward, nor does nature. It doesn’t work like that. All that is happening now is evolution. Yes, the world is evolving. We are evolving. And as human beings experiencing that evolution in such a drastic shift, sometimes the experience is really, really frightening.
But even that is ok.
One of our Entrepreneurs recently unwillingly returned from abroad where he had comfortably settled for the last 3 months. He had built his dream business after working hard and saving up so that he could finally make that big move. And in his words, “business was booming and life was nice” when the pandemic hit. Literally overnight, he lost his dream business, didn’t qualify for any stimulus package or government assistance and was faced with the decision of whether to stay where he’d migrated or come back home to Trinidad. He chose to come back home and arrived back in Trinidad to a 14 day quarantine period which for him, turned out to be 21 days instead.
After the initial rush to get home, he found himself alone in a small (albeit comfortable) room with little fresh air, somewhat claustrophobic for him, little human interaction, business-less, jobless, income-less, with his dream life and business just a memory now, and really vague ideas of what his future will look like. It was tough and a grown man sat and cried for about a day. And then he reached out to us.
We didn’t have all the answers either, nor did we swoop in to rescue the situation.
What we ended up doing together was developing a new business plan, a business stress evaluation, a brand new easy- to-operate website, a digital marketing and selling plan, a post-Covid Plan and created a one month progress evaluation form.
And we did all this daily, remotely, for the duration of his quarantine period. Admittedly though, some days were tough and not very productive, but once he started to see the bigger picture, a new energy flowed and he became unstoppable.
I don’t believe that we always need to constantly look for, and try to find the meaning and deliberate on all that’s happening around us. We don’t have to search for signs and the underlying meanings in every circumstance.
Sometimes it’s just life that is happening. Even though it’s not happening the way we expected or the way we want, it’s ok. We simply have to let life unfold as it would.
The universe is always delivering evolution. See it as growth we can experience, if we choose to. Sometimes we have to let life happen. That’s how we deal with the things we can’t change.
A great misconception about this period is this idea that we need to be doing something productive or useful with our time in isolation. For your mental health, it’s ok to just be. Just be in the moment until you can gather the strength and brave this situation. And when you’re ready, you can write the blog you’ve always wanted to write. De-clutter the spaces in your home, clean out the garage. You can teach yourself a new language, learn to cook etc. Absolutely do those things if you’re open to them and excited to give it a try, but if you feel the need to stop and have a meltdown, you go right ahead. Surrender to the vast unknown. Permit yourself have a good cry. Breakdown if you need to. You can be an Entrepreneur and meltdown too. It actually helps. You can be a spiritual person and also have a good cry. You don’t have to choose one or the other. They are not exclusive. You are the same person entitled to your varying emotions. It is ok to feel.
Your reaction to adversity, especially what the whole world faces now doesn’t have to involve putting on a brave face or what you believe to be a spiritual approach. You are allowed to be your most authentic self, and that means being truly you, and being ever present and letting yourself feel all the feels and at times, giving in to what each moment demands.
Our growth isn’t always pretty like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. There are moments in life that requires a breakdown before the breakthrough.
And that’s just ok too.
And as we have said to many Entrepreneurs reaching out to us, this too shall pass. Remember that this is, but a moment. A bump in the road. There will always be challenging times – and Covid-19 is one of those times. By the Grace of God, we will all live to see this pandemic pass and look forward to the new growth era that is being evolved when we can, once again, leave our homes and meet up with family and friends in person at our favourite places, buy doubles and KFC, and not take any of these basic privileges for granted, ever again!
With love always
The Timely Entrepreneur Resource and Research Centre
(photo: Ross Findon)
