Learning is one of our most important tasks in life. However, as businesspeople, we know that the key to success is not so much encyclopaedic knowledge, but how we can draw on new knowledge from real life. We also know that we all make mistakes. One of the main differences between winners and losers is that winners can learn from their past mistakes. And the biggest winners learn from the mistakes of others. Let’s have a look at 2020 with this in mind!
Introspective session
In 2020, all business decision-makers found themselves in a completely unknown situation. Each of us tried to assess and overcome the huge, unprecedented obstacle with the help of our habits, studies, and experiences. It was a crisis for everyone. Let there be no mistake, some people experience a crisis positively and turn it into success. It all depends on the choices we make in these situations. And our decision-making mechanisms are fundamentally defined by our personalities, by the characteristics and personality traits that accompany us throughout our lives. Basically, a lot of companies are concerned with getting a picture of their employees in terms of what skills and talents they have and what decisions they are expected to make in certain situations. However, this is perhaps the first time that we have had the opportunity to see so much about people and how they relate to a crisis. It is very important in this situation to understand ourselves, to look back at when and what decisions we made, the bases for them, and mainly the consequence they had. We now have the opportunity to learn seriously about ourselves. We now have the chance to be better equipped to respond to the next crisis. It is also, in a way, our duty because even if we do not do it, the business world will still assess us. It is crucial to understand what we did or did not do in 2020 and why, because this can be an important guide for our entire future. So now is the time to learn! Nevertheless, this time it is not about reading books, not about experiencing situations and then summarising them as “best practice” years later. It is now mostly an individual exercise, a kind of introspective “session” where we share our opinion about ourselves.
No right or wrong
It is very important to fix in advance that whatever the outcome of the self-examination, there is no such thing as “good” or “bad”. We are talking about a crisis that we have somehow reacted to. We need to understand that this is who we are. We should not allow ourselves to be influenced by ourselves, saying, “no, I usually do not react like that; it was just an exceptional situation”. We will react like that in every situation when the stakes of the situation reach a certain threshold. When we can no longer solve things with the help of routine, when we can no longer bring book-learned knowledge to life. When a decision really matters, we will behave in exactly the same way as we did in 2020, when the pandemic hit. It is important to assess how our decisions changed after the initial shocks and how long it took us to find ourselves, if we found ourselves at all. It is also crucial to think about the choices we have made that will have long-term consequences and those that no longer matter that much. Why should we learn about ourselves now, beyond the fact that it is always worth doing so? COVID-19 has also changed the way people think about life and work. Many people are now preparing for a major shift, as life itself and the enjoyment of it has become more valuable, even for those who have not been particularly engaged in the subject. Now is also the time to reorganise our future in business terms. But to really understand what we want and what we are best suited for, we need to understand our actions and decision-making mechanisms in 2020. We need to understand our personalities!