Have you ever had a “screamer” boss? I did when I started my CPA career over 30 years ago. Every day I would come to the CPA office on edge, trying to please the tyrant before he yelled at me, or anyone else in the office. I left after one year, vowing never to be a tyrant boss.
What tyrant bosses don’t realize is that they suck out employees’ self esteem. When you rip out an employee’s self esteem, you rob them of performing to their highest ability and creativity. This can also happen with customers. Some customers are tyrants and scream for attention.
These moments of self-doubt create difficult business situations. It could be a tough boss, or a tough customer, or a tough event, but to operate successful, you must keep your head. Barry Moltz discusses some solutions in Improve Your Mental Toughness in 2 Minutes in his interview with Dr. Jason Selk. He lists five points:
1. Focus on solutions. This was a very interesting suggestion, because the bigger the emergency, the harder it is to get back on a positive track. Even in a CPA practice, panic can set in. I have found that if I look at the worst case scenario, and accept its possibility, it helps me to move back to the positive. For example, a mistake could cost me a maximum of $1,000. Once I accept that, I would look for solutions to minimize the damage, many times reducing it down to a meaningless number, if any. If I just focused on the possible $1,000, then I rob myself of creatively fixing the problem.
2. Seek to control only what you can. Sometimes, we make the same mistakes again. So, in a crises, use that anxiety to motivate yourself to fix the system or procedures. This way, you are taking a bad business event and turning it into a future positive result. As a CPA consultant, I have seen business owners bury their heads in the sand. The problem not only does not go away, it gets worse.
3. Find one thing you can do differently to make the situation better. This comment is similar to the one preceding it, but if you can make just one adjustment, you are better off than yesterday. For example, as a CPA, I get tons of documents. If I miss something that is buried on my desk, it motivates me to completely clean off my desk, and to deal with little projects.
4. Keep a success log. I really don’t have the time to do this, but it does remind me of a study done on athletic superstars. Someone studied the likes of Michael Jordan and others on what makes them perform at the most stressful times. What came back was that they knew they could make the clutch shot, or hit the clut hit. The reason was because they did it so many times before. This self-esteem trick is what successful people use by nature. When my oldest son was in the 2nd grade, the teacher had a book report contest where kids got stickers on a board next to their name for reading books. My son originally did not blossom as a great reader, but got into the contest. By the middle of the year, he was leading everyone reading books a couple of years beyond the class reading level. By the end of the year, he had blown the competition out of the water reading middle and high school novels. I made a big deal of it by asking the teacher if we could take the poster home after the school year. I photographed him with it and treated him like he had won an Olympic gold medal. That summer, he read The Hobbit. By time he was in the 4th grade, he had read the three books of The Lord of the Rings. Today, he is in graduate school for creative writing, specializing in comedy poetry. The moral of the story is that he had the ability but needed to stack up victories to get him to the next level. In business, you need to rack up your victories and remember them in tough times.
5. Practice the 100-second mental workout. Whatever works.
Many businesses fail because the owners think that successful businesses don’t struggle. Read the book, Copy This about the origin of Kinkos to put business in perspective. The road to success is always a bumpy one. People hire us as CPA business consultants and expect us to help them with their businesses. But the real solutions are not from the CPA, but the owner who can deal with day to day problems.