It's not Life or Death

In the past couple of months I have spoken at a number of events around the US and Europe, Without exception the same undertone is being expressed, “we are entering a terrible recession”, “times are going to get harder than ever previously experienced”, “there will be redundancies”, “we are entering an economic Ice Age” and so on.

It is sad that so many messages I hear these days are about doom and gloom. The press and media continue to give space to the negative impact. Whilst I would imagine, the finger pointing of the experts seeking to apportion blame, is giving many of them cramp .

It has me concerned, the training budgets which accounts for over 60% my business have been slashed, with some companies even cancelling all training in 2009. But, in truth I can’t get too worried about it.  I love my business, I love what I do and if the recession means a cutback in the training side of the business, that’s fine too, and we shall seek other opportunities.

I was at a particular conference which was looking at all this, however when I got up to give the opening keynote, I went off script for a few minutes. I told the audience that the recession will pass, it probably will be painful, and there is no guarantee it will be speedy, it may take years, but we need to remember that it will pass.

It is not life and death, it may feel like it as our senses continually get assaulted by the negative messages of the media and experts pontificating on the recession, which only a few really predicted with any semblance of accuracy.

To illustrate this I said something when I went off topic that I would never normally talk about on a public platform I told the audience that when the doctor told me 23 years ago I had cancer, if he had said, “I’ll tell you what instead of cancer I can cause the economy to enter a recession, so take your pick cancer or recession”. I would have chosen the recession everytime, as would everyone in the audience.

You see  as much as it sucks, it is a time of economic rebirth with new rules of the game being written, it is also a time of opportunity, an opportunity I intend to do my best to exploit.

But it’s not life and death, it really isn't.