The Challenge Is Never the Challenge
One of the things I'm most grateful for is my relationship with my dad.
Most Sundays I head over and have breakfast with him. It's become one of the anchors of my week. We talk about the kids, the business, life, and every so often we fall into something deeper. This Sunday we got onto how to handle adversity and uncertainty, and I wanted to share so it can help you too.
We realised we approach it in almost opposite ways.
His way is what I'd call outside-in. Something happens, it lands on him, and he goes inward to work out why it's getting to him, settles himself down, and dissolves it from there. Mine is more inside-out. I try to centre myself regularly, on my own terms, when nothing is wrong, so that when something does hit, I can draw back into that centre and meet it from there.
Two different doors. Same room. We both end up in roughly the same place, responding to the problem calmly and objectively instead of reacting to it.
And before I go any further, I'm not writing this as some guru who has it all figured out. I get this wrong constantly. This isn't advice from a mountaintop. It's just something I'm genuinely working on, and most of what I've learned about it has come from the times I've stuffed it up rather than the times I've got it right.
But the conversation got me thinking about something I see in firm owners all the time. And it isn't really about meditation or morning routines. It's about something more fundamental.
The challenge is never the challenge
Here is what I've come to believe. The thing that knocks you sideways is almost never the event itself. It's the meaning you attach to it.
A client sends a slightly unhappy email. A month comes in soft. A staff member answers you in a tone you don't like. Objectively, these are small. Solvable. A five-minute problem.
And yet the reaction is enormous. Out of all proportion to what actually happened.
That's the part worth understanding. You are not reacting to the event. You're reacting to the story you've quietly wrapped around it. "This client is unhappy" becomes "I'm not good enough at this." "This month was slow" becomes "the whole thing is falling apart." "My associate snapped at me" becomes "I'm losing control of my own firm."
The event was small. The story is what wrecks your week.
And the skill, the thing my dad and I were both describing from different angles, is learning to put a gap between the two. Between what happened, and the meaning you bolt onto it. Marcus Aurelius wrote about this two thousand years ago. You are not the panicked voice in your head. You're the one who can step back and watch it. And in that small space between the event and your reaction sits all of your power to choose how you respond.
When you're running a firm, everything sits on you. The client work, the team, the bills, the deadlines, the delivery. There's no one else to catch it if you drop it. So it's completely understandable that you rarely make the time to find that space. The event hits, the story fires instantly, and you're off and running before you've even seen what actually happened.
What this costs you
Let me make it concrete, because this is a business problem, not a philosophy lecture.
Two owners get the same unhappy client email. The first reacts to the meaning. I'm failing. The anxiety spikes, and from that state he fires off a defensive reply that makes it worse, then carries the knot around all weekend and brings it home to his family.
The second owner feels the same initial sting, then pauses. Names it. Sees that it's one client, one issue, easily fixed. Responds to the actual event, not the story. Picks up the phone, sorts it in five minutes, and gets on with the day.
Same email. Two completely different weeks. And over a year, two completely different businesses, because every real decision you make under pressure compounds.
And the quality of your decisions under pressure is what eventually shows up in your numbers. Everything starts in the mind first. The hire, the price, the difficult client, the way you lead your team on a hard day. All of it is downstream of how you metabolise what's in front of you.
The goal is not to feel nothing. An owner who feels nothing when a client is unhappy has stopped caring, and that's worse. The goal is to feel proportionately. Care about the event at the size of the event, not at the size of the story.
How to build the space
So how do you actually do this? There are two ways in.
The first is my dad's. In the moment, when something hits, stop. Take a breath. Name what you're feeling, even silently: this is anxiety, and it will pass. Then deliberately separate the event from the meaning. Ask what actually happened, stripped of the story. Respond to that, and only that.
The second is mine. Build the centre before you need it. I protect a small amount of time each day, 15 minutes or so, to get quiet and check in with myself away from any crisis. It sounds indulgent in a world that worships being busy. It isn't. It's one of the most practical things I do, because it means that when something does land, the calm is already there to draw on. I'm not scrambling to find it in the middle of the storm.
Start with my dad's way. It's available to you today, in the next hard moment. Then build toward mine, banking the calm in advance so the storms have less to take from you. Because the firm will always throw things at you, and that part you don't control. What you can build is the space between what it throws and how you answer.
More next Tuesday,
Gordon