On Thursday I’ll be recognised as a Top 5 finalist at the Accenture Rising Star Awards. The process to getting here was quite a rigorous one and required a lot of reflection into my business operations over the past 7 years, my leadership/management style and where I’m taking the business to.
It had been quite a while since I really unpacked my journey from an assessment point of view and I’m still in awe that through my openness and honesty of my business challenges and where I want to take the business, a panel of experts and leaders consider me a “Rising Star”.
During my interview with the judges, there were some good take home points that they raised that I’m definitely going to implement in my business and will probably share in some future journal post. What hit home the most was a comment that “I’m playing it too safe and need to take more risks”.
Sheila, playing it safe?
It made me feel like I’ve lost my spark and vision. The young 22-year-old that left a lecture to go register a business in excitement… is this where I’ve ended up?
But after letting that sink in a bit, I decided to take the remark as a compliment. That someone recognised that there’s more in me to give and I must go for it.
This year I have purposely “held back”. a) I was burnt out at the end of 2018 and b) I was financially recovering from 2 years of bad business decisions/executions. I had a mandate at the beginning of the year to achieve certain things and didn’t want to come with all my exciting ideas and plans to put a spanner in the works of what needed to be achieved. This month I achieved the final and biggest goal on the list for the year, and I’ve been reflecting on the “what’s next”.
Coming out of the past two years felt like I was in an abusive relationship that I needed to recover from and now that I’m in a good space and should give another “relationship” a chance, I still recall the pain of the last one and I’m not quite ready to jump into a new one as yet.
The above analogy is my new interpretation on “I’m playing it too safe and need to take more risks”. I feel like I need to upscale my business again and expand but the memory of how that dismally failed the previous time is holding me back from embarking on that journey again. I do feel like I’m playing it safe and not taking the risk.
The itch has been there to make the jump again and I have the benefit of hindsight this time.
With all the reflection I’ve been doing lately, I feel like I’m ready to go back to the drawing board to see what the next 5 years look like and approach it with the same energy and excitement that I had when starting my first business.
I look forward to taking risks again (calculated risks) and making more of an impact not only as an entrepreneur but in the entertainment and media space.
