There’s this thing about running your own business; about building something from the ground up. Over time, you gain some serious resilience and stick-with-it-ness. You get gritty and scrappy. You learn to take a problem and see it as an opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not something that necessarily comes easy for me. There have been plenty of times over the past decade that a challenge has arisen and I think: “Welp, that’s it, my business is over.” But then guess what? It really isn’t.

And as soon as I can get my head on straight and start looking for opportunities and solutions, the sooner I can choose a new path. The sooner I see that the perceived ‘problem’ has just diverted my trajectory to a new path that is far better than the one I was on. I am not exaggerating when I say that some of the best changes in my business have come right after an extremely trying event.

That doesn’t mean I don’t go kicking and screaming down the new path sometimes though. I think it’s human nature. Uncertainty is uncomfortable for most of us. Trusting in what we can’t see isn’t how we are hard-wired. It takes mindfulness, exercising a spiritual muscle and doing our due diligence to uncover the gifts of change.

And I am going to write this next line at the expense of sounding trite: we are entrepreneurs of our own lives, are we not? Whether we are building a business or a family or a barn or a novel or career, we are, all of us, every day creating something. So I’m here to remind you, and me, that right now this discomfort is natural and predictable. It is part of the equation. But it’s not necessary for us to sit in it any longer than we choose to. This pause is also an opportunity. The deck is being reshuffled. We’ll take it one day at a time. And I predict we’ll soon see that we have some beautiful opportunities in our midst.

Mary Koff, Owner, Lakebound