Survival during difficult times

We have had to comprehend unexpected bad news in the recent past. You and your friends, relatives, colleagues have so far spent many hours deliberating about potential issues to deal with. It seems that there is no end to the influx of bad news.

Most of the world's greatest economies are in trouble as they took a real beating from the global financial crisis. The question on everyone's mind is; can we survive the difficult times that we are facing? What should be our response as employees and individuals?

Accept the challenge with a positive attitude

Survival during difficult economic times represents a challenge that each of us has to accept whether we like it or not. The most important ingredient required to survive successfully is attitude. Accepting the challenge with a positive attitude can equip you to not only survive, but thrive under difficult circumstances.

In this, my focus is purely on behavioural aspects not so much on technical aspects.

Start with the right attitude; stop worrying -worrying about tomorrow or the difficult times does not add anything to your life. Instead, worrying will bring you wrinkles and unnecessary stress forcing a psychological defeat that will translate into a physical without your knowledge. The experts are quite confident that the present crisis is still far from the difficult times in 1929. According to the economics, the world economy has proper mechanisms in place, in case difficult times like these happen. Now that it has, let's just relax, cross our fingers and hope that these preventive mechanisms will do what they are suppose to do.

If the generation of that time survived the so called deepest recession ever, there should be no reason why we shouldn't survive the current difficulties with more brains at our disposal globally.

Focus on the things that you can do

You can't control how the market reacts in these difficult times. The best thing you can do is to focus instead on the things that you can do something about. You could cutback or put on hold your company's expansion programs until you have a good handle on the situation. You can minimise expenses and implement austerity measures to remove unnecessary fat from the operation.

Simply focus on things you can control or influence and do not mind the things that you cannot do anything about.

Forget worrying about things that have no bearing on your business or personal life. Distinguish between noise and real issues and decide what to respond to.

The first thing to understand is that difficulties, trials and turbulence have allowed us to become what we are today. All successful people are made from adversity. So this is an opportunity to further strengthen yourself with knowledge, competencies and skills. Build acceptance and credibility within the organisation to survive Create personal credibility and reputation that anyone would be proud to have.

Be confident, dependable and reliable in the eyes of your superiors.

Employees need to develop their visibility through their everyday actions and behaviour. Stay ahead of the curve by bringing incremental value to the organisation through change management. Find better ways of doing the same old thing for greater value creation.

Take personal interest in the success of the organisation as well as co-workers.

If your business is failing it is because your actions are not aligned to the critical need. You must be accountable for every single action performed on behalf of your business.

To stay competitive, every employee should be in a constant state of learning and you need to realise that staying competitive during difficult times is harder. Typically, the competition for individuals increases during recession and staying competitive in such an environment is harder than normal.

Focus on behaviour

One question non religious people tend to ask with the concept of God is; if God exists how and why does he allow such bad things to happen to the world? Whatever the case may be, this is not a problem for the god - it's something for the man to respond.

If there is evil in the world, then man is responsible to remove it. We must not deny the existence of evil and ignore it nor is it helpful to just accept it.

Our job is to add light and remove the horrible darkness that exists. This is our choice.

If something is wrong in our personal lives or if something is wrong in the world, we need to fix our behaviour that might be causing it.

Continue to think long-term

The Oxford dictionary defines recession as "a temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activities are reduced".

Having in mind that the economy tends to follow a usual cycle of boom, recession and recovery and then boom again, it's sensible to think of a long-term strategy rather than simply focusing on short-term actions to survive.

Taking the trends into consideration, it is good to plan and prepare for a financial shelter that will safeguard your business when the economic season changes.

The business fundamental of competitiveness remains right across all seasons. Make sure that your short-term fixes do not jeopardise your long-term health of the business.

Managing life through difficult times

As much as we need to take control of our business, we need to take care of our personal life too.

An economic decline caused by a recession penetrates deep into daily life of every individual regardless of the social status.

In a tough economy, is tightening your belt the way to go or should you find ways to make your money work for you to beat the crunch? You can make your own choice but making your money work would be the better choice. Understand your finances - simple theory is that you should spend less than you earn. Be extra cautious with your expenditure and generous with investment in real assets looking at long-term value to benefit from the next boom following the recession.