To transform your business, transform yourself

Dr Kay Bretz explains how COVID has provided SMEs an opportunity to ‘turn right’ and get better at adapting to market changes.

Markets keep changing all the time, inviting us to transform. The magnitude of disruption of COVID has been unprecedented and keeps challenging everybody worldwide. SMEs in particular can find it tough to deal with the unexpected and lead through these uncertain times. Yet, the flipside of every challenge is that it opens new opportunities. I personally see COVID as an invite for transformation. We are not only capable of overcoming any challenge, but even to use it to our advantage. To transform any business, it’s us, the leaders, who have to transform. We need to overcome whatever keeps us stuck so that we can tap into the new opportunities.

What got us here will not get us to the next level

In my roles as a business founder, corporate leader and elite athlete, I experience myself how scary personal transformation can be. But it leads to unknown heights. My journey started in 2014, when I accidentally turned right at my garden. It was much more than a simple choice of direction. I had always turned left when leaving my house. My epiphany was that that was how I was leading my life – on autopilot. From then onwards, I started turning right – metaphorically speaking. I wanted to explore what would happen if I acted outside of my default and walked new paths.

It is typical that what got us here will also keep us stuck and not get us to the next level. I was great at discipline, self-control and rational thinking. But none of those qualities helped me to embrace uncertainty, deal with the unexpected or tap into my intuition. Yet, those are all qualities necessary to deal effectively with our biggest challenges – COVID included. To keep doing the same will not lead to step-change growth. Instead, we need to learn to navigate our junctions better and turn right.

Our biggest challenges are not technical, but require adaptive leadership

We often treat our biggest challenges as if they were technical in nature. In fact, they are adaptive. What that means is that it is not sufficient to keep doing the same or just learn new skills. The question is not what we need to learn but who we need to become.

COVID is a prime example for that. In fast-changing environments, our mindsets are important. We are asked to master the inner game, deal with pressure situations and handle curveballs which get thrown at us. To close the gap between what we are capable of and what the world asks from us, we might have to become more present, resilient and intuitive in our decision-making.

How to reframe challenges through COVID as growth opportunities

One of my right turns was to leave a corporate leadership role to set up my own business. Now, I’m supporting leaders and organisations in their transformational journeys – I help them navigate their right turns. Only days after letting go of my monthly pay check, COVID hit. My business was under severe threat before I had properly started. It would have been easiest to give up.

Instead, I saw it as a timely reminder that our major challenges invite us to switch our mindsets. My response was much more productive than giving up. I surrendered to the new circumstances. Instead of fighting a new reality, I recognised that the seemingly destructive forces had brought lots of new opportunities with them. During the months of hard lockdowns in Melbourne, I could not provide a face-to-face offering. What I could do though was to run transformational projects, executive coaching and inspirational team sessions online. I realised that overnight my target market had become the entire world – with time differences being the only inconvenience. To this day, I haven’t met a single person from my first client. They are overseas but that hasn’t impacted a successful holistic transformation journey for their entire company.

Challenging times invite us to transform. A simple right turn will lead us down a new path. Yes, it might be scary to not know where it will lead. But over and over again I’ve experienced that when we embrace that discomfort, anything becomes possible.

Dr Kay Bretz, author of Turning Right: Inspire the Magic (Major Street Publishing), is a facilitator of transformation, executive coach and inspirational speaker. As the founder of Turning Right he draws on his experiences as a corporate leader and as an Australian representative at the 24-hour world championship. Turning Right is now available at all good booksellers. https://turningright.com